Case of Canadian sent to Syria under review

WASHINGTON: The U.S. Justice Department's ethics office is reviewing a decision in 2002 by department officials to send a Canadian citizen to Syria, where he was tortured, according to American officials.

A Justice Department spokesman, Peter Carr, said Thursday that its inquiry, by the department's Office of Professional Responsibility, was begun in March 2007 and was examining the role of department lawyers in expelling Maher Arar to Syria, which has long been identified by the State Department as habitually using torture on prisoners.

The existence of the Justice Department inquiry was disclosed at a congressional hearing on Thursday by Richard Skinner, inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security.

Skinner told two House subcommittees that the Arar case involved "very questionable" actions by U.S. government officials and that he "could not rule out" that Arar was sent to Syria with the intention of having him questioned under torture about possible connections to terrorists.

The testimony, along with a heavily redacted report of a separate investigation by Skinner, was the fullest accounting to date from the government on the case, which has become a symbol of American excesses in the campaign against terrorism.

Skinner also said his office had recently reopened its four-year inquiry into the Arar matter after receiving new information. He said that the new information was classified and that he could not discuss it.

Arar, a telecommunications engineer who had immigrated to Canada from his native Syria as a teenager, was detained in September 2002 as he tried to change planes at Kennedy International Airport. He had been flying back to Canada from Switzerland. Immigration officers found his name on a terrorist watch list.

After several days of deliberation that involved some high-level administration officials, according to one former White House aide, Arar was sent to Jordan by immigration officers and turned over to Syrian intelligence.

Arar, now in his mid-30s, was imprisoned for a year in Syria and beaten before being returned to Canada in 2003.

An exhaustive inquiry by a Canadian commission found that Canadian police and intelligence officials had provided inaccurate information to their American counterparts, erroneously linking Arar to Al Qaeda.

Canadian officials apologized to Arar and awarded him about $10.3 million.

But the Bush administration has said almost nothing about the case and has continued to bar Arar from the United States, citing classified information. A Democratic congressman, Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, said at the hearing that he had reviewed the secret information. "I think it's nonsense," he said.

Skinner's investigation found that because Arar's name was on a watch list, immigration officers properly declined to admit him into the United States. But the investigation challenged the decision to send him to Syria, suggesting that he could have been sent on to Canada or returned to Switzerland, where his flight had originated.

The inspector general's inquiry, which began in 2003, ran into resistance both inside the Department of Homeland Security and from other agencies, Skinner said, delaying its progress. He said his department initially sought to keep the entire report secret but agreed to his request to release most of it.

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