TORONTO - Maher Arar, the Canadian software engineer who was tortured in Syria after he was illegally sent there by the United States, said Thursday he was stunned the Americans had again dragged up his name in connection with terrorism.
Speaking publicly for the first time since he was named at military commission hearings last week in Guantanamo Bay, Arar expressed dismay at what had happened.
"It was shocking," Arar said.
"I have to tell you for a week at least I've been in a deep depression. It's not easy."
A special FBI agent testified last week that a teenaged Canadian citizen, Omar Khadr, had seen Arar in an al-Qaida safehouse in Kabul and possibly at a terrorist training camp in the fall of 2001.
Arar, who has never been in Afghanistan, also said he had only ever seen Khadr on television.
Khadr's alleged statements to the agent came during the first of a series of FBI interrogations at Bagram, Afghanistan, in October 2002, where the 15-year-old had been taken after his capture by the Americans a few months earlier.
The very next day, Arar who had been arrested two weeks earlier at the airport in New York as he travelled from vacation in Algeria back to Canada, was illegally sent to Syria, where he was horribly mistreated for 10 months.
An exhaustive commission of inquiry in Canada later cleared the married father of two of any links to terrorism. The Canadian government later apologized and paid him $10.5 million in compensation, but the Americans have refused to clear him.
"The Khadr information was part of the inquiry documents," Arar said.
Arar, who is suing U.S. authorities for his "extraordinary rendition" to Syria, said bitterly that he was not particularly surprised the Americans would again try to smear his name.
"It happened many, many times," he said before speaking to a symposium put on by the Canadian Journalism Foundation.
"It will probably continue happening as long as the media is willing to publish those stories."
Arar initially refused to respond to the agent's testimony because he didn't think it warranted a response, saying he and his family has had "enough of this."
He expressed disappointment the Canadian government refused initially to say it had long ago seen the FBI's Khadr information.
Khadr's lawyers said after the evidence the youth had been tortured and would have said anything to his captors in hopes of staving off further mistreatment.
Arar chastized the media for how it covered his ordeal, saying reporters were too willing to rely on information from anonymous government sources and damaging leaks for which no one has been held accountable.
"Most journalists seemed to have assumed I must have done something wrong to deserve my fate," he told the symposium.
Arar compared the agent's testimony to the damaging leaks, which, he said, always happened at critical times.
"Maybe it's (former) president Bush's way of throwing shoes at people," Arar joked.
He also said many journalists are unwilling to own up to their mistakes, which can have devastating consequences for people such as himself.
A free press should be society's watchdog, one that questions government actions, he said, adding journalists should not protect the identities of sources who lie or provide misleading information.
Kerry Pither, who has written a book on Arar's tragic story, chastized journalists for reporting the FBI agent's evidence, saying they did not write enough about why the bureau might have chosen to bring up his name.
"The damage is done," she said, brandishing a newspaper headline reporting the agent's allegation.
However, the CBC's Bill Gillespie explained how Canadian reporters in Guantanamo Bay only reluctantly reported the FBI evidence.
The public would not have been well served if the media had sat on the story, he said.
