From Deportation to Apology: The Case of Maher Arar and the Canadian State
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2002, Maher Arar, a dual Canadian and Syrian citizen, was detained and accused by American authorities of being a member of al Qa’ida. He was deported to Jordan and, ultimately, Syria, where he was imprisoned and subjected to torture for one year. In 2007, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued an apology and 10.5 million dollars (Canadian) in compensation. Drawing on contemporary theoretical accounts of multiculturalism, security, and the state, and utilizing parliamentary debates and American and Canadian print media accounts between 2002 and 2007, we examine the statements of public officials in Canada and the United States to show how the story of Arar, from his deportation to the apology, has been framed in contradictory ways. These contradictions spin on three main dualisms: Arar’s guilt versus innocence; Arar’s status as a Syrian versus Canadian; and the rule of law versus exception. It is argued that these contradictions are of tremendous theoretical significance for understanding the contemporary Canadian state as one in which multiculturalism and liberalism co-exist with racialization and exception. En 2002, Maher Arar, un citoyen ayant la double nationalité canadienne et syrienne, fut détenu et accusé par les autorités états-uniennes de faire partie d’al Qa’ida. Il fut déporté en Jordanie, puis en Syrie, où il fut emprisonné et torturé pendant un an. En 2007, le Premier ministre Stephen Harper présenta des excuses officielles accompagnées d’une compensation de 10,5 millions de dollars. Dans cet article, à partir de théories contemporaines sur le multiculturalisme, la sécurité et l’État, et en référence aux débats parlementaires de même qu’aux média écrits entre 2002 et 2007, nous examinons comment les discours officiels publics se contredisent, aussi bien au Canada qu’aux États-Unis, et ce depuis la déportation d’Arar jusqu’aux excuses publiques qui lui ont été présentées. Ces contradictions découlent de trois formes de dualisme : d’abord, la culpabilité d’Arar par opposition à son innocence, ensuite son double statut de citoyen canadien, mais aussi syrien, et enfin, la règle de droit en concurrence avec la règle d’exception. Cet article montre que ces contradictions sont très importantes sur le plan théorique pour comprendre comment, dans l’État canadien contemporain, libéralisme et multiculturalisme coexistent avec un phénomène de ‘racialisation’ et de rejet de la différence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.122 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.016 | 0.020 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".