Now this at least is good news:
Maher Arar is still under suspicion at Canadian airports, having to wait for security clearances when his name is red-flagged by the computers.
Arar is especially unnerved because the last time he flew, from Ottawa to Edmonton he experienced the same sort of delay. And he spent the trip in the last row of the plane beside someone he strongly suspects was an undercover air marshal.
More good news: maybe there actually are undercover air marshalls on planes. Or is paranoid Arar racially stereotyping a crew cut white guy in a suit? We'll never know.
Arar, his wife Monia Mazigh and their two children, nine-year-old daughter Baraa and four-year-old son Houd, moved to scenic Kamloops in July after several years in Ottawa.
Mazigh, who holds a PhD in finance, accepted a teaching job at the city’s Thompson Rivers University. Arar, meanwhile, is working toward a doctorate in wireless engineering.
I've said for a long time that something in Arar's story smells fishy. Syria is a lousy place to visit and an even worse place to be a prisoner in, but they aren't Red China. They may treat you awfully bad in jail, but they do actually have a reason to put you there in the first place. Arar did something. I don't know what. The Americans know what. Maher Arar knows what. The Syrians almost certainly know what. It's up in the air if the RCMP knows what, and its almost certain nobody in the Canadian government (except perhaps Jack Layton) knows what he did. But he did do something. And now an extra clue: I didn't realize his wife has a Ph.D in finance. This could easily be connected to my old theory from before I had a blog, which was that Arar was involved in some sort of relatively simple money laundering trick to help terrorists (possibly al Quaida), which he'd goofed on big-time. However, the trick is fairly easy to catch as long as the volume of events is low, but if it became common knowledge would be a pain in the ass to catch them all. In other words, the U.S. would rather he go free than for every jackass on the globe to know how to secretly fund terrorism, and Arar knows this which is why he's free to be such a public antagonist about the whole thing -- as long as he doesn't tell what he knows, they'll leave him alone. His fianceer wife could be the lynchpin of this plan. That Arar has a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering may provide a clue or two as well. Needless to say, its setting off even more alarm bells for me.
Canada.com also has a handy timeline in the (public) events of the Arar case. One day I'm sure we'll be able to read that in June of 2002 Arar's wife funnelled money through a bank account somewhere, or that in April of 1999 Arar attended an al Quaida recruitment facility, or that his "acquaintance" Abdullah Almalki (who also ended up sent to a Syrian jailcell) in January 2003 tried to repeat Arar's crimes with similar results.
I've also noted that Arar looks a whole lot like that crazy Iranian president who also is a devout Muslim who hates America and is probably involved in terrorism.
