Report on Maher Arar affair set to be released Updated Sun. Sep. 17 2006 7:19 PM ET
Canadian Press OTTAWA -- The federal government has opened the door to settling a lawsuit launched by Maher Arar, the engineer who wound up in a Syrian prison after being investigated by the RCMP. The government has agreed to send senior officials to mediation sessions with Arar's counsel for two days of discussions next January, according to documents on file with Ontario Superior Court. Representatives of the Ottawa and Peel Regional police services will also attend the talks Jan. 15 and 16, which could pave the way for a financial settlement with Arar. "Obviously compensation would be the end result if an agreement was arrived at,'' said Julian Falconer, the lawyer handling Arar's civil case against the police services and federal agencies, including the Mounties and CSIS. "What the government is doing is agreeing to open a door towards settling all matters. It doesn't mean they're going to. But it does mean and represent an important first step,'' Falconer said in an interview Sunday. Word of the pending talks came as a federal inquiry into Arar's ordeal, led by Justice Dennis O'Connor, prepared to deliver its report Monday. Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian, was detained in New York in September 2002 on suspicion of involvement in Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network. The telecommunications engineer, travelling on a Canadian passport, was subsequently deported by U.S. authorities to his country of birth. An independent fact-finder has concluded Arar was tortured by Syrian officials before being released from a Damascus prison in late 2003. He denies involvement in terrorism and says he was forced to make false confessions. At the inquiry, Arar's counsel asked O'Connor to recommend a legal mechanism of some kind for compensating Arar. But there is no guarantee the judge will do so. Meanwhile, Arar's lawsuit has been relegated to the back burner. But the documents quietly issued in May show the parties have agreed to talks following the release O'Connor's report. "This agreement to enter into a good-faith mediation represents probably the first promising step the government has taken towards making things right with Mr. Arar and his family,'' Falconer said. "And we're optimistic with the good faith of all the parties this thing might actually be settled.'' First, however, all eyes will turn to O'Connor's report. The federal government set up the inquiry to determine the role Canadian agencies, including CSIS, the RCMP and Foreign Affairs, may have played in Arar's case. O'Connor, who got his marching orders in February 2004 and started hearings in June of the same year, sifted through thousands of pages of documents and sat through oral testimony from more than 40 witnesses. A good deal of the hearings took place behind closed doors for reasons of national security, and the government has repeatedly tussled with the commission of inquiry about just how much information will see the light of day. O'Connor will deliver two versions of his report to the government: one classified, the other public. But portions of even the public edition of the long-awaited document will be withheld due to security concerns. It's believed the government fears publication of some passages could put confidential informants at risk or damage relations with countries that supplied sensitive material to the inquiry. Arar, 36, recently moved to Kamloops, B.C., from Ottawa with wife Monia and their two children. He will be in Ottawa on Monday when the report is tabled in Parliament. Arar hopes it will completely clear his name. "Of course, I would like to know why I was sent to Syria and whether Canadian officials were complicit,'' he said in an interview. He also wants to make sure what happened to him does not occur to anyone else. In their public testimony, RCMP investigators have acknowledged they were tipped in advance by the Americans that Arar would be detained in New York, and that they shared information about him with their counterparts south of the border. They deny, however, that they played any role in the U.S. decision to send him to Syria. Once Arar was in Damascus, however, CSIS officers paid a visit to the city in November 2002. They were supposed to be discussing other matters, but while they were there they accepted information offered by the Syrians about Arar. Some officials at the Foreign Affairs Department later concluded that CSIS preferred to keep Arar in Syria rather than let him return to Canada _ a claim hotly denied by the spy service. Foreign Affairs, for its part, has also faced questions about the way it handled the case. Franco Pillarella, then ambassador to Damascus, told the inquiry his goal from the start was to win Arar's repatriation to Canada. But he also had direct dealings with Gen. Hassan Khalil, the head of Syrian military intelligence, and passed on to Ottawa a purported confession by Arar that may have been obtained under torture. Leo Martel, the consular officer who met with Arar during his imprisonment, has also come under fire for not doing enough to alert higher-ups in Ottawa to the possibility of torture. Martel has adamantly denied the claims. A further complication arises from the way Arar first came to the attention of the RCMP in late 2001, well before his arrest in New York. There was never any hard evidence against him, but the Mounties considered him a "person of interest'' because of his contacts with other Arab-Canadians targeted in an anti-terrorist investigation known as Project A-O Canada. The force dumped a massive database on A-O Canada to U.S. authorities in April 2002, four months before Arar was detained and deported. The explanation offered at the inquiry was that the Mounties didn't have the time or personnel to analyse the raw data before passing it along _ a suggestion that infuriated Arar's counsel. The chief targets of A-O Canada were Abdullah Almalki, like Arar an Ottawa-based engineer, and Ahmad El Maati, a Toronto truck driver. Both say they too were tortured in Syria after they travelled there on personal business. And both suspect the RCMP and-or CSIS fed information to the Syrians to be used in their interrogations. A third Canadian, Toronto-area geologist Muayyed Nureddin, was also imprisoned in Syria. Amnesty International and other human rights groups are pressing the government to launch a new investigation into the Almalki, El Maati and Nurredin allegations. They say the cases suggest a wider pattern in which police and security officials are "contracting out'' the torture of Canadian terror suspects to oppressive regimes abroad. Arar also wants to know if his case was part of a broader trend. "Unless we pose the right questions, and we answer the right questions, I don't think we'll be able to avoid this from happening again.''
