Things "We" Do

This looks pretty bad. The United States "arrested" a Canadian citizen who was passing through the US, grabbed him while he was changing planes in an airport, and sent him to Syria to be held in solitary confinement and tortured for ten and a half months.

Canada conducted an investigation and found the man completely innocent. The Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, formally apologized to the man this past week, and Canada is awarding him a multimillion dollar payment as compensation for his ordeal.

Maher Arar said his innocence has been confirmed by the formal apology Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued to him on Friday.

"This means the world to me," Arar said during a one-hour press conference in Ottawa on Friday afternoon.

Earlier Friday, Harper apologized and offered a $10.5 million [Canadian, about $9 Million USD] compensation package to Arar and his family, along with money for legal fees, for the "terrible ordeal" they suffered after Arar spent nearly a year in a Syrian jail.

"On behalf of the government of Canada, I wish to apologize to you…and your family for any role Canadian officials may have played in the terrible ordeal that all of you experienced in 2002 and 2003," Harper said.

"I sincerely hope that these words and actions will assist you and your family in your efforts to begin a new and hopeful chapter in your lives," he said. Harper's apology 'means the world': Arar

This case has caused a lot of tension between the US and Canada, with the head of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police resigning, a summit meeting and legal agreement (the "Monterrey Accord") between Harper and President Bush, several attempts at US lawsuits, which American courts have rejected on "national security" grounds, and more. It has been a big news story in Canada. Oddly, not mentioned much in the American media.

Here's his story, in a nutshell.

In 2002, the engineer was living in Ottawa and returning from a vacation when he was arrested during a stopover at New York's JFK Airport. U.S. authorities deported him to Syria, where he was tortured.

Ottawa set up a judicial inquiry into the case, led by Justice Dennis O'Connor, after Arar returned to Canada more than a year later.

O'Connor released his report in September 2006, concluding that Arar had no links to terrorist organizations or militants.

He also concluded the RCMP had provided misleading information to the U.S. authorities, which may have been the reason he was sent to Syria.

The government intends to implement the report's recommendations to ensure such an incident does not happen again, Harper said.

Earlier this week, U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins criticized Ottawa's efforts to have Arar removed from a U.S. security watch list, saying Washington alone will decide who to let into the country.

The prime minister said the government will continue to press the U.S. to remove Arar from the watch list.

"We believe the evidence is clear that Mr. Arar has been treated unjustly," Harper said.

It is more and more difficult these days to talk about the United States in the first-person plural. I hate to say "we" sent this innocent man off to be tortured. I hate to say "we" maintain secret prisons where this sort of thing happens to thousands of inmates who have never been charged with any crime.

And I especially hate to say "we" are too stubborn to admit when "we" have screwed up. "We" are going to keep this man's name on the watch-list, so he can't travel anywhere, so he is always suspected of being a terrorist, even though the evidence against him was nonexistent and a Canadian investigation found nothing to link him to terrorism.

I just hate having to say that.

Even if "we" received bad information from the Mounties, there is no way his treatment was justified. If "we" had a legal system, with laws in writing and courts and legal representation and habeus corpus, the consequences of "our" mistake would've been something "we" could live with, instead of something "we" have to lie about and deny.