Hear No Evil, Write No Lies

Not surprisingly, there have been belated calls for introspection in the wake of the official imprimatur of Justice O’Connor’s report. The Globe’s Margaret Wente named some names, and former Toronto Star reporter (now a professor of journalism at Carleton) Allan Thompson put the matter in stark terms: “I think Maher Arar... has a right to know how the smear campaign against him was orchestrated and who was responsible for it. Journalists owe it to Arar, and to themselves, to get to the truth and learn from this shameful debacle.” Thompson went further, suggesting that the reporters and news organizations that published or aired falsehoods about Arar should identify their sources. “I’ve been down this road,” he wrote. “More than a decade ago, I was duped into helping government officials smear a whistle-blower. Belatedly, I came clean about how material was leaked to me. I wrote a story and named names.”

Thompson chose to identify his discredited sources because a journalist’s paramount responsibility is to tell the truth, not to protect state officials. The critical choice facing journalists who were complicit in smearing Arar is simple: will they continue to shield officials whose principal aim, as Justice O’Connor concluded, was to “harm” Maher Arar, or will they expose those who leaked misinformation that nearly destroyed a Canadian citizen?

On October 12, 2002, the Globe’s Peter Cheney broke the story of Arar’s deportation to Syria. In his 554-word front-page piece, Cheney described Arar as a “respected Canadian engineer” who had been “seized by US investigators” and was “accused of having links to al-Qaeda.” Cheney offered no evidence to back up the allegation, and the heart of his dispatch was, in fact, about a family’s search for answers about a husband and a new father who had disappeared while waiting to catch a plane back to his home in Canada from New York’s Kennedy airport on September 26, 2002. The Canadian Press picked up Cheney’s piece and affixed the headline “US deports respected Canadian to Syria” to its wire story.

The Globe’s rival, the National Post, published a sixty-nine-word story about Arar’s disappearance on page nine. The Post had been scooped, but what was instructive was the headline: “United States deports suspected terrorist to Syria.” Suddenly Arar was not a “respected engineer” but rather a “suspected terrorist.” This judgment would come to represent the Post’s intransigent stance vis-à-vis Arar. Indeed, in March 2003, one perceptive Post reader had a letter published pointing out that “in the past six months, the Post has run forty stories on [William] Sampson [a Canadian consultant tortured in Saudi Arabia], including eight editorials, almost all in support. In the case of Mr. Arar . . . not a single editorial was published. A total of eight news stories on Mr. Arar appeared in your paper, in which he was always referred to as a suspected al-Qaeda terrorist.” While the Post covered the Sampson story aggressively, what accounts for the neglect and the editorial slant regarding Arar?

The Globe seized the Arar story and ran with it. Several news and opinion pieces probed important angles: Who was Arar? What were the allegations against him? What was the role of Canadian authorities in his abduction? What was Ottawa doing to secure his release? Were overzealous US officials unjustly ensnaring Canadians in a post- 9/11 sweep?

Editorial writers and reporters at the Ottawa Citizen — who would later be among the first journalists to deconstruct the rcmp’s central and disastrous role in the Arar affair — also sought answers. Noteworthy here was the work of Mike Trickey, now at Agriculture Canada. In contrast, the Post’s Bell wrote about complaints by Muslim “activists” and “lobby groups” who argued “that the US government should have returned [Arar] to Canada and said Ottawa was not doing enough.”

Word of a Canadian citizen’s deportation by US authorities barely registered at Canada’s largest-circulation newspaper, the Toronto Star, where Arar’s disturbing tale merited little attention, and when it was mentioned, it was buried in the paper. Star columnist Thomas Walkom acknowledged this on October 29, 2002. “Except for the Globe and Mail, which broke the story,” he wrote, “the Arar incident barely ruffled the front pages of this country’s newspapers.”

Early on, the story also garnered relatively minor play on major television newscasts. Monia Mazigh, Arar’s wife, appeared on ctv’s Canada AM in mid- November, insisting that her husband was not a terrorist and pleading for his release. But after an initial burst of reporting, Arar’s story largely dropped off the media’s radar between late December 2002 and spring 2003, and in many quarters the notion of Arar as suspected terrorist took hold. The Globe kept the story alive by publishing a string of pointed editorials questioning the veracity of US allegations linking Arar to terrorism, as well as an impassioned piece by Mazigh. “One day, Maher was a loving husband, a devoted father and a brilliant engineer. Then, he was turned into a file number,” she wrote on January 18, 2003. “I can still believe that one day our family will reunite.”

The prospects for this reunion dimmed when the Globe reported in late April 2003 that Arar was about to be charged by Syrian officials with “terrorist- related activity.” News of the potential charges reignited press interest in the story, prompting the Globe, the Montreal Gazette, and the Ottawa Citizen to publish editorials demanding that Ottawa act more forcefully to repatriate Arar. The pressure paid off. In late June, the Globe’s Jeff Sallot reported that Prime Minister Jean Chrétien had promised a relentless campaign to bring Arar home.

At the bottom of Sallot’s story, however, was the first leak undercutting Arar’s character from unnamed Canadian and American sources. Sallot’s sources were anonymous, but their charges were clear: Arar was a longtime target of a joint security investigation that resulted in his being placed on an anti-terrorism watchlist. Sallot buried the information in his piece; nevertheless it does represent the first of a series of leaks damning Arar.