Canadian gov't apologizes to Arar

The Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, has issued a formal apology to Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen who was abducted by U.S. officials and sent to Syria and tortured. Harper also rebuked the American government for refusing lift its restrictions on Maher Arar, keeping him on its terrorist watch list in spite of the report of a Canadian judicial inquiry in September 2006 "concluding that Arar had no links to terrorist organizations or militants" and that the "RCMP had provided misleading information to the U.S. authorities, which may have been the reason he was sent to Syria". This is significant because Harper is viewed by a majority of Canadians as being too close to BushCo (a GWB wannabe). Video coverage here.

Glenn Greenwald weighs in on this as yet another example of a BushCo travesty of justice.

Compare that to what the Bush administration has done to Arar as he sought some small amount of justice for having been wrongfully abducted and tortured by our government for almost a year:

Two lawsuits challenging the government's practice of rendition, in which terror suspects are seized and delivered to detention centers overseas, were dismissed after the government raised the secrets privilege.

One plaintiff, Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian, was detained while changing planes in New York and was taken to Syria, where he has said he was held in a tiny cell and beaten with electrical cables. . . .

The United States never made public any evidence linking either man to terrorism, and both cases are widely viewed as mistakes. Arar's lawsuit was dismissed in February on separate but similar grounds from the secrets privilege, a decision he is appealing.