Torture Case Casts Light on America's Most Secret Spy Agency

The U.S. government's Gulfstream jets are back in the news.

On Tuesday, following a two year inquiry, Canadian Justice Dennis O'Connor released an 822-page report detailing how Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian origin, was illegally rendered by American agents "to Syria against his wishes and in the face of statements that he would be tortured if sent there." The Americans flew the shackled Arar to Jordan on a Gulfstream III jet and drove him to Syria, where he was beaten until he confessed that he had trained at an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, where he'd never been. For 10 more months he was caged in a coffin-size cell before his wife's campaign to have him released succeeded. Justice O'Connor concluded that "categorically there is no evidence that Arar did anything wrong or was a security threat."

On Tuesday, Sept. 19, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales categorically denied U.S. responsibility in the affair. "We were not responsible for his removal to Syria," claimed Gonzales, who said he had not read the Canadian report. "I'm not aware that he was tortured." Arar's removal to Syria, Gonzales said, "was a deportation." But, "even if it were a rendition," Gonzales went on, the U.S. government works seeks to ensure "that they will not be tortured."

Gonzales' denial mirrors what President Bush and Secretary Rice have said on numerous occasions.

Nonetheless, Justice O'Connor's report, an Amnesty International investigation, Federal Aviation Adminstration flight records, the New York Times and many others agree that on October 8, at 9:40 a.m., a Gulfstream III jet with a tail number of N829MG took off from Teterboro, N.J. After a stop-off at Washington's Dulles Airport, it departed at 1:36 p.m. from Bangor, Maine, bound for Rome and then Jordan.

According to Justice O'Connor's report, Arar was blindfolded in Jordan and driven by American authorities to a secret Syrian intelligence service jail known as the "Palestine Section." "I was shut away underground, in a cell 6-foot by 3 called 'The Tomb,'" Arar told investigators. "It was full or rats and it was always dark...I was brutally beaten and tortured with iron chains and electric shocks."

The Gulfstream jet used to render Arar is of particular interest because its operator, according to a report in Britain's New Statesman two years ago by Stephen Grey, a British journalist who also writes for the Sunday Times of London and The New York Times, was "the US's Special Collection Service. It runs a fleet of luxury planes, as well as regular military transports, that has moved thousands of prisoners around the world since 11 September 2001."

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