Two years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, momentum is building for a public inquiry into the work of our security and intelligence agencies. It took the case of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen detained by U.S. authorities and deported to Syria, where he languished in jail for nearly 12 months under suspicion of having links to al-Qaeda, to finally bring us to this point.

Mr. Arar was unexpectedly released from the Syrian grip this week. Ottawa would like us to believe it was a triumph of Canadian "quiet diplomacy." Perhaps it was. Solicitor-General Wayne Easter has already taken a stand in opposition to any public inquiry into the origins of the Arar case.

Mr. Easter is premature. The proponents of a public inquiry are, meanwhile, tilting at various windmills. Conspiratorial Mounties sneaking files across the border, jack-booted U.S. security officials, an insensitive Bush administration, and rogue CIA elements playing interrogation games in hidden facilities in Jordan are all worthy of our lance. While we chase these apparitions, an opportunity to do some justice to Mr. Arar may slip from our hands. Equally important, the chance of learning vital lessons from the Arar case may be missed.

There are many questions that need to be answered about the detention and treatment of Mr. Arar by the U.S. and Syrian governments. None of these can possibly be answered by a public inquiry.

There are many questions about the role and knowledge of the Canadian government. Was intelligence on Mr. Arar shared between Canada and the United States? Was the Canadian government at all complicit in the U.S. decision to expel Mr. Arar to Syria? Was it powerless to prevent his ultimate incarceration, and possibly torture, in a Syrian jail? Such questions could, in theory, be answered by a full public inquiry.

But they won't be. Mr. Easter and his fellow cabinet ministers will stonewall, citing national security concerns. We shouldn't shed tears about this. Public inquiries are slow moving and expensive. And we don't have much experience with them -- the last one that dealt with security issues took place in the late 1970s.

There is an alternative. When the Canadian security apparatus was reformed in the early 1980s, Parliament took great pains to establish internal review and accountability mechanisms to ensure legality and greater effectiveness. Efforts to introduce centralized control and co-ordination of the sometimes fractious and feuding players in the intelligence and security game were also introduced.

The Arar case, and the broader issue of the competence of our security and intelligence system, offer a unique opportunity to put these slumbering mechanisms to work, and to the test. These mechanisms include the Inspector-General's office in Mr. Easter's department, the security and intelligence review committee, and the Co-ordinator for Security and Intelligence in the Privy Council Office.

Each should be charged with an investigation into aspects of the Arar case. All should be made to compete to come up with the best answer as to what happened, and to come up with it quickly. Their findings should be made available to Parliament, with an appropriate public report to follow. The whole experience should, in turn, lead to a beefing up of Parliament's feeble capacity to investigate the activities of the security and intelligence community in future.

At issue in the Arar case is not only justice for one man, but reassurance for the Canadian public about its security agencies. If Ottawa must ask the bald question, "What's in it for us?", the bald answer is: the prospect of avoiding future mistakes and doing the federal government's job that much better, in a climate of restored public trust.

Wesley K. Wark specializes in security and intelligence issues at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto.