Is Canada complicit in torture? That is the subject of the public inquiry that began Monday into the ordeal of Maher Arar of Ottawa. It is a question that Canadians never imagined would be seriously put to them. This is a civilized land. Its highest law is a constitution that protects individual rights. It is a signatory to international conventions barring torture.

Yet Mr. Arar has borne witness to a realm that few Canadians are aware of. He was made to disappear from the world of law and individual rights, and to reappear in the world of barbarism, without ever being given a chance to plead his case before a judge. The United States arrested Mr. Arar at a New York airport in September, 2002, and deported him in the middle of the night to Syria, where he was tortured into signing a confession. Details of that confession were later leaked by Canadian security officials to the media.

It was no surprise, then, that Canada's former chief spy, appearing as the inquiry's first witness, acknowledged that this country does indeed share information with countries that use torture. As Ward Elcock, who recently completed 10 years at the helm of CSIS, the civilian spy agency, explained, he was obliged to check out any tips about threats to Canada, whether received directly from countries that use torture or from intermediaries.

This may be true enough. The question, though, is what the civilized world should do to avoid the temptation of relying on torture to achieve its ends. In the global war on terror, is Syria's use of torture simply another weapon in the democratic world's arsenal? The U.S., it appears, could not resist drawing on that weapon. Canada, too?

Did Canadian security officials give the U.S. permission, tacit or explicit, to deal with Mr. Arar as they wished? Paul Cellucci, the U.S. Ambassador to Canada, has said this was the case. If he was wrong, why was there a whispering campaign about the supposed terrorist involvement of Mr. Arar? And was Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper, in a CBC-TV show and a subsequent clarification this week, suggesting that security officials had advised him to keep his mouth shut while Mr. Arar was in Syria because Mr. Arar was in their view a serious safety threat?

As if to underline why an inquiry was needed to answer these questions, the Security Intelligence Review Committee, a civilian agency that oversees CSIS, released a report about CSIS's role in the Arar affair with all 89 pages blacked out. Only the inquiry commissioner, Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor of Ontario, and Public Safety Minister Anne McLellan, will have a chance to view the uncensored document.

Meanwhile, Mr. Elcock could not bring himself to admit that Syria uses torture. All he would say is that the unequivocal reports of Syrian torture from the U.S. State Department and Amnesty International are "relatively credible" documents. It is unclear whether he felt compromised by Canada's security relationship with Syria, whatever that might be.

Mr. Arar's nightmare was an early signal of the U.S. strategy in fighting terrorists: create a realm beyond the law in which to take suspects out of commission while at the same time extracting the maximum information.

The degradation that he described so eloquently in a news conference last November, shortly after his return to Canada, is a reminder of why the democratic world insists on the rule of law, even in dangerous times. To this date, no charges have ever been laid against him in a court of law. The 34-year-old is living with his wife and two young children as a free man in Ottawa.

Maher Arar has emerged as a spokesman for the individual at a time when even democratic states may be prepared to justify the most drastic means possible to achieve their legitimate ends. Judge O'Connor will have to determine whether Canada's security officials share responsibility for the torture of this Canadian citizen.