On September 26, 2002, Canadian telecommunications engineer Maher Arar was apprehended by the CIA because his name had been falsely implicated and placed on the terrorist watch list. He was taken to Syria, where interrogators “whipped his hands repeatedly with two-inch-thick electrical cables and kept him in a body-sized slot of a windowless underground cell…which he likened to being buried alive in a casket. …he eventually confessed to anything his tormentors wanted him to say.”
– Jane Mayer, The Dark Side, Pages 129-131