Prime Minister Paul Martin likes to travel the globe lecturing other world leaders on human rights. He would be better advised to pay attention to what's going on in his own government.

In particular, he would be well advised to deal with the astonishing situation that has risen around the judicial public inquiry into the deportation, jailing and torture of Canadian Maher Arar.

We've had a lot of judicial public inquiries in Canada. But this is the first I can recall in which the judge heading the probe has been forced to take the federal government that appointed him to court in order to ensure that he can do his job.

Yet that's exactly what's happening with the case of Ottawa computer specialist Arar, who was arrested in 2002 while changing plans in New York, held as an alleged terrorist by U.S authorities and secretly transported to Syria.

There he was jailed in a tiny dungeon for almost a year, interrogated and tortured about his alleged relationship to alleged terrorists.

Eventually, the Syrians, who said they never wanted Arar in the first place and figured he wasn't guilty of anything, released him and let him come home.

In response to the ensuing public furor, Martin ordered a judicial inquiry into the entire business.

"It's very clear we do not have all of the facts," he said in January. "What we want is the facts out as quickly as possible."

At the time, it seemed that the Prime Minister might be serious. He appointed a respected jurist, Ontario appeal court Justice Dennis O'Connor, to head the inquiry. He promised Ottawa's full co-operation.

But that's not how things worked out. The more the inquiry digs into the affair, the more the government tries to thwart it.

Matters came to a head this week when the frustrated inquiry released a summary of evidence so heavily censored by federal officials that entire pages were blacked out.

Included among the censored materials deemed too sensitive for Canadians to see were newspaper reports from the Ottawa Citizen and, in one particularly bizarre instance, part of a 1996 judgment from a federal court case involving lumber.

Inquiry counsel Paul Cavalluzzo said federal censors also blacked out information from the public portions of the inquiry that had already been widely reported.

However, he went on, he couldn't be more specific or he risked 14 years in jail.

Now both sides are headed to federal court to let a judge decide who is running this judicial inquiry. But as Cavalluzzo points out, even if the government loses in court, it can still suppress all or part of what O'Connor finds out.

That's because one little noticed part of the anti-terror bill rammed through Parliament after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 allows the government to do just that. Censor the reports of public inquiries.

If this were a probe dominated by anarchists or (even worse) by journalists, one might understand the government's concern.

But this is run by a judge whom the government itself chose.

O'Connor is hardly a bubblehead. The last inquiry he led, the probe into the 2000 Walkerton water tragedy, was a masterful investigation that produced sensible recommendations aimed at preventing a recurrence.

Presumably that's what he is supposed to do here. Indeed, throughout the first few months of the Arar investigations, O'Connor demonstrated that he fully understood the legitimate security concerns of the government and its allies.

He's been careful to hear sensitive evidence in private. He hired Ron Atkey, a former Conservative federal cabinet minister and the first head of the Security Intelligence Review Agency (which oversees Canada's spies) to advise him on what should not be made public.

O'Connor let the government see his draft interim report first and then, after weeks of discussion and negotiation, made changes to address Ottawa's concerns.

But as Cavalluzzo noted this week, the whole point of the probe was to release as much to the public as possible. That's why it's called a public inquiry.

A lot of Canadians want to know how it is that a fellow citizen can be in a friendly foreign country and deported to a third country to be tortured without charge or trial.

And they want to know what role, if any, Canadian security agencies played.

But as the events of this week demonstrate, Ottawa's permanent government the bureaucrats and mandarins who dominate the security organs and the senior ministries seem determined to make sure this doesn't happen.

So they are stalling and opposing, counting on the fact that the government is too disorganized to notice and the Prime Minister too peripatetic to care.

When vandals firebombed a Jewish school in Montreal earlier this year, Martin said correctly that it was an attack on all Canadians.

When Maher Arar was sent to be tortured in Syria, that too was an attack on all of us. O'Connor has been charged with letting the country know what happened. He should be allowed to do his job.

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