• • •
The call wasn’t memorable, just a two-minute chat that sealed Maher Arar’s fate.
Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, was in his office when a secretary told him Larry Thompson, Ashcroft’s deputy, was on the line.
“We’ve got a man named Maher Arar detained up in New York,” Thompson said. “He’s a member of al-Qaeda, and he has dual citizenship, Canadian and Syrian. We want to send him to Syria, but wanted to check whether State had any foreign policy objections.”
“He’s not an American citizen?” Armitage asked.
“No, just Syrian and Canadian.”
This didn’t strike Armitage as a hard issue. Syria had been secretly aiding the Bush administration in the fight against al-Qaeda. Relations between the two countries were improving. There was no reason to think that Syria would object to taking one of its own citizens, even if he had ties to terrorism.
“Okay,” he said. “There’s no problem. We don’t have any objections.”
Green light.
• • •
“Resist!” the detainee yelled in Arabic. “Resist with all your might!”
The military police inside an interrogation booth at Camp Delta in Guantanamo screamed at the detainee to shut up. But the man just ignored them, and continued calling out to his fellow prisoners. Finally, the chief of the detention center’s Interrogation Control Element came out of his office to find out who was causing the ruckus. He arrived at the booth and looked inside. The detainee was still screaming, but the interrogator, the translator, and some guards were frozen in place, unsure of what to do.
“Keep that detainee quiet!” the chief shouted.
A moment passed. “I have some duct tape,” one of the MPs said.
After consulting with a superior, the chief told the soldiers to go ahead and tape the detainee’s mouth shut.
• • •
Down the hall, two supervisory special agents from the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit were watching agents question another detainee. The head of military interrogations walked into the observation room and signaled to them.
“Hey, come here,” the officer said. “I want to show you something funny.”
The agents followed him to another observation area, which was packed with military personnel watching events unfolding in an interrogation room.
A detainee was inside, handcuffed and chained to the floor. Two bands of duct tape wrapped his head, covering his eyes and his mouth. The man had a beard and a full head of hair; when the duct tape was eventually ripped off, it would tear hair from his flesh. Four Americans were in the room—two interrogators and two guards. One interrogator was yelling at the detainee. The scene both perplexed and disturbed the FBI agents. How, they wondered, could the man answer questions with his mouth taped shut?
“Was he spitting on someone?” an agent asked.
“No,” the officer replied. “He just wouldn’t stop chanting the Koran.”
“How do you plan to take the tape off without hurting him?”
The officer just laughed, saying nothing.
The agents left the room and contacted the FBI’s Office of Special Counsel to report that they might have just witnessed a crime.
• • •
Ben Bonk was sitting in his office at the CIA, his heart sinking as he read a new National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq.
What happened? For weeks, Bonk had spent most of his time hunkering down with his staff to produce a lengthy analysis shooting down the administration’s contention that Iraq was working with al-Qaeda. But now it felt as if there had been a switch-up—al-Qaeda was almost irrelevant in the Iraq debate; it was all “weapons of mass destruction.” Bonk hadn’t even considered the issue worth discussing. There was analysis dating back years that demonstrated Saddam had no such arsenal. Yet even though it was his group that handled Iraq, it hadn’t been asked for input on the National Intelligence Estimate.
Was Bush even getting all of the intelligence? And was the Pentagon burying its own findings? The Defense Intelligence Agency had just issued an analysis that had made its way up the line to Rumsfeld. Bonk had reviewed it—the report showed that no one knew a damned thing. Every piece of information they knew about Iraq’s weapons was, at best, hazy.
The Pentagon report acknowledged that 90 percent of the intelligence on Iraq’s nuclear capabilities was imprecise; that the existence of biological facilities could not be proved and the supposed “mobile weapons labs” could not be found; that the presence of sites to produce chemical agents for weapons could not be confirmed; and that there was no proof that Iraq had any facilities to produce chemical devices. This was the best that the saber rattlers at the Pentagon could do?
Then came this CIA report, roaring with certitudes that put the Pentagon’s timid findings to shame. The agency’s analysts stated they had “high confidence” that Iraq was continuing and even expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs; that it possessed chemical and biological missiles; and that it could make a nuclear weapon in a matter of months once it obtained weapons-grade fissionable material.
Weighing the two reports against each other was dizzying. The CIA had no doubt that the weapons were there, while the Pentagon was unsure whether the capacity to make them even existed. It was as if the intelligence analysts were saying that they were confident that Saddam’s wife was ready to give birth, but remained uncertain if she was pregnant.
Bonk finished reading, then walked down the hall to confront one of the agency’s senior people who had been involved in preparing the intelligence estimate.
“How did we get to this point?” Bonk asked. “What are we saying here? This isn’t even what we said four months ago.”
His colleague fumbled for an answer, but all he could do was mutter some vague generalities. Bonk walked away in near despair. Maybe he could have stopped this if he had seen it coming. It just seemed so obvious to him that Saddam’s arsenal was an illusion. He never anticipated that anyone would conclude this imaginary threat was real.
