THAT'S WHAT WE GET FOR TRUSTING SYRIA

[Flabbergasted]

http://frum.nationalreview.com/

The Harper government announced Friday that Maher Arar will receive an official apology and compensation. That agreement settles the case—but it does not resolve it.

Canadian security services suspected Arar of connections to terrorism. They monitored his movements. When he travelled to Tunisia in 2002, Canada alerted U.S. authorities that he planned to fly home via New York. U.S. authorities apprehended him, questioned him, and finally deported him to his native Syria, where he was tortured.

It now seems apparent that the information incriminating Mr. Arar originated with Syrian military intelligence. The revelation that Canada and the United States rely heavily on Syrian information exposes one of the most disturbing secrets of the war on terror.

The Syrians fingered Arar because they believed that a cousin of his had allegedly belonged to the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, an extremist Sunni Islamic group founded in Egypt in the 1920s. Sunni Muslims constitute the largest single religious bloc in Syria. But the ruling Assad family and much of Syria's Baath party apparatus belongs to a very different religious group, the Alawites, a small mysterious sect regarded by some scholars as a surviving vestige of the ancient paganism of the Levant.

[BayCityProgressive]

1. weird

why would we be threatening them all the time and also using their intelligence?

[Flabbergasted]

2. Nothing is as it seems to be....It's all filtered information we get.

[Benhurst]

3. Yeah, I'll bet Bush and Cheney were sooooooooo surprised

when the poor man got tortured. He was innocent to boot, but -- what the heck-- mistakes will be made and boys will be boys.