Maher Arar hopes report will clear his name

Maher Arar knows what he wants to see in afederal report that will be released on Monday afternooninto his arrest in the United States anddeportation to Syria, where he was tortured and held for a year.

"What is important to me is to be able to clear my name," Arar said.

Thepublic inquiryinto the engineer's detention, deportation and torture involved more than 120 days of testimony and cost$15 million by the time it concluded the main phase of its hearings last September.

Justice Dennis O'Connor, who led the inquiry, reviewed hundreds ofdocuments about the case.

O'Connor is expected to present his report to Parliament at 3 p.m. ET. Arar will be in Ottawa when the report is tabled.

Now a resident of Kamloops, B.C., Arar is trying to build a new life for himself and his family.

In September 2002, he was travelling back to Canada from a family vacation in Tunisia when he was pulled off a plane in New York. Within days, Arar was inSyria, where he says he was systematically tortured and brutalized for a year.

U.S. officials accused him of having links to al-Qaeda.

The report is expected to answer many questions, including whether the Canadian government was complicit in what happened to him.

Inquiry held many surprises

A number of surprising facts were uncovered during the inquiry.

Ward Elcock, the former head of the Canadian Intelligence Spy Agency, testified that sometimes Canada's spy agency uses information obtained through torture.

When asked if the spy agency would use evidence obtained under torture from organizations with which Canada has relationships, if the evidence was corroborated, Elcock said yes.

Franco Pillarella, Canada's former ambassador to Syria, stunned the inquiry and the diplomatic world when he denied knowledge of Syria's use of torture.Evidence showed Pilarellaappeared more eager to transmit Arar's false confessions to Canada, than to secure his release.

"Most witnesses did not use the word 'torture.' That was very painful for me. They've always used the word 'mistreatment,' " Arar said.

Reams of documents from the RCMP painted its national security investigators as inexperienced. Other evidence indicated some officials in the force attempted to discredit Arar in the media to discourage the government from holding an inquiry.

U.S. says the decision was theirs alone

The United States, which did not participate in the inquiry, claimed publicly that the decision to send Arar to Syria was made in Washington without Canada's approval.

But Arar pointed out that he was one of four Canadian men who were linked to an alleged terrorist plot, and all of them were imprisoned in Syria.

"Were we all sent there to be interrogated by methods that would be illegal to be used in the United States or Canada?" he said.

The report is expected to answer that question.