Maher Arar was speaking at Carleton on a panel about Muslims in the media ( Photo: C.J. Roussakis )
A crowd of a hundred or so Carleton students and faculty are waiting in anticipation for the guest of honour to arrive.
Some doodle away in their notebooks, others chat quietly with their friends, but it seems everyone has one thing in common: a sense of great anticipation for the man who is about to walk into the room.
Maher Arar was on his way back from a family vacation in September 2002, when he was detained and questioned by U.S. guards at JFK airport in New York.
Soon after, he was deported to Syria, where he was beaten and tortured by Syrian investigators and interrogators. This went on for 10 months, all based on false accusations of supposed affiliations with al-Qaida.
The Canadian government did little to help Arar, an innocent Canadian citizen, and he says he was referred to as a terrorist in media stories several times.
The Canadian government was later reprimanded for not taking a more active role in bringing Arar back to Canada.
Today, he and several other speakers are at Carleton participating in a panel discussion regarding Muslims in the media, mediated by Jeff Sallot, a Carleton journalism professor who reported on Arar’s case for the Globe and Mail.
“Let me be very clear. Investigative, independent, responsible news media is perhaps our public’s best defense against corruption and abuses,” Arar says.
“However, the media is a powerful institution, especially if it has you fixed in its sights. It has the power of defending, but also the power of destroying.”
He says he believes his entire experience has shown him Canadian media are corrupt and too easily influenced by the government and other political factors.
“My personal experience in particular has shown me that there are serious problems with the practice of journalism in Canada, especially in the context of covering terrorism-related stories,” Arar said.
His coverage was highly dependent on anonymous sources, he says, who were considered legitimate at the time. It seems, however, that the press made many mistakes while covering Arar’s case, and printed various counts of false information by these sources.
“Many reporters have admitted to learning from what happened to me,” he says, “But others have unfortunately claimed publicly that they would do it the same way again.”
“I wonder why some continue to refuse to admit that there may have been errors made, that a broader discussion about sources is needed. I wonder if it is it a legal issue or an attempt to avoid liability? In my opinion this is not a legal issue, it is a moral, human issue,” he says.
The most important thing to Arar, he says, is that he sees change. He says he is adamant on preventing such a case from ever happening again, and says he is not looking for an apology.
“What I want to see is change, for journalists to discuss these issues and other ethical issues and find solutions that will reduce the chance of what happened to me in the press from happening again.”