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WASHINGTON — In response to 36 million handwritten letters, the president made a formal apology today to Canadian citizen and extraordinary rendition victim Maher Arar and presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Mr. Arar was a software engineer changing planes at J.F.K. Airport on his way home to Canada from a family vacation when he was detained, kept from counsel, and sent to Syria for a year of torture and interrogation.

The letters in support of Mr. Arar were part of a campaign organized by a coalition of human rights groups including Witness Against Torture, Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and MoveOn.org. His case has come to represent some of the worst excesses of the previous administration’s national security policies.

The context for the apology is the White House’s new Truth and Prosecution Program, which has exposed and reversed policy on secret C.I.A. interrogation and torture centers worldwide, warrantless wiretapping, illegal infiltration of activist meetings (and Quaker quilting bees), and extraordinary rendition, the extrajudicial transfer of suspected terrorists to countries known to torture prisoners.

The program works to assist the Attorney General’s criminal prosecutions of former Bush administration officials for their role in torture policy and taking the country to war under false pretenses.

In a prepared statement, White House Press Secretary Samantha Bee said, “We will not condone torture, nor outsource torture. Maher Arar can never regain that year of his life, when our country sent him to be tortured in Syria, but the Medal of Freedom at least recognizes his heroic fight to assure that what happened to him will never again happen to anyone else.” Bee also noted that the U.S. is matching Canada’s $10 million compensation to Mr. Arar for his ordeal, “but in real money.”

In a tearful interview on ABC’s daytime talk show “The View” earlier this week, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, currently awaiting trial, told Elisabeth Hasselbeck that he hoped the world would not remember him as the man who brought torture out of the dungeon and into the Executive branch. “Maybe the whole torture thing wasn’t such a good idea after all,” he said. “I just hope people also remember my way with words, and peer through that to the essence, where I am also a, at least some kind of, father.”