Poor Syria...

In Bush's performance before the UN General Assembly last week, he said to Syrians:

Today your rulers have allowed your country to become a crossroad for terrorism. In your midst, Hamas and Hezbollah are working to destabilize the region, and your government is turning your country into a tool of Iran.

And a tool of the US, which deported Maher Arar to Syria in 2002 on the basis, apparently, of no evidence at all. Scott Shane, New York Times:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 24 — When the United States sent Maher Arar to Syria, where he was tortured for months, the deportation order stated unequivocally that Mr. Arar, a Canadian software engineer, was a member of Al Qaeda. But a few days earlier, Canadian investigators had told the F.B.I. that they had not been able to link him to the terrorist group.

{ ... }

An Oct. 4 fax to the F.B.I. from Canadian counterterrorism officials said that they “had yet to complete either a detailed investigation of Mr. Arar or a link analysis on him,” and that “while he has had contact with many individuals of interest to this project we are unable to indicate links to Al Qaeda.”

That was particularly significant because the commission concludes that all, or virtually all, of the United States’ knowledge of any threat posed by Mr. Arar came from the Canadians.

The next day, on Saturday, Oct. 5, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police official spoke by phone with an unidentified F.B.I. official. “During this conversation, the F.B.I. official said that the Americans feared they did not have sufficient information to support charges against Mr. Arar,” the report says.

The Canadian officer said that likewise, “There was insufficient evidence to charge Mr. Arar in Canada.”

Canadian officials told the Americans that if they allowed Mr. Arar to travel home to Canada, he would be kept under surveillance. But by then the Americans were already secretly working on the Syrian option, a legal possibility because Mr. Arar retained his citizenship in Syria, where he was born.

“The American authorities appear to have intentionally kept Canadian officials in the dark about their plans to remove Mr. Arar to Syria,” the report says.

Despite the uncertain report from Canada on Mr. Arar and terrorism, on Oct. 7, an Immigration and Naturalization Service official ruled that evidence “clearly and unequivocally reflects that Mr. Arar is a member of a foreign terrorist organization, to wit, Al Qaeda.” At 4 a.m. the next day, Mr. Arar was bundled aboard a Gulfstream jet that flew him to Jordan, from which he was driven to a prison in neighboring Syria.