Watch Maher-Arar's testimony. The Appeals Court just ruled he can't sue

[EFerrari]

for being rendered to Syria and tortured. Transcript at link. :hi:


Appeals Court Rules in Maher Arar Case: Innocent Victims of Extraordinary Rendition Cannot Sue in US Courts
Arar-web

On Monday, a federal court of appeals dismissed Canadian citizen Maher Arar’s case against US officials for their role in sending him to Syria to be tortured. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that victims of extraordinary rendition cannot sue Washington for torture suffered overseas, because Congress has not authorized such lawsuits. In 2002, Syrian-born Maher Arar was held in New York on his way back to Canada from a family vacation in Tunisia. A subsequent Canadian public inquiry has shown Arar was held on erroneous advice from Canadian officials who accused him of ties to Islamic militants. US authorities then flew Arar to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured for a year. Canadian authorities exonerated Arar in 2007, apologized for their role in his torture, and awarded him a multi-million-dollar settlement.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/3/appeals_court_rules_in_maher_arar

(Clip is about 13 minutes.)

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R I was livid when I read about the ruling yesterday.

[EFerrari]

3. It's unbelievable. if this happened to him, it can happen to any of us.

They kept him in a grave, basically, for 10 months.

[Solly Mack]

5. All part of America's rabid desire to pretend it didn't commit war crimes

as evidenced by referring to torture as "policy differences", by pretending the illegal is legal if a lawyer says so, by allowing the guilty to control the evidence, by hiding evidence of war crimes behind the national security umbrella, and the lack of prosecutions...



:(

and it's been going on for years now

[EFerrari]

7. madfloridian posted a thread about an author who is challenging

that whole "positive thinking" delusional POS. The case of the rebranding of torture is a good example of what that author was talking about.

[Solly Mack]

8. I read it. A study was done not that long ago - sociology study

that found that America was the only country (in the study) that believed it(the people) could alter reality with positive thinking.

And I agree...change the language to something less harsh and torture suddenly becomes not that bad

Positive thinking translated into and transformed by positive spinning...

[EFerrari]

13. Warner Erhardt Nation -- that's scary.

But it's good to know no other nation is afflicted with this mass delusion. :(

[Solly Mack]

17. Very scary. My first thought was how easy it is to control someone

who thinks having a positive thought changes their reality. Manipulate their thinking..shape it..frame it...and then tell them just whistle while you work and it will all be better...someday.

[arcadian]

2. Kidnapping is no longer illegal?

And Home Depot is having a sale on duct tape! YeeeeHaaa!

[EFerrari]

4. Kidnapping is not illegal if the government does it?

:shrug:

[arcadian]

6. Read 'Ghost Plane'

Stephen Grey profiles all the high profile cases and acknowledges that there are many more that we didn't hear about. You really get the impression that they didn't care that they didn't have the wrong people, kind of like a cop in some rural backwoods filling his quota by merely handing out tickets to everybody. I think there only goal was to instill fear within the global Muslim community and one way to do that would be to grab completely innocent people and do unspeakable things to them. Then have our joke, complete joke of a justice system cover for them in the name of "fightin' terror". This country is a joke.

[EFerrari]

14. The co-equal goal was to instill fear in the US populace.

They didn't care if they had the wrong people. They knew the goatherders and grandfathers and cooks and tourists they picked up were not AQ. Andy Worthington has run it all down. It's sickening, all of it.

[Octafish]

9. The National Security State requires a certain conformity of opinion.

If there weren't immunity, who knows? We the People might be able to bring some TRAITORS to justice.

[EFerrari]

16. We are now at the point were the government can grab anyone

in broad daylight, kidnap them, torture them and publicly refuse them due process when caught red handed. Isn't there a name for that?

[Octafish]

21. Police State

In effect since November 22, 1963.

[mmonk]

10. We will remain an international rogue for years to come.

We also won't return to American Constitutional government either for a long time. Too many now have been packed into our court system that support the ideas of imperial presidencies and immunity from law. We also, as was proven with the inaction against the Bush administration, have no party with the conviction and principle required to do so.

[arcadian]

11. When the lawmakers become lawless

It's only time before the People decide not to adhere to any law the lawmakers make as well.

[mmonk]

12. A natural progression. The unthinkable or unsupportable becomes

accepted.

[JohnyCanuck]

15. I guess the guy is supposed to be thankful

he was sent to Syria to be tortured and not sent to a US ally where they boil people alive, like Uzbekistan.

Certainly it wasn’t the only occasion when we came across evidence of people being boiled alive. That was the most extreme form of torture, I suppose, but immersion in boiling liquid of a limb was quite common.

Mutilation of the genitals was common. Suffocation was common, usually by putting a gas mask on people and blocking the air vents until they suffocated. Rape was common, rape with objects, rape with bottles, anal rape, homosexual rape, heterosexual rape, and mutilation of children in front of their parents.

It began with that and became a kind of personal mission for me, I suppose, to do what I could to try to stop this. I spent a great deal of time with my staff gathering evidence on it.

Being a very capricious government, occasionally a victim (of the Uzbek regime) would be released and we’d be able to see them and get medical evidence. More often you’d get letters smuggled out of the gulags and detention centers, evidence from relatives who managed to visit prisoners.

We built up an overwhelming dossier of evidence, and I complained to London about the conduct of our ally in rather strong terms including the photos of the boy being boiled alive.

I received a reply from the British Foreign Office. It said, this is a direct quote, “Dear Ambassador, we are concerned that you are perhaps over-focused on human rights to the detriment of commercial interests.”


SNIP

I didn’t want to make a fool of myself so I sent my deputy, a lady called Karen Moran, to see the CIA head of station and say to him, “My ambassador is worried your intelligence might be coming from torture. Is there anything he’s missing?”

She reported back to me that the CIA head of station said, “Yes, it probably is coming from torture, but we don’t see that as a problem in the context of the war on terror.”

In addition to which I learned that CIA were actually flying people to Uzbekistan in order to be tortured. I should be quite clear that I knew for certain and reported back to London that people were being handed over by the CIA to the Uzbek intelligence services and were being subjected to the most horrible tortures.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/102409b.html

[JohnyCanuck]

24. kick n/t

[truedelphi]

18. The lawyer says this:

First of all, Maher doesn’t challenge the policy; he challenges what happened to him, being sent to Syria to be tortured. Second of all, it’s the courts role to uphold our rights and to be the check and balance for the executive branch. The second reason was for secrecy purposes. Basically, the court said if state secrets might be at issue—the court didn’t reach whether state secrets were—it was better to have a decision to preclude a remedy in open court rather than having to deal with classified information. It’s an outrage

It really is an outrage.

[EFerrari]

19. The government's secrets are more important than our lives.

It's that special.

[truedelphi]

22. Thanks for posting this.

One of the benefits of not being in SF Bay area is I no longer have KPFA, which I used to listen to every day and it depressed the heck out of me.

But it did keep me informed.

[EFerrari]

23. I don't have teevee or a radio right now

but can stream Amy who keeps me nice and depressed. :)

[FiveGoodMen]

20. Satan himself wouldn't stoop that low.

America is the definition of evil.