The Saturday Profile: Qaeda Pawn, U.S. Calls Him. Victim, He Calls Himself.:
"As Mr. Arar tells it, American officials detained him on circumstantial evidence during what was supposed to be a brief stopover at Kennedy Airport on Sept. 26, 2002. Within days, they packed him off to Syria where, he says, he was locked in squalor and tortured for nearly a year. Though he holds dual Canadian and Syrian citizenship, he had not lived in Syria for 16 years.

'After what happened, I started asking myself questions,' Mr. Arar, 33, said in a calm voice in an interview in his living room. 'How can a country like the United States send me to a country where they know torture is commonplace, where they know there is no law?'"

His story has proved deeply embarrassing to American officials, even if they continue to insist, privately, that Mr. Arar is not just the mild-mannered computer consultant he seems, but a man with ties to a probable cell of Al Qaeda in Canada, though he has never been charged with a thing.

Whatever the truth, Mr. Arar's soft, steady voice has touched the conscience of Canada and raised disturbing questions about whether Washington's pursuit of terror suspects has trampled judicial due process, or swept up guiltless bystanders.

In his short time home, Mr. Arar's sad, bearded face has become a staple of Canadian television news shows. He has been the subject of newspaper editorials and angry debate in the House of Commons, whose foreign affairs committee called for a public investigation.

Today Mr. Arar appears a determined but shattered man. He says his limp comes from almost a year of beatings and sleeping on a cold tile floor. Though he lost 40 pounds, he has little appetite. He still paces his living room, a habit he picked up in his tiny cell.

At night, he wakes from nightmares in which a guard slaps him and tells him he must return to Syria. In the day, his mind wanders to a world so distant he does not hear his wife, Monia, pleading for him to return.

Bush administration officials concede that the entire episode has been a public relations disaster. "The damage has been done," one official said. "We need to say something because `Arar' is going to become shorthand for excess in the name of security, running roughshod over the rule of law."

While the administration has yet to make its case publicly, American officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said the evidence was strong that Mr. Arar had associated with suspected Islamic militants over a long period in Canada. They say he confessed under torture in Syria that he had gone to Afghanistan for terrorist training, named his instructors and gave other intimate details.

In the interview, Mr. Arar said that he would have said anything to stop his beatings, so intense that he urinated on himself twice, and that he had never been to Afghanistan or Syria or anywhere nearby since he came with his family to Montreal at 17.

At least part of the evidence against him, he said, was a 1997 apartment lease that was witnessed and signed by Abdullah Almalki, another Syrian-Canadian immigrant suspected of having terrorist links.

American officials, Mr. Arar said, showed him a copy of the lease at the airport, where he was to make a connecting flight on his way home from a vacation in Tunisia, his wife's family home. His answer, he said, was that he had wanted Mr. Almalki's brother to sign, but that he had not been available.

He said his request for a lawyer was ignored. Taken to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, he said, he was strip-searched and given an injection that prison officials refused to identify.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/15/international/americas/15FPRO.html?pagewanted=all&position=