* As posted on http://canoe.ca

Lawyers urge probe of CIA
By KATHLEEN HARRIS, OTTAWA BUREAU

OTTAWA -- American lawyers are demanding Congress investigate the CIA's
role in Maher Arar's arrest, deportation and torture in Syria.

Yesterday, the Centre for Constitutional Rights in New York sent letters to
the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives intelligence oversight
committees urging hearings into the Canadian's case. It also asked Attorney
General John Ashcroft to criminally probe whether U.S. officials were
complicit in Arar's torture.

"If it's true that the United States knew that Mr. Arar would be
tortured, the officials who knew that could be guilty of aiding and
abetting the torture, and therefore guilty of a violation of a criminal
law," said legal director Jeffrey Fogel.

Oversight committees must investigate CIA operations in light of recent
reports in which unnamed officials admit to the covert practice of
"extraordinary rendition," he said. In these cases, agents
contract rogue nations to extract information from low-level terrorist
suspects through torture.

Arar was arrested on suspicions of ties to terrorist network al-Qaida Sept.
26, 2002 during a stopover in New York. Despite his protests, he was
deported to his native Syria, where he was interrogated and tortured during
a 10-month incarceration.

Arar's case is the first one to help publicly unravel the disturbing,
secret practices employed in the name of counter-terrorism, Fogel said.
"This really goes to the soul of America," he said. "That's
how fundamental it is. It's not just a legal question."

Errol Mendes of the University of Ottawa's Human Rights Centre says Canada
will also be accountable if it's proven Canadian intelligence information
was shared with foreign agencies without assurance he wouldn't be harmed as
a result.

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