Time in Can. has different person on cover - not smirk

http://www.timecanada.com/story.adp?storyid=006&part=1&area=

Who is Maher Arar? We all know the basic contours of his story. In 2002, U.S. officials detained the Canadian software engineer at New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. They alleged that he was linked to al-Qaeda and secretly deported him to Syria, where he says he was tortured. When Arar was freed more than a year later and the public got a glimpse of him, he seemed to be a likable, hard-working family man caught up in a monstrous international screwup. Was there more? Simultaneously, officials, most of them anonymous, were leaking information and dropping hints suggesting that Arar was a security risk with something to hide.

Well, if Arar is a terrorist, he is unlike any other. In contrast to other suspects dispatched to harsh justice, Arar did not vanish into oblivion in his Middle East cell. Nor, after his release, did he recoil from public view. Instead, Arar, who has a modest home in Ottawa, has stepped into the spotlight as a vocal proponent of human rights in Canada, a symbol of how fear and injustice have permeated life in the West since 9/11. To this day, it has not been revealed why Arar was detained. And no one has pushed harder to shed light on his case than Arar. “I have nothing to hide,” he said in late 2003. “I want a public inquiry.”

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That life came to an abrupt end on Sept. 26, 2002, when Arar was pulled aside while passing through J.F.K. after a vacation in Tunisia, where most of his wife’s family lives. He was detained at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, where he says U.S. authorities questioned him for 10 days. Then, in the middle of the night, he was put into shackles and spirited away via Jordan to Syria, a country he hadn’t been to in 16 years— despite the fact that he was a naturalized Canadian citizen traveling on a Canadian passport en route to Canada.

Arar ended up in a dark, 1-m by 2-m cell he calls the “grave” in the Syrian military intelligence agency’s Palestine branch in Damascus. He was held there without charge for 10 months and 10 days. During his first two weeks, he claims, he was interrogated about people he had known in Canada, sometimes for 18 hours at a time, and tortured. One punishment, he says, was repeated lashings with a 5-cm black metal cable on his palms, wrists, lower back and hips. The mental ordeal was also brutal, he said in November 2003 at one of the most dramatic press conferences ever televised in Canada. “The second and third days were the worst,” he told the world that day. “I could hear other prisoners being tortured, and screaming.” During his first week in prison, he says, he falsely confessed that he had received military training in Afghanistan.
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there is way more to this story - the article is long what with all the complications



-america, the country that tortures-

newsmaker of the year? He died in , so why did they pick him for this year?

Were you misled by the paragraph that began, "That life came to an abrupt end in 2002..."? They were referring to the life he had been leading. It then changed drastically.

yes I DID! I tried to edit my post by calling myself a dummy but it didn't work. I always skim through articles.

Excerpt:

For taking on the national-security agencies in two countries and for stepping courageously into the public realm despite the cost to himself and his family, Maher Arar is Time’s Canadian Newsmaker of the Year.

As for Maher Arar, we see him often on TV....There is an inquiry going on at the present time regarding his ordeal....By the way Arar's wife ran as a member of parliament candidate for the NDP party in the last election...Sorry to say I don't know how she made out...
P.S....Arar is obviously a good, decent person and has a lot of support here.

I guess they figure they can make more catering to every different region.

... Mazigh, who ran unsuccessfully for the New Democratic Party in the 2004 federal election, says she supports his decision, but it has been a rough period. Going public, she says, led to “total confusion about our feelings, about our relations, about our new life.” Her husband, she says, is “absolutely a different person” from the one she met and married a decade ago. Others close to Arar describe him as distraught, stressed out. Mazigh works full-time at n.d.p. headquarters in Ottawa...