My problem with this is: does our government think Arar is a suspicious character? No-one has a right to come here and put Canadians at risk. If they think so, they should be willing to act on that suspicion and to say so. NJC
Washington and Ottawa - Solicitor-General Wayne Easter admitted Wednesday that Canada provided U.S. intelligence agencies with a dossier of information about Maher Arar, the Canadian who was subsequently arrested and deported to Syria where he was tortured for months.
After meeting yesterday in Washington with U.S. Attorney-General John Ashcroft, Mr. Easter made the admission when he insisted that Canada was not alone in giving information to the Americans.
The dossier on Mr. Arar "didn't just come from Canada alone," Mr. Easter said, without indicating which other nations had provided the Americans with information about Mr. Arar.
"I've always admitted that certainly we do exchange information with the security and law-enforcement agencies in the United States in order to protect out national security," Mr. Easter said.
Although he refused to explain what threat - if any - Mr. Arar posed to national security in either Canada or the United States, he emerged from the meeting with Mr. Ashcroft saying the United States remains certain that it did the right thing by deporting him to Syria.
[. . . .]
What remains unclear is whether senior Canadian officials were aware of, or even okayed, the high-level U.S. decision to deport Mr. Arar to Syria, a country known to torture prisoners.
