We do. From our 2003 entry:
Maher Arar is a Syrian-born Canadian. Returning to Canada from vacation in Tunis last September, he flew from there to Zurich to New York, intending to continue on to Montreal. US officials detained him in New York, refused his requests for an attorney, would not tell him what charges or allegations resulted in his arrest, and eventually deported him — to SYRIA, where they knew he would be tortured or killed. He was held for over a year in total — ten months in Syria — before finally being released on October 5, thanks to the efforts of his wife and Canadian authorities.
A Canadian government commission officially exonerated Arar today, 3 years later. He was arrested and sent to Syria to be tortured with no due process, no trial, no jury, no judge, no charge, no nothing. He was essentially abducted and sent to Syria by our government despite the fact that he’s not a US citizen, does not live here, and did nothing wrong. The Canadians gave the U.S. people bad intel, and based on this intel people acting in our name had him tortured. He had no chance to avoid it.
From the NYT story:
Mr. Arar, speaking at a news conference, praised the findings. “Today Justice O’Connor has cleared my name and restored my reputation,” he said. “I call on the government of Canada to accept the findings of this report and hold these people responsible.”
His lawyer, Marlys Edwardh, said the report affirmed that Mr. Arar, who has been unemployed since his return to Canada, was deported and tortured because of “a breathtakingly incompetent investigation.”
[…]
However, the commission found that the designation [on a “terrorist lookout list”] should have only been applied to people who are members or associates of terrorist networks. Neither the police nor customs had any such evidence of that concerning Mr. Arar or his wife, an economist.
[…]
Evidence presented to the commission, said Paul J. J. Cavalluzzo, its lead counsel, showed that the F.B.I. continued to keep its Canadian counterparts in the dark even while an American jet was carrying Mr. Arar to Jordan. The panel found that American officials “believed — quite correctly — that, if informed, the Canadians would have serious concerns about the plan to remove Mr. Arar to Syria.”
Mr. Arar arrived in Syria on Oct. 9, 2002, and was imprisoned there until Oct. 5, 2003. [Dates differ based on presumably more up-to-date info – Ed.] It took Canadian officials, however, until Oct. 21 to locate him in Syria. The commission concludes that Syrian officials at first denied knowing Mr. Arar’s whereabouts to hide the fact that he was being tortured. It says that, among other things, he was beaten with a shredded electrical cable until he was disoriented.
American officials have not discussed the case publicly. But in an interview last year, a former official said on condition of anonymity that the decision to send Mr. Arar to Syria had been based chiefly on the desire to get more information about him and the threat he might pose. The official said Canada did not intend to hold him if he returned home.
This is why it’s not about “torturing terrorists” or “imprisoning bad guys” — it’s about preserving due process. It’s about making sure that innocent people aren’t imprisoned, and it’s about continuing to the the U.S.A., and not becoming a tin-pot dictatorship in the name of preserving the freedoms we’ve denies people like Arar.