Who is Maher Arar? We all know the basic contours of his story. In 2002, U.S. officials detained the Canadian software engineer at New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. They alleged that he was linked to al-Qaeda and secretly deported him to Syria, where he says he was tortured. When Arar was freed more than a year later and the public got a glimpse of him, he seemed to be a likable, hard-working family man caught up in a monstrous international screwup. Was there more? Simultaneously, officials, most of them anonymous, were leaking information and dropping hints suggesting that Arar was a security risk with something to hide.

Well, if Arar is a terrorist, he is unlike any other. In contrast to other suspects dispatched to harsh justice, Arar did not vanish into oblivion in his Middle East cell. Nor, after his release, did he recoil from public view. Instead, Arar, who has a modest home in Ottawa, has stepped into the spotlight as a vocal proponent of human rights in Canada, a symbol of how fear and injustice have permeated life in the West since 9/11. [. . . . ]

Two years later, while his wife Monia Mazigh was completing a Ph.D. in finance at McGill, Arar took a job at the MathWorks, a Boston-area computer company.

[. . . . ] Arar’s choice for Newsmaker of the Year was so politically correct. And so typically Canadian.

Time Canada used Arar to propound the theory, so popular in this country, that the United States is responsible for all of the world’s problems. . . .

[. . . . ] The magazine also propounded the theory . . . .

A burgeoning East Boston-based street gang made up of alleged rapists and machete-wielding robbers has been linked to the al-Qaeda terrorist network, prompting Boston police to ``turn up the heat'' on its members, the Herald has learned.

MS-13, which stands for La Mara Salvatrucha, is an extremely violent organization with roots in El Salvador, and boasts more than 100 ``hardcore members'' in East Boston who are suspected of brutal machete attacks, rapes and home invasions. There are hundreds more MS-13 gangsters in towns along the North Shore, said Boston police Sgt. Detective Joseph Fiandaca, who has investigated the gang since it began tagging buildings in Maverick Square in 1995.

In recent months, intelligence officials in Washington have warned national law enforcement agencies that al-Qaeda terrorists have been spotted with members of MS-13 in El Salvador, prompting concerns the gang may be smuggling Islamic fundamentalist terrorists into the country. Law enforcement officials have long believed that MS-13 controls alien smuggling routes along Mexico.

The warning is being taken seriously in East Boston, where Raed Hijazi, an al-Qaeda operative charged with training the suicide bombers in the attack on the USS Cole, lived and worked, prosecutors have charged. [. . . . ]

Roughly 60,000 illegal immigrants designated as 'other-than-Mexican,' or OTMs, were detained last year along the U.S.-Mexico border, including a sizable number from Arab and Muslim countries. And if recent reports are any indication, they may be getting some troubling new help in their efforts to enter the United States. [. . . . ]

VIENNA (Reuters) - The crisis caused by North Korea's refusal to abandon its nuclear weapons ambitions is deepening and needs to be resolved as soon as possible, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Wednesday.

"This has been a pending issue for 12 years, and frankly it is getting worse," International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei told Reuters in an interview.

[. . . . ] The IAEA team was expelled on Dec. 31, 2002 and has not been allowed to return. Since that time, North Korea has produced enough plutonium for half a dozen nuclear weapons, the IAEA and a number of security think-tanks estimate. [. . . . ]

VIENNA, Austria -- The U.N. atomic watchdog agency has found evidence of secret nuclear experiments in Egypt that could be used in weapons programs, diplomats said Tuesday.

The diplomats told The Associated Press that most of the work was carried out in the 1980s and 1990s but said the International Atomic Energy Agency also was looking at evidence suggesting some work was performed as recently as a year ago.

Egypt's government rejected claims it is or has been pursuing a weapons program, saying its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes. [. . . . ]

VIENNA, Austria (AP) - Iran has agreed to grant access to a military site the United States links to a secret nuclear weapons program and the first U.N. inspectors could arrive "within days," the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said Wednesday.

[. . . . ] In leaks to media last year, U.S. intelligence officials said that a specially secured site on the Parchin complex, 20 miles southeast of Tehran, may be used in research on making high-explosive components for use in nuclear weapons.

[. . . . ] Iran has been the main focus of the IAEA since mid-2002, after revelations of two secret nuclear facilities - a uranium enrichment plant at Natanz and a heavy water production plant near Arak.

That led to a subsequent IAEA investigation of what turned out to be nearly two decades of covert nuclear activities, including suspicious "dual use" experiments that can be linked to weapons programs and a large-scale uranium enrichment program. [. . . . ]

[. . . . ] It's simply not possible to set the degree of discomfort prisoners experience at zero: not if we hope to extract any information from them at all. Such a standard would exclude even routine techniques of interrogation, designed to confuse, manipulate, fatigue or demoralize the prisoner. Indeed, the very process of interrogation is intrinsically coercive (that's why it's banned with regard to prisoners of war). You can call that psychological torture, if you like, in which case every prisoner in every jail is being tortured. Or if you don't call it torture, then you have begun to make distinctions between different levels of pain. [. . . . ]