Some reporters did not rely on leaks to label Arar a terrorist. On July 4, 2003, Sheldon Alberts, a former parliamentary reporter with CanWest News Service, wrote a story published in the Ottawa Citizen under the headline ” ‘Canada’s al-Qaeda’ still behind bars: Only five of seven alleged suspects known to the public.” Quoting Reynald Doiron, a Foreign Affairs spokesman, Alberts’ piece dealt with seven Canadians, including Arar, who were being held overseas because of “alleged links to terrorism.” Alberts then added the accusatory phrase, “Collectively, they are known as ‘Canada’s al- Qaeda.’ ” Who, apart from Alberts, had anointed the seven Canadians, including Arar, as “Canada’s al-Qaeda” is unclear from the story.

By the summer of 2003, Monia Mazigh’s campaign to get Chrétien to secure the release of her husband gathered momentum. According to Justice O’Connor, it was in this context that the first major and damaging leak concerning Arar occurred. The recipient of the leak was CanWest News correspondent Robert Fife, a former Canadian Press and Sun Media parliamentary reporter (now ctv News’s Ottawa bureau chief ), who quoted an anonymous official describing Arar as a ” ‘very bad guy’ who had apparently received military training at an al-Qaeda base.” Citing a New Yorker story by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, Fife also wrote that Syrian intelligence had helped US authorities thwart a terrorist attack against an American target in Ottawa. In his July 24 piece — which appeared on the Citizen’s front page and inside the Post — Fife added that it was unknown whether the “al-Qaeda conspiracy” was “related to the activities of two Ottawa men” now in Syrian jails. Arar was one of those men.

Fife’s rendering of Hersh’s story was telling in a number of respects. First, Fife seemed to have accepted the alleged plot as the truth despite the fact that Hersh devoted a solitary sentence of his lengthy piece to the scheme. Second, Arar’s nefarious-sounding activities were still a mystery. As it turned out, a year-and-a-half later, at an October 2005 intelligence conference in Montreal, Hersh conceded to reporters that the Ottawa plot story might not have been true.

Still, the question remains, why did Fife’s story appear when it did? According to Justice O’Connor, the purpose of the leak was to “influence public opinion against Mr. Arar at a time when his release from imprisonment in Syria was being sought by the Government of Canada, including the Prime Minister.” In other words, whoever was leaking falsehoods about Arar wanted him to remain trapped in a Syrian jail. Given rcmp Commissioner Zaccardelli’s September 28, 2006, admission that he knew Arar was innocent but chose to convey that exculpatory news only to the Americans, what other conclusion can be drawn? Zaccardelli’s admission revealed the dimensions of the cover-up that the rcmp had been engaged in since Arar’s deportation in September 2002. The rcmp, it appears, was content to sacrifice the freedom and safety of a Canadian citizen in order to protect itself from scrutiny and sanction.

On July 26, 2003, the Post published a letter from Monia Mazigh with the headline “Where’s the evidence? ” She denounced Fife’s use of “unnamed sources… [who were] making unsubstantiated claims” and suggested that his story was intended to justify Arar’s imprisonment and torture by labelling him a terrorist. Her effort to clear her husband was followed by a stream of leaks published and broadcast by major Canadian media outlets suggesting that Arar-the-terrorist deserved his fate.

That ugly refrain was compounded by opinion pieces and letters to the editor from government officials published in the National Post that lambasted the Chrétien government for working to free a Canadian citizen held incommunicado in a foreign jail without charge. “If Canadians require further evidence why our allies in the war against terrorism no longer trust us, they need look no further than the Maher Arar case,” wrote James Bissett, a retired diplomat and senior immigration official on July 31, 2003. “Despite . . . allegations that [Arar] is a terrorist, our government has gone to extraordinary lengths to demand Mr. Arar’s release and return to Canada.” That same day, the Post published a letter by former csis and rcmp officer Peter Marwitz, who found it “offensive that Prime Minister Jean Chrétien is tampering with security matters . . . regarding the accused al- Qaeda member, Maher Arar.”

In early August 2003, the Arar story took a particularly disturbing turn. The London-based Syrian Human Rights Committee reported that Arar was beaten severely and subjected to electric shocks. The report made the Globe and Citizen’s front pages, but it was consigned to page five in the Post.

The torture allegations triggered another wave of editorials imploring Ottawa to step up the pressure on Syria to release Arar. “Get tough with Syria” was the blunt headline of an August 8, 2003, Toronto Star editorial. But little changed. Indeed, Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham insisted that Canadian consular officials had met with Arar and that “he personally totally rejects all allegations of torture.” Graham also assured the public that the imprisoned Canadian would receive an open trial, even though Arar had not been charged. Graham’s nonsensical comments were greeted with skepticism by some reporters and by a posse of angry Liberal backbenchers who demanded to know more about the troubling case.

The Arar affair was beginning to shake official Ottawa. Late September 2003 marked the first anniversary of his deportation, and it offered media outlets an opportunity to resurrect his story. Monia Mazigh appeared again on ctv’s Canada AM. She implored Canadians to join her crusade to free her husband. On October 1, 2003, the Globe’s Paul Knox, a veteran correspondent who is now the chair of the Ryerson School of Journalism, took up Mazigh’s call in a column that bluntly stated, “A Canadian citizen was detained by a foreign power, delivered into the custody of a repressive dictatorship, and left to rot in jail without charge. He has been denied the most elementary rights. There are alarming reports of torture. The suspicion lingers that Canadian authorities were complicit in this travesty. Where is the loud, sustained, all-party, cross-country outrage? What has become of us? ”

Five days later, Arar was freed. He arrived home in Canada on October 6, 2003.