Maher Arar Deserves An Apology From The U.S.
What would it be like to be suddenly arrested one day while visiting a country on a business trip for being a terrorist when you knew you weren't? To be jailed by police then deported to a country you hadn't been to since you were a child? A country where they torture you for information if they suspect you of a crime. This was the reality faced by Maher Arar.
Maher Arar is a Canadian citizen. In 2002 he was seized by United States officials in New York at the John F. Kennedy International Airport while on a business trip. The United States agents had been given mistakenly false information by Canadian associates that linked Arar to a terrorist group.
Maher Arar was taken by the United States agents and jailed. Later on he was placed on a plane and deported to Jordan in his native country of Syria. In Syria Maher Arar was imprisoned by Syrian officials and subjected to torture as they tried to get information from him. Information he couldn't possibly give them, seeing as he didn't know anything.
After a year of such torture a few political changes in Syria resulted in his release. He was found to have had no connection to any terrorist group and returned to Canada. In Canada Prime Minister Steven Harper issued a public apology on behave on the Canadian Government for having given the United States officials the false information leading to the arrest.
Steven Harper and the Canadian government also awarded Maher Arar ten-million dollars for the time he had spent in the Syrian prison because of their actions. Arar gladly accepted the money saying that no amount could give him a year of his life back but that the money was still much appreciated.
However in the United States the response to Maher Arar being found innocent was shamefully grudging. The United States government refused to admit to any wrong doing at all and the closest thing to an apology Arar got was when one official stated that Arar's case 'Wasn't handled very well."
An interesting development however is that the 2nd U.S. Circuit of Appeals, without any prompting from Arar's lawyers, agreed to review a three-judge panel ruling saying he couldn't sue the U.S. government. The panel had come to the conclusion that since Arar had only been stopping in the U.S. to switch planes at the airport he had no constitutional rights while in the United States. This however according to many officials is a un-humane finding.
The United States is suspected no to be apologizing because they quite often deport suspected terrorists without thorough investigation. So the accused are left o defend themselves in corrupted court systems in foreign countries. They seem to not want to apologize as they would have to admit to several other such mistakes from similar circumstances.
