At first, I thought this was about Ernst Zundel. Silly me. I should have known that the Jewish media would never let on that the government had made a mistake in that particular case.

Found at
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060918/ts_nm/security_canada_arar_dc

Police mistakes led to U.S. deporting Canadian
By David Ljunggren

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canadian police wrongly identified an Ottawa software engineer as an Islamic extremist, prompting U.S. agents to deport him to Syria, where he says he was tortured, an official inquiry concluded on Monday.

Maher Arar, who holds Canadian and Syrian nationality, was arrested in New York in September 2002 and accused of being an al-Qaeda member. Arar, 36, says he was repeatedly tortured in the year he spent in Damascus jails. He was freed in 2003.

Judge Dennis O'Connor, asked in 2004 to examine what had happened, said the Royal Canadian Mounted Police wrongly told U.S. authorities that Arar was an Islamic extremist.

"The provision of this inaccurate information ... (was) totally unacceptable" and guaranteed the United States would treat Arar as a serious threat, O'Connor said.

"I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr Arar has committed any offense or that his activities constitute a threat to the security of Canada."

Civil rights advocates said the case of Arar and three other Canadians who ended up in Syrian jails raised suspicions that Canada might be outsourcing interrogation to nations where torture was commonplace.

O'Connor said the case of the other three men was troubling and warranted further investigation. But he found no evidence that the Canadian government had played any role in the decision to deport Arar.

The three-volume report repeatedly castigated the Mounties for slipshod work in the wake of the 9/11 suicide attacks.

It said the Mounties exaggerated Arar's importance and later asked U.S. customs agents to put Arar and his wife onto a special watchlist, calling them "Islamic Extremist individuals suspected of being linked to the Al Qaeda terrorist movement."

U.S. agencies declined to be questioned by O'Connor as to why they had deported Arar.

"I do conclude it is very likely that they relied on information received from the RCMP in making the decision to remove Mr Arar to Syria," the judge wrote.

Arar first came to police attention in October 2001 when he was seen talking to another man already being probed for possible al-Qaeda links.

O'Connor found that police made a number of serious mistakes in the Arar case.

The special police unit probing possible terror networks was poorly supervised and was comprised largely of financial fraud experts who had very little experience of national security cases.

Police gave all their files from the probe to the United States without screening the data for inaccuracies or following internal rules which limited what they could hand over.

The judge criticized unnamed Canadian officials who he said had leaked confidential and sometimes inaccurate information about Arar both before and after his release in a bid to demonstrate he really was a threat to national security.