U.S. appeals court to conduct rare review of Arar torture lawsuit

A three-member panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a challenge from Arar last June.

But a slate of more than a dozen judges on the appeal court has now issued what Arar's American lawyers call an extremely rare decision to take a second look at the case, without prompting from the parties involved.

Arar was heartened by the news, said lawyer Maria LaHood of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a non-profit legal organization based in New York that has taken on his case.

"He's really pleased. He thought it was good news - I think he's hopeful," LaHood said Thursday.

"It's another chance for us to argue why the U.S. officials should be held liable for sending Maher to Syria to be tortured. And I think it's a great sign that the court decided to rehear the case on their own."

A court notice says arguments are to be filed this fall in advance of a Dec. 9 hearing in New York.

It's the latest chapter in Arar's longstanding effort to hold Washington to account for his year-long ordeal at the hands of Syrian captors who assisted western allies in the frantic post-9-11 bid to stamp out supposed terror plots.

Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian, was detained at New York's JFK Airport in September 2002 and later whisked out of the country as a terrorism suspect, winding up in a grim Damascus prison cell.

Under torture, he gave false confessions to Syrian military intelligence about alleged ties to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network.

A Canadian inquiry concluded that faulty information passed to the United States by the RCMP likely led to Arar's nightmare. Last year he received an apology and $10.5 million in compensation from Ottawa.

The federal government also promised to act on a raft of recommendations from the inquiry about information-sharing with allies and the consular handling of cases of Canadians held abroad in security-related matters.

A majority of the three-member U.S. appeals panel upheld a lower-court decision to dismiss Arar's suit, filed in January 2004, on grounds that hearing the arguments would interfere with sensitive foreign policy and national security issues.

The 2-1 ruling also rejected Arar's claims that American officials blocked his access to counsel, saying that Arar - a foreigner who had not been formally admitted to the U.S. - had no constitutional right to his own lawyer.

"That was the opinion of two judges," LaHood said Thursday. "We had one judge who strongly disagreed with that opinion, and thought that the officials should be held accountable for what they did to Maher, or at the very least that the case should proceed past this point."

U.S. officials say they don't intentionally transfer anyone to face torture and have denied wrongdoing in Arar's case. Washington has not apologized and maintains his name on a security watch list.

"It seems perfectly reasonable to me for a country to reserve the right to decide who enters," U.S. Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff said in an April interview. "It's like you have a right to decide who enters your house."

Two months later, Homeland Security's inspector general said he was reopening a probe of the case after receiving new classified information that contradicted one of his office's earlier conclusions.

The watchdog had cleared U.S. immigration officials in a secret report, large portions of which remain under wraps.

The report also said the U.S. government had sought assurances from Syria that Arar wouldn't be tortured, but the assurances were "ambiguous" and not thoroughly checked.

Last October, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice admitted American officials mishandled the Arar file, but limited that assessment to the lack of communication with Canada before he was deported.