Updated: US Peace Activist, Retired Col. Ann Wright, Detained at Ottawa Airport
OTTAWA - A former diplomat and retired US army colonel said she was detained at Ottawa airport Thursday while en route to anti-war talks and a news conference with Canadian MPs blasting wrongful detentions.1025 08 1Retired US Army Colonel Ann Wright, was scheduled to speak to media at 1 p.m. local time (1700 GMT) alongside five opposition MPs, outside parliament.
Later, she was to join the wife of Maher Arar, a Canadian who was wrongfully detained as a terror suspect and tortured, and the head of the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group for a panel discussion on civil liberties breaches tied to post-9/11 security.
“I’ve been detained and I’ve been banned from Canada for one year,” Wright told AFP. “Now, they’re sending me back to the United States on a 5 p.m. flight” because of a half-dozen US misdemeanor charges stemming from anti-war protests in Washington.
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“I find it unbelievable that because I have misdemeanors in the US, Canada has banned me, even after I’ve been invited here by five members of Parliament,” she said.
“Hopefully, I won’t get sent to Syria (like Maher Arar),” she quipped.
Maher Arar, a Syrian-born software engineer, was detained by US authorities in New York in 2002 while in transit from Tunisia to his home in Canada, and then deported to Syria where he was jailed and tortured for almost one year.
A Canadian judicial report in September 2006 cleared Arar of terror ties and blasted federal police for wrongly labeling him an “Islamic extremist.” The botched case eventually cost Canada’s top policeman his job.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/25/4814/