Maher Arar starts online magazine called Prism to discuss security, human rights issues

Maher Arar has launched an online magazine called Prism as a forum to discuss national security issues. According to a story carried by Canwest News Services, the "security practices monitor" made its first appearance last Wednesday.

The inaugural edition includes a feature article on security and human rights by Alex Neve, head of Amnesty International Canada's English branch, and a commentary by veteran Ottawa journalist Jeff Sallot on the failure of U.S. intelligence officials to detect the Christmas Day airline bomb plot.

Arar is, of course, the Canadian of Syrian birth who experienced a year of imprisonment and torture in a Syrian jail after "extreme rendition" by U.S. authorities in 2002, plucked from an inbound flight. He had been targetted after Canadian authorities designated him an Islamic extremist, a conclusion that a judicial inquiry found to be false. Arar later received an apology from the government of Canada and the RCMP after a $10.5 million settlement of a lawsuit.

He says that little or none of the money has gone into the new project, of which he is the publisher,  largely because it was relatively inexpensive to set up the site. 

"Setting up an online magazine is not as expensive as people think. It's actually more time-consuming than anything else," he said. "I could have done a professional (for-profit) magazine, I have the money, but there is something I didn't want to lose . . . my contributors are contributing because they believe in this . . . There will be no paid ads, either."

 The name of the magazine, perhaps not altogether coincidentally, is the same as the code name of an RCMP investigation into whether there should be charges against Canadian officials in the Arar case.
[Photo: Jean Levac, Canwest News Services]