OTTAWA - In 2002, when the United States government seized Maher Arar as he changed planes in New York and took him to Syria, the reason was starkly stated in a Justice Department document: he was a member of Al Qaeda.
But no evidence of that has been made public in a judicial inquiry here into why Mr. Arar, a Canadian who was born in Syria, was sent to his native country, where he says he was beaten with a metal cable and held for 10 months in a tiny cell. Instead, it increasingly appears that Mr. Arar was singled out because his ties to other Muslims under suspicion in Ottawa were misinterpreted by jittery Canadian and American security officers.
American officials said in recent interviews that the decision to deport Mr. Arar to Syria was made by the Justice Department after consultation with the F.B.I., the C.I.A. and the National Security Council, and was based on secret information from Canadian security agencies. But a Canadian official who reviewed that information and other evidence said nothing persuasively connected Mr. Arar to any terrorist group.
The case of Mr. Arar, a 34-year-old telecommunications engineer and a married father of two, has become a central example for human rights advocates who accuse the Bush administration of betraying American values by outsourcing interrogation to countries notorious for torture. In intensive Canadian media coverage, Mr. Arar has been depicted as a compelling symbol of the excesses in the campaign against terrorism.
Unable to find work as an engineer, he spends his days listening to Canadian officials testify before the Arar Commission. "I need to know: Why was I sent to Syria?" Mr. Arar asked in a recent interview here. "Was I sent by the Canadians and Americans so they could get information out of me using methods that would be prohibited here?"
The Bush administration has refused to cooperate with the Canadian inquiry and invoked a rare "state secrets privilege" defense against a lawsuit filed in New York by Mr. Arar. But two current administration officials and one former official said the still-classified Canadian information seemed sufficient to justify putting his name on an American terrorist watch list. When he landed in New York, American officials were still under fire for failing to "connect the dots" before the September 2001 terrorist attacks. They decided it would be irresponsible to let him go home to Canada.
"We wanted more information," said the former official, who sat in on discussions of Mr. Arar's fate in 2002. "The one way we wouldn't get it is if we let him go."
With insufficient evidence to hold Mr. Arar, one way to have him interrogated was to deport him to Syria, which he had left at 17. "It's easy to say now, 'You sent him to be tortured,' " said the former official, who, like other people interviewed, spoke on condition of anonymity because the matter involves classified material and is in litigation. "This was a pragmatic decision. People's lives were at stake."
Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, who has denounced the United States government's conduct in the Arar case, says he finds that unpersuasive. "To me this case is more than an embarrassment," Mr. Markey said in an interview. "The reason the U.S. sent Mr. Arar to Syria and not Canada is that Syria tortures people and Canada doesn't."
The case shows the difficulties of identifying potential terrorists and the risks of relying on information extracted from harsh interrogations. It also illustrates the shift in focus by the public and the media since 2002.
When Mr. Arar was detained at Kennedy Airport on Sept. 26, 2002, anxiety was high that there could be a repeat of the 2001 attacks.
Today, after a year of revelations about prisoner abuse in Iraq and elsewhere - and no new attacks on American soil - the media's attention is on excesses in the battle against terrorism.
Advocates have challenged the C.I.A.'s seizure of terrorism suspects abroad - intelligence officials estimate the number to be 100 to 150 people - and their forced transfer to detention in other countries, including some that practice torture, in a pattern that resembles Mr. Arar's case.
Mr. Arar, who before his detention worked for a Boston company and often traveled between Canada and the United States, said his experience had shaken his faith in the legal system. "If there are suspicions about people, you don't send them to be tortured based on hearsay," he said. "This is why the U.S. and Canada and the Western democracies are different from the rest of the world."
He said he was appalled by the Sept. 11 attacks and never had any ties to terrorists. He said Islam prohibited violence against innocents. "I have nothing to hide," he said.
[Last Tuesday, Mr. Arar demanded that Canadian officials make public major documents in his case.]
In 2002, Mr. Arar was put on an American watch list, the National Automated Immigration Lookout System, as "a member of a known terrorist organization," Al Qaeda. American and Canadian officials said the placement was based on his connections to others among Ottawa's 40,000 Muslims.
Riad Saloojee, executive director of the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations, said many of Ottawa's Muslims knew one another because they attended the city's one central mosque or went to the same social events. "You've seen them at a picnic, or an Islamic lecture, or a sporting event," he said. "It's not a particularly long chain."
At one end of this chain are a few people proved to have terrorist links. Mr. Saloojee, for instance, said he was once introduced at Ottawa's airport to Ahmed Said Khadr, a Canadian and senior Qaeda leader who was killed in a 2003 gunfight with Pakistani forces. Had security officers seen them meet, perhaps he would have come under suspicion, Mr. Saloojee said. "If that's the standard, then there's always going to be six degrees of separation between you and a terrorist," he said.
Mr. Arar said he was "less than a casual acquaintance" of one person under official scrutiny: Ahmad El-Maati, whom he had met briefly while having his car fixed at an Ottawa garage. Mr. El-Maati's brother, Amer El-Maati, is a wanted Qaeda member. Last year, John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, described Amer El-Maati as a pilot who had discussed crashing a hijacked plane into an American building.
Ahmad El-Maati, a Kuwaiti immigrated to Canada in 1981, was detained while in Syria in November 2001. According to an affidavit he filed with the Arar Commission last year, he was tortured, falsely confessed to a nonexistent plot to blow up the Canadian Parliament and named Mr. Arar as an acquaintance.
Mr. Arar had already been spotted by a Canadian surveillance team while walking in the rain in 2001 with another Ottawa man, Abdullah Almalki, who was later detained in Syria and subjected to gruesome treatment. Far from plotting terrorism, Mr. Arar said, he had been asking Mr. Almalki to introduce him to a friendly salesman for a discount on ink cartridges. (Mr. Almalki and Mr. El-Maati are both free in Canada and face no charges, their lawyers say.)
Mr. Arar got the discount, but he also got on the watch list. When his name popped up at J.F.K. - he had taken a circuitous route home from Tunisia to use frequent-flier miles - he was held for 13 days while American agencies considered his fate.
Before taking Mr. Arar to Jordan on a chartered jet and delivering him to Syrian agents, the United States received assurances from Syria that Mr. Arar would not be tortured, Mr. Ashcroft said later. Mr. Arar, along with several rights groups, questions why American officials would accept such assurances from a government it has denounced annually for the most extreme abuses.
Syria freed Mr. Arar in October 2003. An American diplomat said his Syrian counterpart told him that an investigation found "nothing there."
