More on Maher Arar

I have posted about Maher Arar before. But recent development in Canada have drawn attention to his case. The New York Times reports:

Even if the government agreed with a Canadian citizen’s claims that American officials sent him to Syria in 2002 to be tortured, he should not be allowed to sue for damages because there was no Constitutional violation and Congress has not authorized such lawsuits, a Justice Department lawyer argued on Tuesday before a federal appeals court in Manhattan. The lawyer, Jonathan F. Cohn, added emphatically that the government did not agree with the claims made by the man, Maher Arar, who has been trying to sue for the deprivation of his rights. His case has come to symbolize the hotly debated government policy, known as extraordinary rendition, of moving terror suspects to countries that engage in torture.

Mr. Arar, who was detained in September 2002 as he changed planes at Kennedy International Airport on his way to Canada from a vacation in Tunisia, was later sent to Syria, where he spent a year in confinement and, he says, was tortured.

He was released in 2003, and Canadian officials later concluded that he had had no involvement with terrorism.

A suit filed by Mr. Arar was dismissed in 2006 by a federal judge in Brooklyn. That ruling was affirmed in June by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

But in a highly unusual step, the appeals court decided to rehear the matter, and on Tuesday 12 judges engaged in a spirited debate with Mr. Cohn and Mr. Arar’s lawyer — and with one another — over whether Mr. Arar could sue.