It was an instructive moment during an otherwise sonorous edition of the now-defunct public-affairs television program Diplomatic Immunity. Two scribes and an academic — the Globe and Mail’s Patrick Martin, veteran Toronto Star columnist Richard Gwyn, and University of Toronto professor Janice Stein — joined the show’s effervescent host, Steve Paikin. The program’s guest on April 9, 2004, was Stewart Bell, a National Post reporter and the author of Cold Terror, a thin volume under discussion that evening. Bell’s book repeated a familiar mantra: Canada was a haven for terrorists and Canadians were soft on terror.
With the exception of Stein, who dismissed Cold Terror as hyperbole, the panellists treated Bell guardedly. Toward the end of the interview, Bell was asked to comment on the case of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who insisted that he had been abducted, deported, and tortured by Syrian thugs masquerading as intelligence officers with the complicity of US and Canadian authorities acting on the suspicion that he was an Islamic extremist. “Well, I think I’m kind of reserving judgment on the Arar thing because we really don’t know that much about it,” Bell said. The largely restrained Martin called that reply a “convenient dodge” and snapped that the evidence clearly suggested that Arar was an innocent man who had been maligned by authorities on both sides of the border.
On September 18, 2006, Justice Dennis O’Connor delivered the judgment that Bell had been waiting for. After spending more than two years examining Arar’s story, the sober Associate Chief Justice of Ontario issued a blunt and damning verdict: Arar was an innocent victim of incompetent rcmp officers who produced worthless intelligence. O’Connor also concluded that a smear campaign had been orchestrated against Arar by Canadian officials, aided by members of the media. Leaks to the press spanned two years and constituted a campaign with the intent, O’Connor stated, not only to tar Arar’s name and reputation but also to keep him imprisoned. When that ultimately failed, the goal was to thwart a public inquiry.
Though it has received scant attention, a twenty-two-page section of O’Connor’s encyclopedic report stands as an indictment of the reporters who participated in labelling Arar a terrorist and a habitual liar. “The impact on an individual’s reputation of being called a terrorist in the national media is obviously severe . . . labels, even inaccurate ones, have a tendency to stick,” wrote O’Connor.
On September 28, 2006, none other than rcmp Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli confirmed the key findings of Justice O’Connor’s report when he admitted to a parliamentary committee that he knew within days of Arar’s arrest that the software engineer was not a terrorist; Zaccardelli also confessed that he had kept that fact a secret. “You let him rot for almost a year in Syrian prisons,” Bloc Québécois MP Serge Ménard told Zaccardelli. “For most Canadians, before the O’Connor commission report, Mr. Arar was linked to terrorists, and you knew it was false. How, as a policeman, could you leave someone that you know is innocent in prison?”
Zaccardelli insisted that no one had been misled. A look at the media record suggests otherwise. Wittingly or unwittingly, several reporters became complicit in a cover-up by perpetuating the myth that Maher Arar was a terrorist.
Arar was already a damaged man when he returned to Canada from his ten-month nightmare in a coffinlike Syrian cell. The trauma was registered on his ashen face as he sat in front of a bevy of reporters at Montreal’s Dorval airport on October 6, 2003, shoulders slumped and clutching his wife’s hand. At that moment it must have been difficult for him to imagine that some of the reporters in his midst would soon compound his suffering by repeating government lies about who and what he was.
A careful review of more than 2,500 stories, editorials, opinion pieces, letters to the editor, and transcripts of newscasts between the time word broke in mid-October 2002 that Arar had been secretly shipped to Syria and early October 2006 reveals much about the sometimes- incestuous relationship between anonymous government sources and parliamentary reporters. These documents also speak to the hypocrisy of news organizations and writers who demand transparency and accountability from others but fail to provide it themselves, and to a great divide between the coverage of the Arar story published by Canada’s two national newspapers.
This examination also reveals that there were journalists who faithfully pursued the truth and lived up to another core journalistic duty — to serve as a monitor of power. Among them were veteran columnists Thomas Walkom, Catherine Ford, Haroon Siddiqui, and Paul Knox. The list also includes Globe reporters Colin Freeze and Jeff Sallot (although Sallot’s record has blemishes), who, along with the Globe’s editorial board, followed the Arar story with determination and produced articles that today appear prescient. Sallot wrote early and often about how the rcmp’s handling of the Arar case constituted “guilt by association” and how it exposed the force’s inability to gather intelligence “without trampling on the rights of citizens.” Ottawa bureau reporters at the Canadian Press, notably Jim Brown and Jim Bronskill, reported on the inquiry hearings fairly and with precision. Ottawa Citizen reporters Kate Jaimet, Mike Trickey, Janice Tibbetts, and Lee Greenberg also produced exemplary work. Their reporting did not treat Arar like a commodity that could be bartered in return for an ephemeral scoop on page one or at the top of a newscast.
The literature search also unearths moments of refreshing candour by writers who acknowledged their past failure to challenge official lies. But such introspection was rare, and there was a near-total absence of analysis of media complicity in smearing Arar. Writers often condemned government officials and the rcmp when it became apparent that misinformation was being leaked, but rarely condemned the reporters and news agencies who published or broadcast the accusations.
