Pillow Talk...

While the world is filled with gossip about the supposed romance between Condoleeza Rice and Canadian Foreign Minister Peter MacKay Washington insiders continue to claim that the Secretary of State’s real paramour is a 30 year old gym rattress who sat behind Condi during her Senate confirmation hearings for the top diplomatic job in the world (not that there’s anything wrong with that).Nonetheless, if the chief Canadian diplomat and America’s highest ranking gal really are sharing leisure time together do you suppose the subject of the unfortunate Mr. Maher Arar has come up?
Mr. Arar is a Canadian Muslim who has been the subject of a three year inquiry by the Canadian Authorities over his deportation to Syria by the US government which lead to him being beaten in Jordan and tortured in Syria in 2002/2003.
The mild mannered Canadian engineer had gone to visit his family in Tunisia in September of 2002. On his way back to Canada his plane had a stopover at JFK. American authorities acting on information provided by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that Arar was an Islamic extremist with suspected links to al-Qaeda took Maher into custody and held and interrogated him in a detention center for twelve days.
When the US interrogators didn’t learn what the wanted from him Arar was shackled and deported to Syria (where he had lived before emigrating to Canada at age 17) by way of Jordan. After being beaten in Jordan Maher was driven to Syria where he was imprisoned and tortured for 10 months finally being released by the Syrians after signing a false confession that he had been trained in Afghanistan. There is no evidence that he has ever been to Afghanistan.The most obvious question MacKay might ask Secretary Rice would be: Why wasn’t Arar sent on to Canada where he was a passport carrying citizen and for which he had paid passage when he was removed from the plane?
Ms. Rice might ask why the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said Mr. Ahar was an Islamist extremist with links to al-Qaeda when all the information they really had was that he had been seen briefly in the company of someone they were “shadowing”?
Something to talk about…