500 Days (65 page)

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 October, 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.

•  •  •  

Arar never saw the evidence against him that was cited in the removal order from Blackman. The classified information was nothing more than the statements from El-Maati and Almalki that had been extracted by torture, and Omar Khadr’s false identification of Arar.

Other pages included the unclassified reasons the government concluded he was with al-Qaeda. Arar was friendly with both Almalki and El-Maati, the document said. Another reason for suspicion, it said, was that Almalki exported radios overseas, and one of his customers was the Pakistani military—both an incorrect and a bizarre assertion. His customer was another company that in turn sold equipment to the Pakistanis. And the Pakistanis were being celebrated as an ally in the fight against al-Qaeda. How could selling radios that ended up in the hands of a military ally be suggestive of wrongdoing?

Arar had held three business meetings with Almalki, the document said. Blackman cited one lunch that took place at a restaurant as particularly suspicious, since Arar had been seen walking in the rain with Almalki.

The false weather report, with its illogical connection to terrorism, helped drive the decision to ship Arar to Syria.

•  •  •  

The Gulfstream III landed in Amman, Jordan, at about two on the morning of October 9. While the Syrians were willing to hold Arar, they would not take him directly. Their cooperation with the United States—ostensibly an enemy—had to remain a secret.

Arar was handed over to Jordanian officials. They blindfolded him, chained him with new shackles, and loaded him into a van.

“Put your head down,” one of the Jordanians said.

Arar complied. Then the men started beating him on his face and head.

•  •  •  

Through a grating above his cell, Abdullah Almalki detected the sounds of a new arrival. The guards searched the man’s bags, asking him to identify various items.

“That’s Swiss chocolate,” Almalki heard the man say. He recognized the voice. Maher Arar had arrived at Far’ Falastin.

Almalki listened as Arar asked the same questions he had posed on his first day in this hell. Where was the bed? Where was the pillow? Still so naive.

It wouldn’t be long, Almalki knew, before he would hear Arar’s screams.

The first snow of the Russian winter dusted the tree-shrouded hunting lodge at the Zavidovo nature preserve. As a motorcade approached, Vladimir Putin and his wife, Ludmilla, stepped outside onto a porch to greet their visitors.

The caravan stopped. Tony and Cherie Blair emerged from a limousine and walked toward the Putins. As flashbulbs popped, there were handshakes and airy kisses. The Russian president gestured toward a flag hoisted above the building.

“I made it a point to meet you under the Russian flag,” he said in practiced English.

The Putins escorted the Blairs inside for a tour of the house, then settled in an elegant drawing room beside an unlit, ornate fireplace. A group of reporters appeared at the doorway. One of them asked the prime minister what he thought of Zavidovo.

Breathtaking, he said, and a wonderful place to meet. “I’m looking forward to my talks with President Putin,” Blair said.

The prime minister had traveled to Russia on this day, October 11, hoping to persuade Putin to support a new U.N. resolution on Iraq. Both Blair and Bush had been lobbying members of the Security Council all week; in a phone call two days earlier, Bush had urged Jacques Chirac, the French president, to support a single declaration threatening Saddam with severe consequences if he failed to comply. But Chirac was wary; he told Bush that he preferred a two-tiered approach, with weapons inspectors returning to Iraq and leaving the question of military force until later. It was the same position that Blair had advanced to the president privately, without success.

Bush had ceded responsibility for winning over the Russian president to
Blair, with good reason—the prime minister had cultivated a strong rapport with Putin, while relations between Russia and America remained frosty at best. If Blair could convince Putin that the U.N. resolution was just as important to the British government as it was to the Bush administration, he thought, it would go a long way toward winning him over.

To sway Putin to their cause, both London and Washington had assembled their evidence of Saddam’s malfeasance, delivering separate unclassified intelligence reports in the days leading up to the Zavidovo summit. What Blair didn’t know as the two men prepared to square off was the futility of the mission—Putin had already privately brushed off the “Dossier” from Britain and the “National Intelligence Estimate” from the United States as rehashes of old information that he had previously scorned as inadequate.

The wives headed out of the sitting room, leaving Blair on a couch with Putin across from him in an armchair. Two interpreters stood by while the Russian president continued flaunting his growing proficiency in English with small talk; his fluency wasn’t up to the subtleties of diplomatic discourse.