Has he heard about
Maher Arar?
TORONTO, Nov. 4 -- A Canadian citizen who was detained last year at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York as a suspected terrorist said Tuesday he was secretly deported to Syria and endured 10 months of torture in a Syrian prison.
Maher Arar, 33, who was released last month, said at a news conference in Ottawa that he pleaded with U.S. authorities to let him continue on to Canada, where he has lived for 15 years and has a family. But instead, he was flown under U.S. guard to Jordan and handed over to Syria, where he was born. Arar denied any connection to terrorism and said he would fight to clear his name.
U.S. officials said Tuesday that Arar was deported because he had been put on a terrorist watch list after information from "multiple international intelligence agencies" linked him to terrorist groups.
...
Arar said U.S. officials apparently based the terrorism accusation on his connection to Abdullah Almalki, another Syrian-born Canadian. Almalki is being detained by Syrian authorities, although no charges against him have been reported. Arar said he knew Almalki only casually before his detention but encountered him at the Syrian prison where both were tortured.
This guy was just on his way home from Tunisia. He had to take a connecting flight from NY to Montreal. Somebody had put his name on a watch list and the next thing he knows, he's being tortured in a Syrian prison. BECAUSE HIS NAME WAS ON A LIST.
This can happen to anybody of Middle Eastern descent. If your name happens to look like that of a terrorist or maybe you have met the acquaintance of somebody else who is on a watch list, you could find yourself in all kinds of trouble for no reason other than that you might share the same ethnicity as a terrorist.