I don't know how many American readers have even heard of Maher Arar, a Canadian software engineer who was detained by U.S. authorities at a layover in JFK, accused of al-Qaeda links and "rendered" to Syria where he was held for ten months and tortured into giving a false confession. The first link will send you to coverage of the case at Obsidian Wings, if you need to catch up.

The news this week is that Canadian security officials suspected that Arar would be extradited and tortured. (This discovery comes after the official inquiry into the Arar case found that "the RCMP wrongly labelled Arar a terrorist and passed the misleading information to U.S. authorities, where it led to Arar being linked to al-Qaeda and deported to Syria.") Here's more on the inquiry and its findings.