This is a long article available at the Walrus website. The article analyses in great detail the press reaction to Arar and the shameful parade of leaked material from anonymous sources meant to damage his reputation. It is well worth reading in its entirety. This is the second good article in Walrus on the Arar case. However the article misses out the fact that Zaccardelli denied his early testimony that he knew for some time that Arar was not a terrorist. In fact he contradicted himself in later testimony claiming that he did not know until the O'Connor inquiry. In fact this denial and retraction of the testimony cited here is what led to his resignation. Surely the author should have noted this! An amazing oversight.
Hear No Evil, Write No Lies
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Maher Arar was portrayed as a sly fox, a predator working with al-Qaeda. He turned out to be a hare, an innocent family man.
by Andrew Mitrovica
Photographs by Tamara Shopsin and Jason Fulford
Published in the December/January 2007 issue
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It was an instructive moment during an otherwise sonorous edition of the now-defunct public-affairs television program Diplomatic Immunity. Two scribes and an academic — the Globe and Mail’s Patrick Martin, veteran Toronto Star columnist Richard Gwyn, and University of Toronto professor Janice Stein — joined the show’s effervescent host, Steve Paikin. The program’s guest on April 9, 2004, was Stewart Bell, a National Post reporter and the author of Cold Terror, a thin volume under discussion that evening. Bell’s book repeated a familiar mantra: Canada was a haven for terrorists and Canadians were soft on terror.
With the exception of Stein, who dismissed Cold Terror as hyperbole, the panellists treated Bell guardedly. Toward the end of the interview, Bell was asked to comment on the case of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who insisted that he had been abducted, deported, and tortured by Syrian thugs masquerading as intelligence officers with the complicity of US and Canadian authorities acting on the suspicion that he was an Islamic extremist. “Well, I think I’m kind of reserving judgment on the Arar thing because we really don’t know that much about it,” Bell said. The largely restrained Martin called that reply a “convenient dodge” and snapped that the evidence clearly suggested that Arar was an innocent man who had been maligned by authorities on both sides of the border.
On September 18, 2006, Justice Dennis O’Connor delivered the judgment that Bell had been waiting for. After spending more than two years examining Arar’s story, the sober Associate Chief Justice of Ontario issued a blunt and damning verdict: Arar was an innocent victim of incompetent rcmp officers who produced worthless intelligence. O’Connor also concluded that a smear campaign had been orchestrated against Arar by Canadian officials, aided by members of the media. Leaks to the press spanned two years and constituted a campaign with the intent, O’Connor stated, not only to tar Arar’s name and reputation but also to keep him imprisoned. When that ultimately failed, the goal was to thwart a public inquiry.
Though it has received scant attention, a twenty-two-page section of O’Connor’s encyclopedic report stands as an indictment of the reporters who participated in labelling Arar a terrorist and a habitual liar. “The impact on an individual’s reputation of being called a terrorist in the national media is obviously severe . . . labels, even inaccurate ones, have a tendency to stick,” wrote O’Connor.
On September 28, 2006, none other than rcmp Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli confirmed the key findings of Justice O’Connor’s report when he admitted to a parliamentary committee that he knew within days of Arar’s arrest that the software engineer was not a terrorist; Zaccardelli also confessed that he had kept that fact a secret. “You let him rot for almost a year in Syrian prisons,” Bloc Québécois MP Serge Ménard told Zaccardelli. “For most Canadians, before the O’Connor commission report, Mr. Arar was linked to terrorists, and you knew it was false. How, as a policeman, could you leave someone that you know is innocent in prison?”
Zaccardelli insisted that no one had been misled. A look at the media record suggests otherwise. Wittingly or unwittingly, several reporters became complicit in a cover-up by perpetuating the myth that Maher Arar was a terrorist.
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