CIA Kidnapped an Innocent Canadian Engineer at JFK Airport and Had Him Tortured in Syria for a Year

On September 26, 2002, Maher Arar, a 32-year-old Canadian software engineer, was detained at JFK Airport in New York while on a layover during a flight to Canada. What followed was a chain of events that exposed one of the most troubling intersections between Canadian and American intelligence operations: an innocent man would be kidnapped by the CIA and transported to Syria, where he would be tortured for nearly a year in a coffin-sized cell.

At the time of his detention, Arar was simply returning home. He had no criminal record and no connection to terrorism. Yet U.S. authorities pulled him from the airport and held him in custody, eventually placing him on a CIA plane bound for Syria—a country notorious for its use of torture. The stated reason: faulty intelligence suggesting he had links to al-Qaeda, information that had originated from the Canadian RCMP.

The U.S. government's position, when pressed, was characteristically opaque. Officials argued they were following standard procedures in a post-9/11 security environment. They claimed the decision to send Arar to Syria had been made by relevant agencies based on available intelligence. No apology was offered. No acknowledgment of wrongdoing was made. Instead, Arar remained on the U.S. no-fly list, effectively imprisoned by bureaucratic indifference.

What made this claim verifiable was the Canadian government's independent investigation. In 2006, the Arar Commission, led by Justice Dennis O'Connor, released its findings after a comprehensive review of classified documents and testimony. The commission's conclusion was unambiguous: Maher Arar was completely innocent. The intelligence the RCMP had shared with American authorities was not simply flawed—it was fundamentally wrong. No credible evidence connected Arar to terrorism. He had been rendered to Syria and tortured based on a mistake.