Fluorescent Dreams Wax Cylinders - Adding insult to injury for Maher Arar

What happened to the 1920 decision that we couldn't hold people in port - or on immigrant staging islands - because they were humans and had the same rights as the rest of us?

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There really is nothing that can be said to this. The current administration has overstepped its bounds so many times that it has become a contemptible farce. Their behavior can have no rational defense. Their actions are intolerable, and they must be made accountable. They have utterly destroyed our reputation, sullied our name, and shamed all of us.

I have no words, really, to describe the depths of my revulsion. Their crimes, though not nearly as bad in absolute terms as many other nations have committed, are made much worse in my eyes by the fact that they are my leaders, my elected officials, carrying out these deeds in my name. No, I won't have it. To hell with them all. January 20th cannot come a moment too soon, but I fear that if Seymour Hersh is right, they have far more damage yet to do.

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What is Hersh predicting?

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War with Iran, before Bush steps down in January. Of course there were rumors before, but Hersh has some very disturbing evidence. Congress, reaching new depths of spineless collaboration, last year approved $400M for increased covert operations in Iran aimed at destabilizing it. Bush requested this money at the very same time the NIE estimate on Iran was coming out, contradicting him.

We will never fucking learn.

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God, how low they've set the bar that my response to this is "oh well, at least it's not Iran AND North Korea..."

ARGH. At first I thought "well, he can START shit, but who'll want to keep it going?", but then I realized the same sort of momentum that applies in Iraq, applies on the other side of the sand.

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not to mention the law he got signed into effect a while back that gives GW the ability to nullify the result of a national election...

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Do you mean him stealing both of his elections, Rep. Sensenbrenner's proposed repealing of the 22nd amendment, or when Bush joked about retaining power like Putin? I've heard rumblings about this, but can't quite find a specific cite.

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Just when I think it can't get any worse than it is, another shoe drops.

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Very sad.

So, the actions of American officials are not subject to American law? We sent a Canadian to another country to be tortured!

Where is the international outrage over this? How is Canada weighing in on this?

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The short version: Canada is complicit in this. My government told your government that sending him to Syria was okay, and it took months for Mrs. Arar to get a hearing to even get the case looked into. I believe the Canadian government offered Arar an official apology at some point recently for their part in things, and I know there was an investigation to figure out if he was, indeed, innocent or guilty of the charges. He was found not guilty in that investigation. He didn't start the lawsuit in New York until he'd already gotten the Canadian government into a position of moral backing of the lawsuit.

That said, I'm still not convinced that he's completely clean. I suspect there may be something in his past to indicate that he does, indeed, have terrorist connections, whether or not he is one himself, but CSIS and the CIA are both unwilling to reveal what those ties are to the public because it would jeopardize something else, so they've allowed the various investigations to declare him not guilty of the charge of being a terrorist. It would not be the first time such a thing has happened.

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They always say that. Then, six months to a year later, they release the people with hardly a word. 9 times out of ten it comes from torturing some other poor soul who says they saw X kissing osama bin laden underneath the mistletoe last night.

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I suspect there may be something in his past to indicate that he does, indeed, have terrorist connections...

The CSIS and the CIA might not have revealed his connections, but he has:

He is questioned in particular about Abdullah Almalki. Arar tells them that he only knows him very casually, but that he worked with his brother Nazih at two high tech firms in Ottawa and Hull. He tells them that the Almalki family came from Syria about the same time as his, so the families know of each other. Arar does not know why they are questioning him so much about Abdullah. He tells them he has seen Abdullah a few times and he describes, in detail, the times he can remember. Arar is shocked when they show him the rental lease he signed when he moved to Ottawa in 1997. It was witnessed by Abdullah Almalki. Arar remembers this and explains he had asked Nazih to sign it, but that Nazih was busy and sent his brother instead.
. . .
Arar is woken at 3:00 a.m. and is told he is leaving. He is given food, and then taken from his cell. A woman reads to him from a document, saying that based on classified information that they could not reveal to him, and because he knows a number of men, including – Abdullah Almalki, Nazih Almalki, and Ahmad Abou-el-Maati, the INS Director has decided to deport him to Syria.
. . .
Arar is teaching English to some other prisoners in his cell when he hears others saying that another Canadian has arrived. He looks up and sees a thin man with a shaved head looking very weak. After some time he realizes this is Abdullah Almalki.

Almalki tells Arar he has also been at the Palestine Branch, and that he was in a cell like Arar’s for even longer. He tells Arar he has been severely tortured – with the tire and the cable. He says he was also hung upside down. Almalki also says he was tortured at Sednaya prison just weeks before.

I don't know as much information about Abdullah Almalki, but it should be easy enough to find out. Ask him. He, too, is back in Canada, cleared of charges.

