Maher Arar

Wikipedia:

Maher Arar (Arabic: ماهر عرار) (born 1970) is a telecommunications engineer with dual Syrian and Canadian citizenship who resides in Canada. He is famous for the outcry resulting from his deportation by the United States government to Syria. Arar has claimed he was tortured while in Syria. His experience has been put forward as an example of the United States government policy of "extraordinary rendition".

Arar was detained during a layover at John F. Kennedy International Airport in September 2002 on his way home to Canada from a family vacation in Tunis. He was held in solitary confinement in the United States for nearly two weeks, questioned, and denied meaningful access to a lawyer. The US government suspected him of being a member of Al Qaeda and deported him, not to Canada, his current home, but to his native Syria, even though its government is known to use torture. He was detained in Syria for almost a year, during which time he was tortured, according to the findings of the Arar Commission, until his release to Canada.

The government of Canada ordered a commission of inquiry which concluded that he was tortured. The commission of inquiry publicly cleared Arar of any links to terrorism. The government of Canada later settled out of court with Arar and awarded him a C$10.5 million settlement. The Syrian government reports it knows of no links of Arar to terrorism.

Despite the Canadian court ruling, the United States government has not exonerated Arar and, on the contrary, has made public statements to state their belief that Arar is affiliated with members of organizations they describe as terrorist. As of February 2009, Arar and his family remain on a watchlist. His US lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights are currently pursuing his case, Arar v. Ashcroft, which seeks compensatory damages on Arar’s behalf and also a declaration that the actions of the US government were illegal and violated his constitutional, civil, and international human rights.

[…]On October 7, 2002, FBI agent Robert Fuller went to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and showed Canadian teenager Omar Khadr a black-and-white photograph of Arar obtained from the FBI office in Massachusetts, and demanded to know if he recognised him. Khadr initially stated that he did not recognise Arar, but when further pressured by Fuller, stated that he had seen him at a Kabul safehouse run by Abu Musab al-Suri or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. However, it was later revealed that the actual interrogation notes from the incident showed that Khadr had denied recognising the black-and-white photograph he'd be shown and it wasn't until Fuller pressured him that he agreed the man in the picture "looked familiar", even though Khadr would have been only six or seven years old at the time Arar was alleged to have been in Afghanistan.[citation needed] This testimony given by Fuller is also contradicted by the fact that during the period indicated by Khadr in Fuller's testimony, Maher Arar was known to be in Canada, under surveillance by the RCMP.

Arrested in 2002, Arward Al-Bousha gave up the name of Arar as a possible militant, after he himself had been fingered in a confession given by Abdullah Almalki allegedly to stop his own torture.