Katherine R. on Maher Arar. Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach him now.

Arar update

by Katherine

Maher Arar remains, officially, too dangerous to fly over U.S. air space.

U.S. officials won't say what the sources of information against him are. I have a guess as to some of them. I've posted it before, but it's not widely known enough, so here's one more vain effort.

Posted by hilzoy at 12:35 AM in Maher Arar | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBack (0)

September 19, 2006 "They told him yes, he could invent a story" by Katherine

Von notes below that Syrian intelligence forces beat Maher Arar into falsely confessing that he had received terrorist training in Afghanistan. It's actually worse than that. Arar wasn't just tortured into a false confession in a Syrian prison. He also seems to have been sent to be tortured in Palestine Branch partly because of false confessions that two other Canadian citizens made under torture in the same prison.

Their names are Ahmad Abou El-Maati and Abdullah Almalki. Unlike Arar, they both traveled to Syria voluntarily. El-Maati flew to Damascus for an arranged marriage in November 2001. Almalki went there to visit relatives in May 2002. Both were arrested by Syrian intelligence forces when they arrived at the Damascus airport, and taken to a prison called the Palestine Branch. Both have since been released, returned to Canada, and given detailed chronologies of their experiences in Syria to their lawyers. (Here is a PDF of El-Maati's chronology; here is a PDF of Almalki's).

Continue reading ""They told him yes, he could invent a story"" »

Posted by hilzoy at 10:25 PM in Maher Arar | Permalink | Comments (17) | TrackBack (0)