Canadians thought that when they told U.S. authorities (on no good evidence, bad for them) that someone was suspected of being linked to Al Qaeda, that they were dealing with "a country with many of the same values as Canada." To the innocent man's harm, they were wrong.
Posted by Matt Weiner at September 19, 2006 10:00 AMOh, come on. That's what's called "deniability." Don't let the Mounties off the hook.
Posted by: Matt's mom at September 19, 2006 12:40 PMMy comment is based on reading of NY Times story on Arar, which says that RCMP, in telling the U.S. to put Arar and his wife on terrorist watch list, said they were "Islamic extremists" and that he'd been in Washington shortly before Sept 11 and had refused to cooperate with Canadian police.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/19/world/americas/19canada.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1
That accords with the story I saw. What the Mounties did was very bad, and I did soft-pedal it in the post. But I don't think this is deniability, at least I think it might not be; this comes from a report that was extremely critical of the Mounties. It seems plausible to me that the RCMP negligently described Arar as an Islamic extremist, and that the FBI lied to them about what they were going to do with him; they said that they were going to send him back to Switzerland (bad enough, and Canada shares equal responsibility for that), and instead they sent him to Syria to be tortured (utterly shameful).
Posted by: Matt Weiner at September 19, 2006 07:20 PMToday's NY Times (web) says that Canada had told the FBI that they could not link Arar to al-Qaeda. So it's on the US after all.
Posted by: Matt's mom at September 25, 2006 10:30 AMToday's NY Times (web) says that Canada had told the FBI that they could not link Arar to al-Qaeda. So it's on the US after all.
Posted by: Matt's mom at September 25, 2006 10:30 AM