Echoing Arar

Tim Carlson gets fictionalized at the US border

According to Maher Arar’s account of events, he spent July 4, 2003, in a Syrian jail cell the size of a grave. He’d been there for seven months, without recourse, and would be held another four. During this nightmare year, he endured beatings with a cable, administered in an effort to determine whether or not he was an al Qaeda operative. As the details trickle out during the inquiry being held in his honour, a little chill is creeping through Ottawa’s security establishment. The recent reprimand from the UN committee against torture can’t be offering anyone much comfort.

When I first heard about the case, Arar’s story read more like paranoid fiction than a scenario a middle-aged white guy like myself could imagine falling into. Granted, my roots don’t reach back to the Middle East. But when I recalled a border hassle of my own that us Independence Day, I suddenly had a personalized lens through which to view the events, and to conclude that current North American anti-terrorism measures leave the doors wide open to abuse.

It was a trip I’d made a half dozen times without incident. I’d take the 6 p.m. Amtrak south from Vancouver and arrive in Bellingham before eight, where I would eat and drink too much with my sister and her family, have some laughs, and watch the Fourth of July fireworks. The next afternoon I’d bus back, since the sole train departing in the morning didn’t allow for a decent sleep-in.

So, as usual, I bought a one-way ticket at the station at about 5:30 p.m. and got in line to pass through us immigration. It was a fine summer day. There was no heightened state of alert; the colour code languished comfortably in the yellow zone. I was dressed in jeans, T-shirt and sandals; my hair was at least partially combed. A stout female official in her 40s called me forward. She seemed pleasant enough. I described my plans for the next 24 hours, and she asked what I did for a living.

“I’m a writer,” I said.

“Who do you work for?” she asked.

“I’m self-employed,” I said, explaining that just three weeks earlier I’d taken a buyout from The Vancouver Sun after eight years of service, and was pursuing freelance journalism and theatre work.

She wanted to know from whom I’d received cheques since going freelance.

“No one—it’s only been three weeks,” I said.

“So you’re unemployed,” she said.

She tapped my passport information into her computer.

“Have you ever been arrested?” she asked.

“No.”

“Have you ever been fingerprinted?”

“No.”

The stare-down she gave me must have been the textbook border-patrol look of incredulity. She slowly turned back to her computer screen. “Have you ever been charged with narcotics trafficking?”

“No.”

The glare increased. I refused to look away. Perhaps that was a mistake; if only I’d given a sign of submission—a weak glance at my feet, perhaps—the dynamic might have changed. On the other hand, I knew that looking away might be interpreted as an admission of guilt.

“Give me your wallet, please.”

I handed over my wallet—a well-worn, decade-old leather Levi’s promotional item only big enough to hold a driver’s license and a few credit cards. She held it up between her thumb and forefinger, wrinkled her nose, and asked: “This—is your wallet?

“Yes.”

The officer sitting behind her turned around. She whispered something to him and turned back to me.

“Have you ever been indicted on a firearm and/or crossbow offence?”

“No.”

“And you’ve never been arrested for trafficking?”

“No, I haven’t,” I said, with a chuckle of disbelief.

“You think that’s funny?” she snapped. The other officer turned and stared me down too.

“Well … yes,” I said, “Because it’s not true. I don’t have a record.”

She whispered something to the other officer, who shrugged and said, “Well, the burden of proof is on him.”

“Open your bag, please.”

I opened my backpack and she zeroed in on a palm-sized notebook half-filled with play scenarios, random lines of dialogue, library book call numbers, interview notes, and other scratchings of the kind common to the practice of a working writer. She flipped through it slowly.

“We get our information from the RCMP,” she said, handing back my notebook. “It says here that you were charged for narcotics trafficking.”

“My second name is Carl,” I said. “Surely that’s some other Timothy Carlson with the trafficking record.”

She said that the name matched. “I’m going to call the RCMP to confirm.” She walked over to another cubicle to place the call. When she noticed that I was observing her, she ordered me to step around the corner, out of view. It was 10 to six.

