Both depressing and encouraging is the news that the Canadian government gave a nicely sized sum to a suspected terrorist who had been… interrogated in Syria before being let go again.

Maher Arar was detained in the US while returning to Canada from Tunisia. He has dual Syrian-Canadian citizenship.

A Canadian government inquiry cleared him of any involvement in terrorism. Syria denies that he was tortured.

PM Stephen Harper said Mr Arar would receive $10.5m (US$8.9m, £4.54m) compensation, and urged the US to drop him from its list of terror suspects.

See, I still get confused with the strange dichotomy of rendering terror suspects to Syria while at the same time pointing the finger at them as an aid to terrorism in the Iraq Fiasco. Like we might send them people they sent into Iraq initially.

Now, the thing that really gets me is that we have a good idea about how many (or, more accurately, how few) people in our custody are actually guilty of anything. If the Canadian government were to pay them all for their trauma, the country would go bankrupt before everyone got their checks.

And, unsurprisingly…

Despite repeated calls from Canada to drop Mr Arar from its security watch list, the US refuses, saying it has reasons of its own to keep him on the list.

Yep, reasons of its own. Meaning, “we don’t care what you found out.”