Maher Arar
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Maher Arar is a Canadian-Syrian political-science professor at the University of Toronto. In the summer of 2002, returning from a family visit in Tunisia via JFK, he was secretly seized by the FBI at CIA request, "completely off the books," and rendered to Damascus, where he was tortured by Syrian intelligence for eight to nine months. Per John Kiriakou, then chief of counterintelligence in the CIA's Bin Laden unit, the Bin Laden unit run by Cofer Black (known internally as Alec Station), Arar's seizure was a mistake from the start.

The intra-CIA dissent before the snatch

A group of CIA officers, Kiriakou among them, went to the chief of operations of the Bin Laden unit run by Cofer Black (known internally as Alec Station), known internally as "the redheaded devil" (the figure later portrayed by Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty), and pushed back: "This is the wrong guy. We're snatching the wrong guy." The chief refused. "This is a political-science professor in Canada. He's not an al-Qaeda mastermind."

The cover-up that collapsed on a duty-free sunglasses receipt

The U.S. asked the FBI to grab Arar when he transferred at JFK, off the books, and turn him over for rendition. He was flown to Damascus. The U.S. then "denied and denied and denied to the Canadians that he was ever on that plane."

A month later, with the Canadian government still telling Arar's wife her husband had never been on the flight, she produced a credit-card receipt: Arar had bought a pair of sunglasses for her in the duty-free cart in the hour before landing. "And the Canadians were like, 'Oh shit. The Americans have him.'" The CIA then quietly told the Syrians to let him go. In another telling, Kiriakou places the sunglasses purchase itself as the proof: Arar, seized by the FBI at the gate at JFK and turned over to the CIA, had bought a pair of sunglasses for his wife on the in-flight duty-free cart, which later established that he had in fact been on the plane.

Kiriakou says he was among a number of CIA officers who told their superiors at the time that Arar was the wrong man, "this guy has a similar name but this Mahar, he's just a professor at some university in Toronto", warnings that were not heeded. In some tellings Kiriakou gives the duration of Arar's torture in Syria as roughly nine months, in others as eighteen months.

The two lawsuits

Arar sued the U.S. government in the Eastern District of Virginia. The CIA appeared in court and said "Your Honor, national security." The judge dismissed the case with prejudice.

He then sued the government of Canada, which Kiriakou says had been told by the CIA that Arar was al-Qaeda and, as a Five Eyes intelligence partner, went along with it, and won six million dollars. Kiriakou says all Arar really wanted from the American government was an apology, which he never received, since it is U.S. policy not to apologize.

Aftermath

Per Kiriakou, who interviewed Arar for his podcast roughly five years ago: "He said, 'I have developed such agoraphobia. I haven't left the four walls of my house in fifteen years. Even to be on a Zoom call, I just can't do it. I'll have a panic attack. I'll have to be hospitalized.'" Kiriakou: "We ruined his life." In a separate telling, Kiriakou says Arar is now a political-science professor at the University of Toronto and that his PTSD is so severe he had not left his house in six years, teaching his classes online.

See also

The other canonical wrong-rendition case Kiriakou pairs with Arar is Khalid El-Masri.

- Khaled El Masri
- Mohamedou Ould Slahi
- Guantanamo Bay
- Enhanced interrogation techniques
- Cofer Black
