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Maher Arar is an innocent victim of inaccurate RCMP intelligence reports and deliberate smears by Canadian officials, a commission of inquiry says in a report that also recommends the federal government pay him compensation.

As The Globe's Jeff Sallot reports in today's front page article How Canada failed citizen Maher Arar Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was deported from the United States to Syria, where he was tortured as a terrorist suspect.

Mr. Arar has suffered "devastating" mental and economic consequences as a result of his ordeal, Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor says in the report released Monday.

"I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offence or that his activities constitute a threat to the security of Canada," the judge says.

How did this happen? Who's to blame? What will happen next?

Mr. Sallot was on-line earlier today to try to answer those questions. The questions and Mr. Sallot's answers are at the bottom of this page.

Mr. Sallot has been a correspondent with The Globe and Mail since 1974, based in Toronto, Edmonton, Moscow and twice in Ottawa.

He shared a Pulitzer Prize for news reporting about the shooting deaths of four students by National Guardsmen during anti-war protests at Kent State University in 1970 in Ohio.

He is a veteran of many Canadian federal and provincial elections but says the most memorable campaign he has covered was the Solidarity Movement's defeat of the Communist Party in Poland in 1989 in the first free elections in post-war Eastern Europe, a precursor to the end of the Cold War.

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Jim Sheppard, Executive Editor, globeandmail.com: Welcome back, Jeff. It's always good to have you on globeandmail.com. Your report in today's Globe was very comprehensive. The question that sticks in my mind is whether you found any surprises in this report? Or whether this basically stated officially what was well-known in advance?

Jeff Sallot: Hi, Jim, glad to be here. In terms of the facts of the Arar case, the report held few surprises. There is, however, a lot of rich detail in the report. And I hadn't expected Judge O'Connor to be as tough as he was on the leaks of information — and misinformation — about Mr. Arar to news media. Judge O'Connor said this was a deliberate attempt to smear Arar to head off the possibility of an investigation into how Mr. Arar got sent to Syria.

Moreover, senior officers at the RCMP concealed their activities in the investigation from the Privy Council Office, which is the central federal agency. This is a cautionary tale, I think, for cabinet ministers. Don't take what your bureaucrats say at face value. Ask the tough questions.

Les Caine, Brampton, Ont.: How is it possible for the United States government to send a Canadian citizen to certain torture in a Third World country and add insult to injury by not participating in the Canadian inquiry into this travesty of justice? How can Maher Arar expect justice if the real perpetrators are not accountable?

Jeff Sallot: Good point, Les. There is a hierarchy of responsibility here. Obviously, the Syrian torturers of Mr. Arar have the most to answer for. They are also the most likely to never be held to account. Civil law suits in Syria against the military don't go very far.

Next come the Americans, who are responsible for deporting Mr. Arar. He has launched a civil action in U.S. courts but it is being tied up with appeals and issues of national security, raised by the Bush administration. The wheels of justice grind slowly in the U.S. But he has the backing of an American constitutional law group and they will push the case as far as they can.

Then, of course, we have Canadian officials — notably RCMP officers — who first flagged Mr. Arar and his wife, Monia Mazigh, for U.S. officials as Islamic extremists and terrorist suspects. They did this without any evidence, Judge O'Connor says. His mandate was limited to examining conduct by Canadian officials. And he is strongly suggesting that the federal government owes the Arar family compensation of some sort. I suspect the Harper government will try to negotiate something.

Franklin Carter, Etobicoke, Ont.: Hello, Mr. Sallot. Do you think the release of Justice Dennis O'Connor's report will have any impact on Juliet O'Neill's case in Ottawa? I understand that Madam Justice Lynn Ratushny heard closing arguments in the O'Neill case several days ago.

Jeff Sallot: There will be many more rounds to go in the Julie O'Neill and Ottawa Citizen case and I am sure their lawyers will get the O'Connor report into the record.

The O'Connor report is strongly supportive of the argument that Ms. O'Neill, a journalist, is not the one the government should be going after. Instead, somebody should be trying to find out who deliberately leaked misinformation to smear Mr. Arar.

