Thank you, Chair.
Mr. Zaccardelli, today you said that on October 5 and October 7, 2002, respectively, RCMP staff advised the FBI that the RCMP could not link Mr. Arar to al-Qaeda.
On October 11, you were formally briefed that Mr. Arar had been removed to Syria by U.S. authorities, that the RCMP had shared investigative material with them, and that Mr. Arar was considered a person of interest.
Surely the fact that the U.S. deported him to Syria would have suggested that they certainly considered him to be more than a person of interest. It would have behooved you or somebody in the RCMP to have taken action at that time, either on your own authority or in coordination with government authorities, to try to protect the rights of a Canadian citizen or to intervene on behalf of a Canadian citizen. Would that not have twigged him as someone who was more than a person of interest in somebody's mind?