Maher Arar gets his day: Complete vindication at home

So finally the innocent Canadian Maher Arar has reached a settlement with and received a large compensation package of $12,000,000 from the Canadian government for his execrable treatment at the hands of the United States, Syria and to a large extent the security branch of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police . He also receives a personal letter of apology from Prime Minister Stephen Harper. (Jean Chretien was PM when the incident took place fyi.) The Chretien government did call an inquiry into the affair and the Harper government accepted Justice Dennis O'Connor's recommendations for a full apology and negotiations leading to the monetary settlement.

Mr. Arar's lawyer said (and correctly so) that no amount of money can undo the wrong(s) that were done to Arar, beginning with the Canadian complicity in his summary "disappearance" and shipping-off to his native Syria where he was reportedly savagely treated by the Baathist secret police, who are so vicious they were the thuggish inspiration for Iraq's own Ba'ath Party four decades ago.

This is not the end of the matter however, as Mr. Arar and his legal team (now rejuvenated with the large award as well as the moral victory of the vindication) is appealing the dismissal in the United States of his lawsuit against US authorities' part in the sad affair. More to unfold there in the coming weeks and perhaps months.

CBC.ca reported January 26:

"A U.S. politician, meanwhile, said Friday after the apology was issued to Arar that it is time for the U.S. to look at its role in the Arar affair.

Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat who represents Vermont, said the U.S. government could have treated Arar differently than it did.

'The question remains why, even if there were reasons to consider him suspicious, the U.S. government shipped him to Syria where he was tortured, instead of to Canada for investigation or prosecution.' "

Syria is not only an international pariah and a one party dictatorship with a horrible record on human rights according to every organization in the world that monitors such things but an (anti-Semitic) sponsor of terrorism and mischief-maker in Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon and other hot spots. They are not, however likely to be in any kind of alliance with Al Qaeda in their terror campaign(s). This begs the compelling question, the twelve million dollar question: Why did the US send Arar to Syria and why did Syria accept him?

Yes some authoritarian and extremist governments refuse to recognize naturalized Canadian citizenship (and this must be defended much more vigorously certainly) but what on earth was to be gained by either the United States or Syria (the two are enemies) in the deportation and torture of this man??? How on earth did the US come to use its enemy Syria in its post-911 anti-terror campaign? Bizarre. (I picture Yves Montand in The Confession.)

I find the most frustrating part of the incident to be not the Canadian complicity in the wrongdoing but the inability of Canada (or any other civilized nation) to hold dictatorships to account in the United Nations, in the World Court, anywhere it seems for their misdeeds against our nationals. (The Mandelas and Solzhenitsyns of these countries should be aided in every possible way in their own struggle for freedom and the rule of law, both by individuals and by our governments and groups such as Amnesty International.) There is at least one Canadian citizen in danger in The People's Republic of China at present and we've all seen and heard the tragic news out of Mexico with not only four Canadians being killed there but the notoriously Clousseau-esque or even corrupt Mexican legal system letting everyone down, even to the point of blaming the murder of a Toronto couple on two Canadian housewives who were holidaying in the same hotel.

I saw Maher Ara driving his car less than a half a dozen blocks from my house shortly after his return to Canada and no doubt it took him a great degree of courage to accomplish even such a small task. His face was troubled and at that time he was still under suspicion by curmudgeons, skeptics and even some fair-minded people perhaps. (I was neither a skeptic nor an advocate on his behalf at that time but my heart immediately went out to him, here was a man who had clearly been to hell.) At his press conference regarding the award and the apology today:

He also said he is stigmatized as a terrorist, and he can't shake that label. He often Googles his own name and sees it tied with the words "suspected terrorist.""There's no amount of money that would compensate me on what my family and I have gone through," Arar said. "I wish there was a way I could buy my life back."

Canadian decency finally won the day but there is much to be done to prevent this from ever happening again and more to be done to protect all Canadians abroad (or in the post-911 United States) from summary kidnapping, incarceration and mistreatment. We await the results of Mr. Arar's US appeal with interest, hope for a vindication in that country that mirrors what he received in Canada and long for a day of accounting for the Syrians most of all.

What on earth had Syria to gain by this awful thing? The Baathists are sadists to be sure and bullies but why in this case??? And again, how and why would the US cooperate with an enemy to do this to the citizen of a friendly country? Yes someone in the RCMP was ultimately partly to blame, that was at least part of the genesis of this terrible thing but the Syrians, why were the Syrians interested??? Al Qaeda has generally stayed completely away from any anti-Syrian campaign in spite of the fact there has been some recent terror (car bombings and machine gun attacks) there.

We have an apology, Canadian decency has triumphed. But the answers why the US and Syria did what they did to this innocent man still have not been answered - and may never be answered.

"The struggle to clear my name has been long and hard," he said, with his lawyers at his side. "I feel now I can put more time into being a good father and to being a good husband and to rebuilding my life."

Arar's American legal team will appeal of the dismissal in the US courts of his case against that government's actions. But how to bring Syria or any other rogue nation to account, that's the nut no one can apparently crack. Those who defend the United Nations and other international bodies and our own Canadian government, diplomats, rights organizations and legal experts must not only investigate, prevent and lobby and but they must also prosecute those nations such as Syria that commit such heinous crimes. Yes, democracies such as Canada and the US must never have a part in torture but there are mechanisms and laws and people here who will eventually ensure that, as in the case of Maher Arar, the right thing will be done. Eventually. Late in this case but right and the rule of law has won out in the end and Maher Arar has had a commission, an apology and an important public debate ensued before during and after all was said. And now a vital precedent has been set in the so-called new post-911 world where "everything has changed." Canada has done the right thing and is a better place because of the way two successive govenments and the system responded to the wrong.

The American legal appeal awaits.

But how can we call Syria to account? That has been answered nor is it likely to be possible to do so until that country rejects its brutal Baathist dictatorship (international courts, diplomatic pressure and rights bodies' efforts notwithstanding). How to make the Syrian Baathists pay?