I don't think it's a matter of whether or not people made mistakes. We found no evidence that they were involved in his arrest or apprehension and deportation, that's for sure. We do know that, on the request of the Syrian intelligence officials, they did go to interview the Syrian officials. As I understand it, that was supported by not only DFAIT, but Justice O'Connor, who said they had reason to do that.
If you want to talk about whether their actions caused him to be detained longer, again, I don't think that's a conclusive thing in either Justice O'Connor's report or in any other investigation that we've done. So the question I have to get to is what you're saying specifically. Was there error of operation or did they make a contribution to it? There was nothing that we found in our report that was inconsistent with what Justice O'Connor has concluded. The question is where you are placing the blame.
I can tell you that they have made some changes as a result of a variety of things that we have investigated. Among them, in terms of what they do with information they get from countries that may be suspected of human rights violations and how they conduct themselves with respect to meetings with countries and agencies that are suspected of human rights violations, changes are already taking place to try to ensure that they're on top of these kinds of issues in future.
In terms of the actual issue of their ability to know whether the information obtained from him was by torture, I don't think we knew that until Stephen Toope did his report, nor do I think anybody else did. You had reports coming from DFAIT personnel who were in face-to-face contact. CSIS was never in face-to-face contact with Mr. Arar. Two parliamentarians, Ms. Catterall and Mr. Assadourian, went and saw him face to face, and they didn't come back reporting that they suspected that the information was obtained by torture.
So there was a great deal out there that made this a very difficult environment. Let's be fair about that. And on the other matters, we certainly had no indication from Justice O'Connor's report that it was inconsistent with our report and our investigation.