Maher Arar launches new online magazine

Maher Arar--the Canadian citizen of Syrian origin who was once extraordinarily renditioned by the United States with Canadian complicity, jailed and tortured for 10 months in Syria, and then fully exonerated by a Canadian judicial inquiry which found that the RCMP not only was complicit in misidentifiying him as an al-Qaida-linked terrorist but also engaged in a conspiracy with Canadian intelligence officials to cover up some of the truth of how Arar was sent to be tortured in a foreign land--has started his own online magazine.

PRISM Magazine is a new not-for-profit venture that Arar has developed for a general Canadian audience, focusing on issues of National Security, Human Rights and International Law.*

Among the features in the launch issue of the online publication:

• A two-part series by David Cole, "Getting Away with Torture";
• An op-ed, "Death with Dignity," about the loss of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan;
• A feature called "Hey Washington, Ever Hear of Google," which pretty much slams American intelligence officials as less savvy than a thirteen-year-old with a broadband connection.

According to an article in Global Winnipeg, Arar chose the name PRISM because it "is something that takes one type of light and defuses into many lights, emphasizing the analyses. Prism means transparency, too. That's the kind of impression we want to portray."

Coincidentally, "Project Prism" is the code-name of a recently revealed and continuing RCMP investigation, started in 2006, into whether charges against Canadian officials were warranted in the Arar case. One official reportedly questioned was retired Canadian diplomat Gar Pardy, one of PRISM's new regular contributors.

[Tip o' the hat to Canadian Magazines blog]

* - Arar's PRISM is not to be confused with another similarly titled publication, Prism International magazine, the fifty-year-old quarterly literary magazine published by the University of British Columbia.)