Secret Arar details lifted, Bush/Gonzales torture tactics revealed

Court lifts lid on secret Arar details

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"Newly declassified information shows that that Canadian agencies worked directly with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and also received information known to be likely derived from Syrian torture during a post-9/11 investigation that culminated in the Maher Arar scandal.

The disclosure follows a pitched legal battle by Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor, who fought to make public 1,500 words that the Canadian federal government had excised from his four-volume report released last year.

A Federal Court decision resulted in the release of some of the information Thursday morning.

Almost universally, the blotted out passages referred to the CIA or information most likely derived from Syrian torture.

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In his findings last year, Judge O'Connor said Canadian agencies should not necessarily be forbidden from using intelligence from countries that abuse human rights, but that officials should carefully assess the reliability. That does not appear to have happened in 2001-2002.

Judge O'Connor found that Mr. Arar was never a threat to Canadian national security and that authorities here had no case against him, but still spread incorrect and misleading information that may have caused the United States to send him to the Middle East, where he was jailed for a year. Canada has since compensated Mr. Arar $10-million.

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• It was the CIA that sent questions to Canada about Mr. Arar when U.S. border guards arrested him in October, 2002. The CIA, which sent him to the Middle East in shackles aboard a leased Gulfstream jet, appears to have been driving the process to send Mr. Arar to Syria.

• Canadian officials were knowledgeable about the U.S. practice of "rendering" suspects to harsh interrogations third-countries. "I think the U.S. would like to get Arar to Jordan where they can have their way with him," one CSIS official wrote in an email on October 10, 2002 – two days after Mr. Arar was quietly sent to that country, and on to Syria, for questioning.

• CSIS visited Syria once Mr. Arar was in custody and came back with the impression that officials there "looked upon the matter as more of a nuisance than anything." He remained jailed there for nearly a year.

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"The third-party rule is one that is sacred among law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, and is premised on mutual confidence, reliability and trust," he writes at one point in the new decision."

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Yeah. Right. Trust bush's CIA sanctioned by AbuGonz. Not. On. Anyone's. Life.