Refuge in a cold, dark pit

As Maher Arar recounted the moment he lost the last scraps of hope that his nightmare would come to a quicker, less brutal end than the one he would be eventually be subjected to, a collective gasp of incredulity and anger could be heard emanating from a packed house at the Winspear Centre.

During the fall of 2002, sitting in tears at a detention facility in New York, Arar pleaded with an American Immigration and Naturalization Service officer not send him to Syria, as they had been threatening to, for fear of being tortured.

"'INS is not the agency that signed or approved' - I don't remember the exact expression she used - 'the Geneva Convention on torture,'" Arar said, paraphrasing an agent's response to his plight. "To me it was clear: they didn't care; my Canadian passport doesn't mean anything. 'You're not a human being. That's exactly why we're sending you to Syria, because we want you to be tortured.' That was very clear in my mind."

Given the familiarity of the Arar case with most Canadians, the audience's propensity to be shocked by what he said spoke volumes of this dark, Orwellian piece of recent history: after being wrongly profiled as Islamic extremist by Canadian authorities, Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen, was detained without cause in New York, shipped to the detention centre and denied access to legal counsel, and then flown to his birth country to be interrogated as part of the U.S.'s rendition policy vis-à-vis the "Global War on Terror."

In February of this year, Prime Minister Stephen Harper formally apologized to Arar, who was also awarded a $10.5-million settlement for his 10-1/2 months of imprisonment and torture.

In a moving testimony, Arar, the keynote speaker for the University of Alberta's 11th Annual Political Science Lecture, told the audience how he came to actually view his filthy, dark, three-foot wide cell where he lived for those 10-plus months as a place of refuge.

"Can you imagine preferring a place like this rather than having to see their faces and to endure their beatings?" he said.

Still, Arar says some good came out of his ordeal, such as the official inquiry in which Justice Dennis O'Connor held Canadian officials accountable for distorting information.

Arar also said that Canadian citizens helped bring his case to justice, and in doing so revealed some fundamental differences between approaches to human rights in Canada and the U.S.

"Canadians are fair-minded. I don't think the Arar Inquiry occurred because I wanted it, I think it occurred because the Canadian people wanted it to happen. The Canadian people wanted the truth to come out," he said. "I really believe that if my case had happened in the states, if I was an American, I don't think I would have been released from Syria, I don't think Americans would have stood up to their government and ask to get me back."

But additional guest speaker Julian Falconer, Arar's lawyer in the compensation case, cautioned that as a nation we still need to be vigilant. Falconer, a U of A alumnus, pointed out that even though the kind of Terrorist Act provisions that led to Arar's arrest and detainment were renounced in a vote earlier this year, the likely balance of political power in the near future likely means those provisions are anything but history.

"For those that believe the fact that the sunset clauses on secret investigative hearings and preventive arrests, which is fancy code for groundless arrest, for those that believe that that is over now because the sunset clauses were voted down 159 - 124, with respect, you're not being realistic," he said. "The Conservative party brought a motion to have the laws extended. That motion was defeated. One doesn't have to spend a lot of time in newspapers to see that this government might return as a majority and not far from now. One should accept the fact that the government of the day - that the position that they announced and sought to advocate in February of 2007, will be the law in months to come."