International cooperation in the war on freedom - er, terror

When I posted on the case of Maher Arar on November 19, I didn't think it was an singular aberration. I was right, as the Toronto Star for February 26 makes clear.

When Ottawa computer consultant Maher Arar told his story last fall, the country was horrified.

A Canadian citizen - apparently innocent of any crime - had been deported to Syria from the U.S. and tortured for 10 months.

Worst of all, it seemed that the information used against Arar had come from Canadian intelligence agencies. ...

Now it turns out that the Arar case was not unique at all. Yesterday, another Canadian citizen - this one of Iraqi descent - met reporters to tell his story of torture at the hands of the Syrians.

And here, too, the information used to justify the detention and torture of Muayyed Nureddin appears to have come from Canadian intelligence.

Apparently, he became a person of interest to intelligence agencies because of his involvement with the Salaheddin Islamic Centre in Scarborough, Ontario. It seems the two principals who preceded him had been arrested for apparently security-related causes, one in Canada, the other in Egypt.

Taking a trip back to Iraq this past summer to visit his family, he was questioned by Canadian officials for 45 minutes before being allowed to board his flight. On his way through Turkey to Iraq, he was detained and interrogated for three hours by Turkish officials who asked questions almost identical to those he'd been asked in Canada. On leaving Iraq and heading for Damascus for a flight home, on December 11 he was arrested, imprisoned, and tortured by Syrian intelligence forces - who asked the same questions he'd been asked in Canada and Turkey. Sometimes they even knew the answers.

Over a month later, January 13, he was finally released.

To put it bluntly, there is growing suspicion that these kinds of things are happening on purpose - that CSIS and the RCMP have adopted their own version of what the U.S. calls "extraordinary rendition" and are making quiet deals with foreign dictatorships to interrogate Canadians abroad using methods that would be illegal at home.

And all justified by "the war on terror."