I wondered if the officer really was calling the RCMP. I looked around for a piece of glass in which she might be reflected. No luck. I did notice a surveillance camera pointed in my direction. Perhaps she was just watching a monitor to see if I fidgeted in some telling way. I pulled out the notebook and opened it at random, thinking its contents might have elevated her suspicions.

It didn’t look good. On the page were notes from an interview with Jonathan Barker, author of The No-Nonsense Guide to Terrorism. I could imagine the title sounding like a how-to book, when in fact it’s a historical primer about terrorism within the context of 9/11, which I was interested in as research for a play. Another note referred to “inverted totalitarianism,” a reference to an article in The Nation by Sheldon Wolin, who had theorized that US citizenry complacently accepts totalitarian acts by its government, unlike the enforced totalitarianism under Hitler—therefore “inverted,” but with increasingly similar effects. How was I going to explain this to the officer in a way that wouldn’t offend her sensibilities?

It was six o’clock. I stood alone in the foyer. My train was pulling away. The officer rounded the corner. I couldn’t help but notice that she was barely five feet tall; standing in her cubicle behind glass earlier, she’d been a few inches taller than my 5' 11". She handed me my passport.

“We are refusing you entry to the United States of America,” she said tonelessly. “According to our information, you have been charged with narcotics trafficking.”

“But that’s wrong,” I said firmly. “I’ve never been charged with anything. What can I do to fix this?”

She said that I would need a document from the RCMP confirming my lack of a record, which I should bring with me every time I tried to cross the border. “But even if you weren’t convicted of narcotics trafficking,” she added, “we would have refused you entry today because you have been unemployed for more than a month.”

“That’s not true,” I said calmly. “I quit only three weeks ago.”

“We would need to see pay records showing that you are earning an income.”

“Since when is regular employment a prerequisite?” I asked, thinking of students, artists and numerous other feast-or-famine freelancers whose income statements show irregular deposits.

“Employment—that is something we take very seriously,” she said, much like a trainee parroting a manual. “And it will be a long time, I’m afraid, before you’ll be able to be cleared for entry.”

She turned on her heel and marched back across the yellow line.

When the Arar story broke months later, I began viewing my train-station trial in a somewhat ominous light. I had, after all, temporarily lost my identity at the border, with no way to prove who I was. Arar, a 33-year-old computer engineer holding dual Canadian-Syrian citizenship, who had spent half of his life in Ottawa, had begun his ordeal similarly during a stopover at New York’s JFK airport. But while I was let go to prove my innocence, he was detained on “circumstantial evidence” of having terrorist links, and denied access to a lawyer. The US outsourced his interrogation to Syria—a practice called “rendition.” Syrian officials, who deny that Arar was tortured, eventually released him, unable to find a direct link to al Qaeda. The most damning piece of evidence connected with him was a 1997 apartment lease witnessed and signed by another Syrian-Canadian suspected of having terrorist links. The US State Department has refused to cooperate with the inquiry, citing national security concerns.

Arar’s story, and that of others trapped within the new rules of the US Patriot Act, may be exceptions within the wider fight against terrorism. They do, however point to faults in the system—faults that I understood more clearly after my visit to the Vancouver RCMP headquarters on Cambie Street to get my official visa clearance for future border crossings. When I got there, five officers nearing retirement age were enjoying an atmosphere of camaraderie, stealing each other’s pencils and chairs, trading back-slaps and witty repartée, and flirting with newly minted teachers who were getting criminal records checks rubber-stamped.

An officer took a good look at me and my passport picture, then went behind a glass partition to annoy a fellow officer until he logged off their shared computer. He whistled as he punched in data. He rolled his chair backwards until he could crane his neck around the doorway, and asked, “Do you live in Alberta?”

“No. But I was born there. I live in Vancouver.”

He rolled back to the keyboard and glanced back and forth from passport to screen. Then he rolled back to the doorway. “Were you ever arrested for narcotics trafficking?”

“No.”

“Offences for firearms and/or crossbow?”

“No.”

“You have a restraining order against you?”