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I'm connected to someone who has access to information that isn't available to the general public. He says this isn't the whole story. I trust him to know what he's talking about. Unfortunately, that means I can't reveal any more than I have already.

Neither of those men should have been sent to Syria. Arar should have been sent back to Canada, and it's appalling that either of our governments thought it was okay to send anyone, suspected terrorist or otherwise, to a place where he'd be tortured. It was wrong and I'm ashamed of my country for it. But that doesn't mean I'm convinced of his innocence.

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I'm connected to someone who has access to information that isn't available to the general public. He says this isn't the whole story. I trust him to know what he's talking about. Unfortunately, that means I can't reveal any more than I have already.

With all due respect, putting a "classified" (or "secret", or "top secret" or Q-level, or...) stamp on a document doesn't make it more accurate. Classified information can be far less accurate than open-source information --- simply because fewer people can examine it.

Remember that in 2003, "information that isn't available to the general public" was that Saddam Hussein was actively pursuing biological and nuclear warfare and that Saddam Hussein was secretly working with Osama bin Laden.

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Fortunately, his guilt or innocence matters far less than what was done about it, which was decidedly the wrong thing.

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That's not exactly correct, and in any case, what kind of criminal act would you deem necessary to make 10 months of torture an acceptable punishment? Especially when no one could find evidence that he'd done it after the fact - and at the hands of a foreign country where your government has no say?

The Canadian government did not "tell your government that sending him to Syria was okay".. the RCMP - in violation of Canadian law, BTW - gave the US government Arar's name as part of a list of people they considered potentially risky. There's evidence that the RCMP did know that this might lead to someone being deported to Syria - but the US was insisting that they had assurances from Syria that such people would not be tortured.

You want not completely clean? Ask yourself why the US would accept the Syrian assurances on torture when at the same time they're calling Syria one of the three countries in the Axis of Evil? Then again, why did the RCMP buy that?

But rather than speculating on it - here are the facts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahar_Arar

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/arar/

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I explicitly stated, in another comment further down, that what happened was wrong. Please don't twist my words.

Thank you for the more specific information.

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Sorry, i didn't realize the comment where I'd made that clear hadn't actually been posted. It's up now.

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How is Canada weighing in on this?

I think since Harper got elected, it isn't. Too many Canadian conservatives have this thing where they're willing to sell out Canadian (and world) interests to the US. I think it's a mutant substrain of the general conservative tendency to worship power, whether just or not.

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*Several* discussions I have had recently about the rights of people in this country have ended with the other person stating that times and people have changed since the laws were written. Sure - I can see that. But then they added "We [as a country] know so much more now, and don't make the same mistakes that we used to, or go around behaving like we were back in the wild west..."

Yes, they were serious.
Yes, they were completely convinced and unable to entertain an alternative view.
And Yes, in my head, I'm still screaming.

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Remember the old saw that we study history so that we can avoid repeating its mistakes? Well, I had a history professor in university, in a course that covered Europe from 1815 to 1914. In the final lecture, he said that he no longer believed in that reason to study history. As he pointed out, the Foreign Ministers of the Great Powers in 1914 were all, to a man, students of history and the Arts. They had degrees from Oxford, the Sorbonne, etc, etc. They were some of the best-educated and best-rounded men of their time, and their education included swathes of history going back to Ancient Greece. And yet they managed to throw the world into WWI and set the stage for WWII.

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Ridiculous. The worst part is that most people are too wrapped up in their own lives to care about abuses like these. How long will it be before we wind up like Nazi Germany?

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Shhhh. Our freedom of speech does not allow this comparison to be made. We must all sacrifice (our rights) to defeat the (largely mythical) terrorists.

On a historical note, the Nazi regime's crimes against humanity were lawful at all times under German law.

I personally consider the suspension of the rule of law to be a critical danger sign and cancellation of elections to be definitive. Your mileage may vary.

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This is just another incident where it shows that those in charge of the US government will do whatever they want, whenever they want, and to hell with rights.

George Carlin once said that our rights were an illusion...

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Oi.

It's hard to think of anything more to say to that.

The Canadian government apologised to Arar for their part in the affair and after confirming that he wasn't a terrorist, or involved in any way with terrorist groups, paid him a settlement of $12M. They've also been trying to get the US to remove him from their No Fly list... although I doubt he'd ever want to go near the US again.

The US' response so far has been 'We do not allow other countries to decide our foreign policy...'.

Indeed.

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*sigh* My family wonders why I am so reluctant to fly anywhere.

I wonder, if that part of JFK is not "technically" in the US, if they actually have any rights under international law to deport you? If the two of us went out into international waters, could I just up and deport you to Syria? It seems strange.

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