• • •
After twenty-four hours of hunting, Canadian police had come up dry in their search for information to give the CIA. There wasn’t a lot of evidence that could be used to keep Arar locked up.
At 6:10 P.M. on Saturday, October 5, an FBI official called the home of Corporal Rick Flewelling, the RCMP official who was coordinating the search. He told the American that his force hadn’t found anything that could definitively tie Arar to al-Qaeda.
“Well,” the FBI official replied, “Washington’s afraid that we don’t have enough evidence to charge Arar with anything.”
If neither country could conjure up an irrefutable link to the terrorist group, couldn’t the Canadians come up with something to indict him with so that Arar could be locked up or barred from returning home? the FBI agent asked. The bosses in Washington wouldn’t be happy if the guy was allowed to wander around Canada at will.
There wasn’t much he could do, Flewelling said. They couldn’t imprison Arar without evidence.
“And since he’s a Canadian citizen, he would have to be readmitted to Canada,” Flewelling said.
The call ended without a resolution of their conundrum and with both men befuddled by the difficulty of nailing down Arar’s terrorist leanings. Neither considered the obvious explanation—the evidence didn’t exist because Arar was an innocent man.
• • •
About an hour later, Arar was taken from his cell to a visiting area at the prison. A woman who appeared to be Moroccan was waiting for him on the other side of a wall of glass. He picked up a handset so they could speak.
“My name is Amal Oummih, and I’m an immigration lawyer,” she said. “I’ve been speaking with your family, but I haven’t been formally retained yet.”
Arar started crying again. “They want to send me to Syria!”
“You need to calm down. You will be allowed to choose where you w
ant to go, and there will be a hearing where you can argue your case. You don’t need to be worried about this.”
Arar didn’t believe her. The Americans had made no secret of the fact that they wanted to ship him to Syria.
“Please,” he begged. “Please do everything you can.”
The meeting lasted about an hour and a half. Before she left, Oummih again told Arar not to worry. This would all be straightened out.
• • •
As Arar was meeting with Oummih, INS headquarters contacted asylum officers in New York with instructions to interview Arar the following day. It was standard procedure for a foreigner like Arar who was being forcibly removed to a country where he thought he would be tortured. Arar couldn’t just declare that he was scared; he had to provide specific evidence to support his fear.
But Arar would be hard-pressed to produce any grounds by himself. He had been locked up for days. Only his lawyer could gather the proof.
• • •
Twenty-four hours later, after 4:30 on a Sunday, an e-mail arrived at the INS Command Center in Washington. A lawyer for the service instructed officials at the center to contact Arar’s lawyers immediately. They needed to be informed that an asylum hearing would be held for their client in four hours.
A call was placed to Oummih’s office about five; unsurprisingly, she was not there late on a Sunday afternoon. The INS official left a voice-mail message. A second call reached a Canadian lawyer who had worked with Arar, but he pointed out there was no way he could get to New York in four hours. If the hearing were rearranged for the next day, the lawyer said, he could attend.
The INS official refused. The hearing would go forward as scheduled.
• • •
Guards unlocked Arar’s cell just before nine o’clock that night. “Your lawyer is here to see you,” a guard told him.
The timing seemed odd—Oummih was visiting on Sunday night?—but Arar was relieved to hear the news. He was escorted to a room where a group of asylum officers waited. Arar didn’t recognize them. Oummih was not there.
“Where is my lawyer?” Arar asked.
One of the asylum officers responded. “We called, but he refused to come.”
What? Were they lying? Oummih was a woman; why did they say “he”? He didn’t imagine they were talking about a lawyer from another country.
The asylum officials instructed Arar to sit down, and the questioning began.
“Why are you opposed to being sent to Syria?”
“I’ll be tortured there,” Arar replied. “I don’t want to go to Syria. Send me to Canada or Switzerland or Tunisia. Don’t send me to Syria.”
“Why do you think you’ll be tortured?”
Arar thought for a moment. “I haven’t performed my mandatory military service. They’ll arrest me.”
“But why would they torture you for that?”
A pause. “Please, don’t send me to Syria,” Arar pleaded.
“So, is the question about military service the only reason you’re frightened?”
“Please, don’t send me to Syria. Send me to my family. Please don’t do this.”
The asylum officer leaned forward, his elbows on the table. “Mr. Arar, if you don’t want to go to Syria, you have to explain why you believe you’ll be persecuted there.”
Arar rubbed his hands over his face, then stared at the asylum officer.
“I’ll be persecuted because I’m a Sunni Muslim.”
“All right. Why do you think that?”
Arar teared up. “I don’t know. But they’ll persecute me for that.”
No one was persuaded by his claim; he was acting out of desperation. Sunni Muslims were the largest religious group in Syria.
“I’m not a member of a terrorist organization!” Arar blurted out.
“We’re not here to discuss that, Mr. Arar. The purpose of this is to find out if you have a reasonable basis for believing you would be tortured in Syria. Is there anything else that makes you afraid?”