“What?”

“A restraining order.”

“No.”

He rolled back to the computer—then promptly reversed, rolling right back.

“How tall are you?”

“5' 11". ”

He got up from the chair and lumbered over to look into my eyes. “Brown. Hm.”

He finally explained that there was, in fact, a Timothy Carl Carlson living in O—, Alberta, who had a trafficking conviction, had been served a restraining order, and had seen charges for firearms and/or crossbow offences. Well. This other Timothy Carlson was 6' 0", had blue eyes, and was born in the same year, in the same month, and even on close to the same day—and in Alberta, but not in Edmonton.

The RCMP officer stamped and signed a document confirming that I wasn’t the badass Timothy Carlson of O—, Alberta. I paid $24 for the privilege.

If that’s all it took to exonerate me, the border official had clearly not phoned the RCMP the day I was refused entry; my different eye colour, height and day of birth would easily have confirmed that I was another Tim Carlson. I later talked to an official familiar with us border protocols, who explained that officers assess travelers based on about 40 categories. If half of them are suspect, they have cause to turn you away—even if some of the categories are contradictory. A name takes care of three categories; month and year of birth add up to two more; the employment issue and a one-way ticket would have counted for a few more. Wouldn’t take long to add up to 20.

Technically, I understood that the immigration officer had what she needed to make a case—she was not expected to think, only to count. This new information, however, made me a bit paranoid. If I could be confused for another person in an unlikely scenario (I’m just not the kind of person to collect trafficking and firearms convictions or restraining orders), I could only imagine what might happen in a much more likely scenario (if I crossed paths with someone suspected of having terrorist links).

Let’s say I had been let across the border that day in a rented car and later stopped for a traffic violation. The cop in question might have accessed a database showing my particulars lining up with 20 of 40 categories describing a Timothy Carl Carlson in Vancouver, whose name was on a receipt for a cell phone sold to a member of the Arab community suspected of having terrorist links. Under the Patriot Act that would have been enough to land me in the clink until other evidence could be collected. There might even have been further so-called evidence: The RCMP may have once videotaped me talking to a Muslim at a university information display, or something like that. Vancouver is a cosmopolitan city; I also have friends and colleagues who are from Middle Eastern nations. Add to that the fact that I am an artistic director of a company with the eyebrow-raising name Western Theatre Conspiracy—its initials, WTC, could even stand for World Trade Centre. And then there’s my recent reading, documented in public-library requests and online purchases: investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh’s book Against All Enemies: Gulf War Syndrome and the War Between America’s Ailing Veterans and Their Government, and Anthony Swofford’s Gulf War memoir Jarhead, which contains unpatriotic blasphemies from a former Marine Corp sniper’s point of view.

Improbable, to be sure. But four years ago it would have been improbable to think that anyone could be held in detention in foreign countries, without access to a lawyer or due process in the courts, for being suspected of having links to a terrorist organization. If, at that time, someone had suggested that I would be confused with another Timothy Carlson, convicted of trafficking and firearms/crossbow offences, I might have laughed and declared the idea absurd.

It might seem equally absurd to be creating fictive scenarios with which to compare my situation to Arar’s. But in that train station I had become another character: I was fictionalized. It’s a problem when that can happen in a half hour. It’s a much larger problem when the fictionalized person cannot establish a link back to reality, to his true identity, through legal recourse when the stakes are much higher. One US justice official recently said, though not for attribution, “‘Arar’ is going to become shorthand for excess in the name of security—running roughshod over the rule of law.” And the problem isn’t exclusive to the US. Former CSIS director Reid Morden (now a special advisor to the Arar Commission) wrote in the CSIS journal Commentary that Canada’s Anti-terrorism Act—quickly passed soon after 9/11, like the Patriot Act—gives our government “virtually unreviewable” powers to label organizations and individuals terrorists.

I get my visa clearance updated every six months. Who knows what other Timothy Carl Carlsons have been up to? I need to be able to prove I’m the real me. However, I no longer carry my notebook when I cross the border, just in case the official has a problem with the real me.