Former foreign affairs minister Bill Graham appears before the Arar inquiry in Ottawa on Monday
By SCOTT DEVEAU
Monday, May 30, 2005 Updated at 2:18 PM EDT
Globe and Mail Update
<snip> The real frustration I had, I guess, with (U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell) and the ambassador (Paul Cellucci),” Mr. Graham testified Monday, “was that they consistently asserted that somebody in Canada had given them the go-ahead, if you like, to deport Mr. Arar.”
He maintained that he did not know initially the whereabouts of Mr. Arar and was not able to obtain specific information from U.S. officials. <snip>
“So my frustration was very much around that: Why couldn't we get to the bottom of absolutely whether anybody here had anything to do with it?” Mr. Graham said. “If (Mr. Powell) had given me a name, we could have quickly tracked it down and said to the person look, ‘Did you or didn't you?' We could have found out. We never got a name. We never got a lead in Canada of anybody we could go to. That was the frustrating aspect.” <snip>
“My position was if he's guilty of something in Canada, we're perfectly able to prosecute him in our country according to our laws,” Mr. Graham said. <snip>
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