Now I've got to be careful here. Leaks are a way of life in Ottawa and reporters depend on them, especially in political reporting. I don't want anyone put a chill on sources — whistle blowers, for example — who have information that should be published in the public interest. But as journalists, we also have to ask tough questions of our sources, try to discern their motives, and weigh all of this in determining what we end up writing.

I had sources try to tell me that Mr. Arar was in fact a bad guy who had confessed to training in Afghanistan. I never reported these allegations at the time because I could not verify them, because I had my suspicions of their motives, and because Mr. Arar's wife so strongly denied he had ever seen the country. Scoops are no substitute for the truth.

Cryin Outloud: After watching and listening to much of the inquiry into this case, my thoughts were that the security services like the RCMP and CSIS have become rogue organizations answering to no one in Canada. It was if they were taking orders from the CIA and the FBI. Are the security agencies of the world becoming more and more of an entity unto themselves and do they feel they are above our governments or our laws? Do we need more of a citizens' watchdog agency to oversee these public servants or is our government just not doing its job — because it seemed to be uninformed of what our security agencies were doing in our names. And the other thing, Jeff, is when you interview our government and they say things like they have to protect Canadian "interests" with this classified information can you please ask them what are "Canadian interests" because I would really like to know what they consider those to be? Thanks.

Jeff Sallot: Effective oversight of police and intelligence services is a tough thing to pull off 100 per cent of the time, even in democracies where we have clear lines of responsibility leading to elected political officials at the top.

But this is not new. I covered stories about RCMP dirty trick operations against Quebec separatists three decades ago. The Church commission in the U.S. in the post-Watergate days discovered just how out of control spy and police agencies can be.

However, we have a particularly weak civilian oversight mechanism in regard to the RCMP. The Mounties can simply clam up. Everyone who has given it any thought recognizes this problem. Judge O'Connor will have a Part II to his report coming later this winter on how to fix this.

As for your other point, I would hope the politicians would say the Canadian interest is in knowing what our police are up to. The balance between public accountability and national security seems badly out of whack.

Dish Steve, Toronto: Justice O'Connor has clearly shown that the RCMP is a group that will try to justify any injustice and mislead our public leaders to protect themselves. How is it that a complete house-cleaning of all involved is not warranted and now justified? Is this government and the RCMP not going to eliminate these people from the police services and charge them under our laws for their inappropriate actions that lead to Mr. Arar's most egregious assault. I for one, who support our police services, would not want to be involved in any investigation by the RCMP because it seems clear that the top part of that organization is compliant with what happened to Mr. Arar. I don't think many Canadians will have faith in the RCMP if this or any future government doesn't act against those who perpetuated this injustice.

Jeff Sallot: The government has some very serious thinking to do about the future leadership of the RCMP. But as a political observer, I have to bet nothing will happen quickly. Fixing the RCMP is not one of the Big Five priorities for the Harper government.

Sandra Labelle, Gravenhurst, Ont.: Can it actually be true that the information in this report was available in 2003 and that the RCMP actually had us spend taxpayers' money for this lengthy report?

Jeff Sallot: Yes. But it had to go through the evidentiary tests of sworn testimony. I remember writing in 2002 that the Mounties passed along information to the Americans that led to Mr. Arar being put on the U.S. border watch list. I had that from "sources" who didn't want to be identified publicly as whistleblowers. Getting the story on the record and in sworn testimony takes it to another level in regards to the credibility of the source.

Gary Wilson, Calgary: What is being done by the current federal government? And what can be done to demand accountability from the RCMP? the United States? Our own government? The most infuriating aspect of this story is how predictable something like this was when that wave of fear, terrorism-hysteria and overreaction began sweeping across our continent.

Jeff Sallot: Mr. Harper will be in New York for UN meetings this week. He might have an opportunity to speak about the U.S. role and the practice of extraordinary rendition. But I'm guessing he won't. It's not one of the Big Five.

