Ottawa refused US appeal to jail Arar
Ottawa — U.S. security officials offered to send Maher Arar back to Canada in October of 2002 -- before he was deported to Syria -- in exchange for a promise that he be jailed in this country, a public inquiry heard yesterday.
Liberal Senator Pierre De Bané, who was prime minister Jean Chrétien's special envoy to Syria on the Arar case, said he learned of the offer in a foreign affairs briefing in early July, 2003.
"The Americans told the Canadian security services, we're prepared to give you back Mr. Arar, on condition you engage yourselves to arrest him and put him in prison and press charges," Mr. De Bané said.
Canadian authorities rejected the idea, he said.
"The Canadians said to the Americans, we have a Charter of Rights . . . we don't have cause to arrest and press charges and put him in jail," he said.
Mr. Arar, a 34-year-old computer engineer, was deported to Syria in October of 2002 and imprisoned for about a year. He was tortured during his time in detention.
His case has become an international cause célèbre, as Canada has drawn criticism for its handling of the case and the U.S. has come under fire for its practice of deporting suspected terrorists to countries known to practice torture. Mr. De Bané said he was briefed on the matter by former senior consular official Gar Pardy, who was the Department of Foreign Affairs' point man on the Arar file during his incarceration.
The briefing was to help him prepare for a trip to Syria that month, where he presented president Bashar Assad with a letter from Mr. Chrétien asking for Mr. Arar's return.
Mr. De Bané repeated several times yesterday that Mr. Pardy told him of the U.S. offer, saying it struck him powerfully at the time.
Mr. Pardy recently testified before the inquiry for three full days, during which no hint of the U.S. offer emerged.
Barbara McIsaac, a lawyer for the federal government's legal team at the inquiry, called Mr. De Bané's version of events into question, saying he may have "misremembered" the briefing he was given by Mr. Pardy.
"I want you to remember that he is reconstructing a conversation that took place quite some time ago," she told reporters later.
Mr. Pardy is expected to return to provide further testimony today.
An internal RCMP inquiry into the Arar affair has previously determined that the RCMP shared information about Mr. Arar with the FBI during the nearly two weeks that he was detained in New York in early October of 2002.
The Garvie Report also found that U.S. officials had asked the Mounties whether they had grounds to charge Mr. Arar.
Mr. Arar's legal team has long suspected that he was then sent to Syria because the Mounties could not promise to jail him in Canada. But no hint of this had emerged before in either public testimony at the inquiry or in the document record.
Lorne Waldman, Mr. Arar's lawyer, said Mr. De Bané's testimony revealed for the first time that the Mounties were aware of both the threat that Mr. Arar might be deported to Syria, and of the U.S. insistence that he could not be returned to Canada unless he were imprisoned here.
"We've never had evidence before that Canadian officials knew he couldn't be deported to Canada because he couldn't be arrested [here]," Mr. Waldman said.
A six-page foreign affairs briefing note prepared for Mr. De Bané before his mission to Damascus in 2003 is entirely blacked out in government-redacted documents made public by the inquiry.
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