In a letter dated Nov. 10, the Center for Constitutional Rights asked members of both the House of Representatives committee on intelligence and its Senate counterpart to review Mr. Arar's case. The centre also urged Mr. Ashcroft to begin a criminal investigation.
The Washington Post reported last week that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has a covert program known as "extraordinary rendition" in which it turns over people suspected of terrorist links to foreign intelligence services to be tortured for information.
Mr. Arar was born in Syria but is a Canadian citizen. He was detained at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport last fall while returning home to Montreal from Tunisia. U.S. authorities accused him of having ties to al-Qaeda and deported him to Jordan, and then Syria, where he was held for 10 months and where, he says, he was routinely tortured.
"There is good reason to believe that the United States knew and wanted Arar tortured to obtain information," the centre's legal director, Jeffrey Fogel, said in his letter.
"There is also no basis for the belief that Mr. Arar has any connection to terrorism."
The Center for Constitutional Rights, which is also defending prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who are being held without trial, said the officials who deported Mr. Arar not only violated international conventions but also U.S. law.
"This practice of rendering cannot and must not be allowed to continue," Mr. Fogel said in his letter to Congressman Porter Goss, chair of the House permanent select committee on intelligence. "It is against every value this country is supposed to embody."
Opposition MPs have demanded an inquiry into what role Canada played in providing the Federal Bureau of Investigation with information on Mr. Arar and in the deportation. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien has rebuffed those calls, saying the decision to deport Mr. Arar was taken by U.S. officials alone.
This week, Solicitor-General Wayne Easter announced plans to review intelligence-sharing agreements between Canada and the United States to ensure human rights are protected.
U.S. congressional offices and the Justice Department were closed yesterday for Veterans Day.
Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota said he believes the case deserves consideration and for Congress "to determine what the facts are and what response, if any, ought to be achieved on the part of our country as we look at these circumstances," Reuters news agency reported.
Senator Trent Lott, a Republican member of the Senate intelligence oversight committee, provided little hope that this body would take up Mr. Arar's case. "We don't have time to do it," Mr. Lott told Free Speech Radio, an independent Washington-based news bureau. "We've got more to do than we can possibly get around to."