A. Aragorn, Toronto: Given the overreaction and the poor judgment of our government agencies, notably the RCMP whose image has been tarnished, do you think that the U.S. agencies have far too much influence on our own? Secondly, how do we protect Canadian citizens from these agencies behaving in the same manner as those of the U.S. or any other aggressive authority?

Jeff Sallot: We are always going to be the junior partners to the U.S. security, intelligence and police agencies. We get a lot of useful information and co-operation from them. However, you raise a valid point. Our spies and cops need to be responding to Canadian needs and priorities. And one of those priorities must be protecting our own citizens, something the RCMP failed to do when it passed along raw — and erroneous — intelligence to the Americans.

Sadly, there were policies and procedures in on the books to protect Canadian interests. But it all went overboard in the chaos and the climate of fear after the Sept. 11 attacks. Did our agencies overreact to take account of American fears of terrorism? Yes, probably in many cases they did. The Arar case was the most horrible example we know much about.

John Gilks: Jeff, do you really think ministers and officials in the PCO didn't know that Arar was tortured? The briefings look to me very much like well-arranged "plausible deniability."

Jeff Sallot: Certainly the ministers closest to issue, people like then-foreign affairs minister Bill Graham, had reason to fear that Mr. Arar might be tortured. What the Mounties sought to hide was the fact they asked the Americans to put him on the border watch list. When Mr. Arar was back in Canada and talking about his ordeal, the RCMP tried to head off a public inquiry. So they failed to tell even their political masters the full extent of their involvement.

Sometimes ministers say they don't want to know too much about police investigations. This is an easy out for politicians. But as this case showed, they should have been more diligent with their officials.

And I would like to think the fact that we in the news business were publishing information that the politicians were not getting from the bureaucracy was one of the things that eventually forced the then-Liberal government to finally ask the right questions. As a result, the Liberals set up the judicial inquiry.

Judah Nanneti, Toronto: There is no doubt that our government failed in providing false information which caused the Americans to send him to Syria where he suffered persecution. [But] why is not he suing the Syrian government here or in the U.S.?

Jeff Sallot: This is a good legal question and I have had international lawyers explain it to me a couple of times. It's called the principle of sovereign immunity. The bottom line seems to be that we allow foreign governments to escape the reach of our courts for reasons of diplomacy and reciprocity. We don't want the Syrians, for example, harassing our diplomats abroad with lawsuits. Thus our domestic laws require the federal government's okay before a private citizen can take a foreign regime to court.

Joseph Cheng, Toronto: Erroneous information appears to be synonymous with our Mounties these days . . . But somehow the Mounties keep saying they did their best. Will someone in our government have the guts to stand up and tell them their best simply isn't good enough anymore?

Jeff Sallot: Some opposition MPs will certainly say that. But the Liberals are in a bit of a tight spot. They were the government when Mr. Arar was deported. The Conservatives can easily say it was a management failure by the Liberals.

Doug Redhoffmen, Toronto: Will someone kindly point out how quick Mr. Day was in opposition to actually thank the Americans for finding this guy and sending him to Syria, all the while pointing out how "incompetent" the Liberal government was to not catch this "terrorist" themselves. Now, Mr. Day says the situation is entirely regrettable. Will someone hold him accountable for [his previous statements] finding an innocent man guilty and making public remarks that damaged Arar's reputation?

Jeff Sallot: Funny how things change after an election, eh? Mr. Day can say he was responding to open source information — news reports, mainly — and he did not have insider status at that time.

Ultimately, voters hold elected politicians responsible for what they say and do. And how the current government responds to the Arar report may be a factor in the minds of some voters when they come to deciding how they'll cast their ballots.

Jim Sheppard, Executive Editor, globeandmail.com: Jeff, thanks again for another information discussion with our readers. Any last thoughts?

Jeff Sallot: I've got to run now to get ready for Question Period. But I really appreciate the time and interest our readers at globeandmail.com have shown in this story. Keep reading.

Jim Sheppard, Executive Editor, globeandmail.com: To our readers: We're sorry, as usual, that we could not get to all the questions you submitted today in the time allotted. If you have a comment to make on this discussion or the O'Connor report, or the Arar case, please use the regular "comment" function to submit them to our editors.