The Toronto Star reports:
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. Eventually, Prime Minister Paul Martin called a judicial inquiry into what the government implied was a unique case. 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... ...At the Syrian border, Nureddin was arrested, handcuffed and eventually transferred to military intelligence headquarters in Damascus. He was held in a 30-square-metre underground cell with between 30 and 40 other prisoners. He was told he'd never see the sun again. Syrian interrogators asked him the same questions he had been asked at Pearson airport. In some cases, they even knew the answers. They told him, for instance, the exact amount of money he'd left Canada with. This being Syria, he was tortured as a matter of course. His captors made him strip and lie on the ground with his legs raised while they beat the soles of his feet with a steel cable. Then he was doused with cold water and made to run on the spot in his bare feet before the procedure was repeated — twice. He couldn't walk for four days... ...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. As for Nureddin, he's just glad to be back. He says he's grateful that the federal government helped to get him out but remains confounded as to how he ended up in a Syrian dungeon. He finds it hard to sleep and keeps asking himself: "Why did this happen? Why did this happen to me?" He deserves an answer.