Life On the Watchlist | Explorer

The watch list, also known as the terrorist screening database, is used by U.S. intelligence agencies to nominate people as known or suspected terrorists. Over the past 15 years, the list has grown from a few thousand to more than 1 million names. But the most troubling fact is that leaked documents revealed that forty percent of the names on the list had no established ties to recognized terrorist organizations. So why are these people on the list?

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Mehar Arar is a Syrian-born Canadian citizen. He was stopped at JFK Airport in New York when returning from a family vacation in Tunisia in 2002. "I was traveling back from Tunis to Montreal. I had to transfer. The FBI integrated me for long hours. I was eventually taken to the Metropolitan Detention Center and accused of being a member of al-Qaeda. They refused to show me any evidence of that, and I kept asking for a lawyer to make a phone call. They would never allow me to do that."

"And then all of a sudden, in the middle of the night, they came in and took me to a private jet and they shipped me off to Jordan like a parcel. The U.S. government sent Mehar to Jordan, where he was then transported under duress to his birthplace of Syria and imprisoned for ten agonizing months, separated from his wife and children. Mehar was tortured, beaten, and kept in a 3 by 6 foot jail cell."

"I call it the coffin. Now if it's that white, exactly that white, and about 6 feet deep and about 7 feet high, it's underground, completely dark. There was just a little bit of an opening at the top. I'll be honest with you, that cell was more mental torture than physical torture, and I don't know how I survived that. It was awful. I had breakdowns in that place. I think I thought I was going to die. I thought I was just... that's it for me."

"I always say when I talk about your case, Mehar Arar was kidnapped at JFK Airport. Yes, I was literally kidnapped by state agents. I think they just used the law to go around the law. That's what it is."

A Canadian investigation determined Mehar was completely innocent and that the mistake was based on faulty intelligence. "In this country, I think we think of ourselves as this incredibly free society, but I think few Americans are aware of the fact that there's a secret justice system where you're not allowed to know the rules. You're not even allowed to know why you've been put on a terror watch list."