Freedom vs. torture?

Washington Post: Maher Arar, a Canadian-Syrian dual citizen, was on his way to Montreal last fall on a flight path that took him through New York City. Unbeknownst to him, he had been placed on the terrorist watch list, and American immigration authorities detained him on his arrival in New York. After reportedly concluding that they lacked evidence to charge him with a crime, they decided to deport him. And faced with a choice between democratic Canada, where he would presumably remain free, and totalitarian Syria, which could be expected to lock him up and torture him, authorities chose the latter. As a consequence, Mr. Arar was locked up for 10 months until pressure from the Canadian government secured his release. Now, back in his adopted country, he alleges that he was savagely tortured during his months as an unwilling guest of Syrian President Bashar Assad. His case has long been a cause celebre in Canada, where many see in it evidence of American arrogance and disrespect for human rights and for Canada.
It's unAmerican
Deporting someone to a vicious police state knowing the fate that awaits him there is morally repugnant. America shouldn't be subcontracting torture. But saying that much is the easy part. The harder question is what should be done with a suspected Al-Qaida associate in such circumstances. Sending Mr. Arar to Canada, as a practical matter, meant setting him free, since there was little prospect of bringing charges there either. Authorities faced this choice: torture in Syria or freedom on the other side of the longest undefended border in the world.
If credible intelligence linked him to Al-Qaida, Mr. Arar could have been designated an enemy combatant and held at Guantanamo Bay. The trouble with this solution is that the legal process given alleged enemy combatants is so opaque and unfair. The military won't provide data on who is being held at Guantanamo or the standards used to keep people there. Were there some publicly understood process for handling these cases, so that sending a suspected enemy combatant to Guantanamo was not the same as dumping him into a legal black hole, authorities would have an option for people such as Mr. Arar other than torture in Syria and freedom in Canada.