Arar didn’t answer. He didn’t know what to say.
“Mr. Arar, you need to tell us if there is any other reason you have for being afraid that you will be persecuted.”
Arar covered his eyes with one hand. “I don’t know,” he mumbled.
“It’s important that you explain your reasons, Mr. Arar. We need to understand why you believe this.”
Silence. Arar stared at the ground, looking broken. He couldn’t think of anything to say.
• • •
Throughout the meeting, the asylum officers repeatedly left the room to brief senior officials at INS headquarters in Washington about the questions and Arar’s answers. They were fed suggestions for follow-ups.
After five and a half hours, the interview ended. Arar was handed a typed statement summarizing the discussion and was told to sign it. He refused.
The asylum officers reached their decision. There was no reason that Maher Arar could not be sent to Syria. He had no reasonable basis to believe that he would be tortured.
• • •
If Arar had been given sixty seconds to do an Internet search, he could have called up all the evidence he needed to prove his fears were justified. It was posted on United States government Web sites, in the Syria section of the State Department’s annual report on human rights practices worldwide. Syria tortured prisoners, the report said. Those suspected of ties to terrorism—like Arar—were frequently subjected to the most abusive treatment.
The methods of torture, the report said, included administering electrical shocks; pulling out fingernails; forcing objects into the rectum; beatings, sometimes while the victim was suspended from a ceiling; hyperextending the spine; and using a chair that bends backward to fracture the detainee’s spine.
In his prison cell, though, Arar had no access to the report. And the INS pretended that it didn’t exist.
• • •
A sixteen-year-old boy was escorted into an interrogation room at Bagram Air Base, where an FBI agent was waiting to question him. The teenager was Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen born in Pakistan. He had been captured in July by American forces in Afghanistan and accused of killing a soldier with a grenade, and since then he had been questioned about the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
It was October 7. The agent, Robert Fuller, had come with a photograph to show Khadr, in hopes the boy could confirm that the man in the picture was tied to al-Qaeda. Fuller showed Khadr the photo.
“Do you recognize this man?” the agent asked.
Khadr stared at the picture. “I’m not sure.”
“Okay,” Fuller said. “Let me give you a couple of minutes to think about it.”
After a short break, Fuller showed Khadr the photograph again. This time, the teenager admitted that, in September or October 2001, he had seen the man at a Kabul safe house run by Abu Musab al-Suri, an al-Qaeda operative.
Done. That was the proof that Washington had been so diligently seeking. Khadr had identified Maher Arar as having ties to al-Qaeda.
The information was transmitted to Washington. Justice Department officials met in their command center to discuss the breakthrough. There was no question now; Arar, they decided, could not be sent to Canada. Since he could not be arrested there, he might sneak back across the border and launch some attack.
The best place to ship Arar, they decided, was Syria.
• • •
Khadr had lied. He had never seen Arar in Afghanistan. Later, he would say that he had told Fuller only what he thought the agent wanted to hear.
Once again, the sloppiness of the investigation went undetected. No one checked the records that could prove that Khadr’s statements were at odds with reality. And those documents were already in the hands of the FBI and the Mounties.
Arar could not have been in Kabul during either September or October 2001. Through their investigation, FBI agents had already shown—incontrovertibly—that Arar was in California during September. As for Octo
ber, the evidence of Khadr’s lies was even stronger. For it was on October 12 that Arar had met with Almalki at Mango’s Café. Several surveillance teams had watched as they lunched. Afterward, Arar’s movements were monitored. He was, the Canadian investigation established, in Ottawa.
And now the American investigation had established that, at about the same time, he was also in Kabul.
• • •
At 4:00 A.M. the next day, Arar’s twelfth day in limbo, a group of men arrived at his cell and woke him up.
“You’re leaving,” one of the guards said.
Arar struggled to stand. “Where am I being sent?” he asked.
“Let’s get going, come on.”
After a strip search, he was handcuffed, shackled, and taken to an office. A woman stood in front of him, holding a sheaf of papers. She read the first page, saying this was the decision of Blackman, the eastern regional director.
“I have concluded on the basis of classified information that Arar is unequivocally inadmissible to the United States,” the woman read, quoting Blackman, “in that he is a member of an organization that has been designated by the Secretary of State as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, to wit: al Qaeda.”
Arar shook his head. “No,” he pleaded. “No . . .”
He would be removed to Syria, the woman read. The INS commissioner had determined that shipping him to Damascus was consistent with the international Convention Against Torture, she said. There was no reason to believe that Arar would be persecuted there.
Arar grew hysterical. “Please, please don’t do this to me,” he begged. “Please . . . I’ll be tortured. They’ll torture me. Don’t do this.”
Everyone in the room ignored him. Instead, they ordered him to change out of his orange prison suit into a brown one. Then he was hustled out to a government car and driven to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey.
Waiting there was a Gulfstream III. Arar was removed from the car and brought up the steps into the plane. It took off at 5:40 A.M.
500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars Page 49
