Remember Mr. Arar? "jettisoning the rule of law"

[amborin]

Torture, American Style

BOB HERBERT \
Published: February 11, 2005

Maher Arar is a 34-year-old native of Syria who emigrated to Canada as a teenager. On Sept. 26, 2002, as he was returning from a family vacation in Tunisia, he was seized by American authorities at Kennedy Airport in New York, where he was in the process of changing planes.
Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was not charged with a crime. But, as Jane Mayer tells us in a compelling and deeply disturbing article in the current issue of The New Yorker, he ''was placed in handcuffs and leg irons by plainclothes officials and transferred to an executive jet.''
In an instant, Mr. Arar was swept into an increasingly common nightmare, courtesy of the United States of America. The plane that took off with him from Kennedy ''flew to Washington, continued to Portland, Maine, stopped in Rome, Italy, then landed in Amman, Jordan.''
Any rights Mr. Arar might have thought he had, either as a Canadian citizen or a human being, had been left behind. At times during the trip, Mr. Arar heard the pilots and crew identify themselves in radio communications as members of ''the Special Removal Unit.'' He was being taken, on the orders of the U.S. government, to Syria, where he would be tortured.

The title of Ms. Mayer's article is ''Outsourcing Torture.'' It's a detailed account of the frightening and extremely secretive U.S. program known as ''extraordinary rendition.''
This is one of the great euphemisms of our time. Extraordinary rendition is the name that's been given to the policy of seizing individuals without even the semblance of due process and sending them off to be interrogated by regimes known to practice torture. In terms of bad behavior, it stands side by side with contract killings.
Our henchmen in places like Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Uzbekistan and Jordan are torturing terror suspects at the behest of a nation -- the United States -- that just went through a national election in which the issue of moral values was supposed to have been decisive. How in the world did we become a country in which gays' getting married is considered an abomination, but torture is O.K.?
As Ms. Mayer pointed out: ''Terrorism suspects in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East have often been abducted by hooded or masked American agents, then forced onto a Gulfstream V jet, like the one described by Arar. . . . Upon arriving in foreign countries, rendered suspects often vanish. Detainees are not provided with lawyers, and many families are not informed of their whereabouts.''

Mr. Arar was seized because his name had turned up on a watch list of terror suspects. He was reported to have been a co-worker of a man in Canada whose brother was a suspected terrorist.
''Although he initially tried to assert his innocence, he eventually confessed to anything his tormentors wanted him to say,'' Ms. Mayer wrote.
The confession under torture was worthless. Syrian officials reported back to the United States that they could find no links between Mr. Arar and terrorism. He was released in October 2003 without ever being charged and is now back in Canada.
Barbara Olshansky is the assistant legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is representing Mr. Arar in a lawsuit against the U.S. I asked her to describe Mr. Arar's physical and emotional state following his release from custody.

She sounded shaken by the memory. ''He's not a big guy,'' she said. ''He had lost more than 40 pounds. His pallor was terrible, and his eyes were sunken. He looked like someone who was kind of dead inside.''
Any government that commits, condones, promotes or fosters torture is a malignant force in the world. And those who refuse to raise their voices against something as clearly evil as torture are enablers, if not collaborators.
There is a widespread but mistaken notion in the U.S. that everybody seized by the government in its so-called war on terror is in fact somehow connected to terrorist activity. That is just wildly wrong. Jettisoning the rule of law to permit such acts of evil as kidnapping and torture is not a defensible policy for a civilized nation. It's wrong. And nothing good can come from it

snip

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0DE1DA173AF932A25751C0A9639C8B63&scp=6&sq=terrorist%20and%20wrongly%20accused%20and%20canada%20&st=cse



".......Mr. Arar was detained in September 2002 at Kennedy International Airport as he changed planes on his way to Montreal from a vacation in Tunisia. Suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda, he was held and interrogated under harsh conditions in New York for 13 days, and then sent to Syria, where he spent a year in confinement and, he says, was tortured.

He was released in 2003, and Canadian officials later concluded that he had no involvement with terrorism.

A lawsuit filed by Mr. Arar was dismissed in 2006 by a federal district judge in Brooklyn, a ruling that was affirmed in 2008 by a three-judge panel of the appeals court. Then, in a highly unusual move, the full appeals court decided to consider the matter, and held oral arguments last December.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a former member of the Second Circuit appeals court, participated in the oral argument of the case last December, but was later elevated to the United States Supreme Court by President Obama and did not participate in the decision.

Mr. Arar, a Syrian-born telecommunications engineer who has dual Canadian and Syrian citizenship, said via a spokesman: “I have done my best over the last seven long years to obtain justice through the U.S. court system. Today’s decision removed any left-over hope that this will ever happen.

“In simple terms, today’s decision means that United States government’s agents can commit human rights violations in any part of the world and the courts will always find a legal justification for these agents to escape accountability. I am afraid to say that these courts have lost the purpose of their existence.”

David D. Cole, a Georgetown law professor who argued the case on behalf of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has been representing Mr. Arar, said the decision “effectively places executive officials above the law, even when accused of a conscious conspiracy to torture.” He said that a petition for Supreme Court review is likely.
"
snip

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/full-appeals-court-rejects-suit-in-rendition-case/?scp=8&sq=terrorist%20and%20wrongly%20accused%20and%20arar&st=cse

[amborin]

1. why would anyone un-rec this?

clearly, the truth is unsettling

[neverforget]

2. Principles are easliy jettisoned when it doesn't affect you.....yet.

[The Traveler]

4. I shall compensate by reccing. n/t

[Richard Steele]

7. We have some lurking FReepers who unrec everything of significance.

They can't handle the truth.

[whistler162]

8. Probably just to hear you whine!

[The Traveler]

3. Rule of law

You either have it or you do not.

We do not.

Do you want it back? If so ... then we have more work to do. And a question we must answer lingers ... have we perhaps hitched our hopes to the wrong horse?

Trav

[ixion]

5. k/r...

for the Rule of Law. :patriot:

[Jim Lane]

6. The Supreme Court will probably deny review, which will put the matter in Obama's hands.

He can say, "Well, that's it, the case is over."

Or he can say, "We did a terrible injustice to this man. Money can never make up for it, but it's the best we can do at this point. I call upon Congress to pass a private bill awarding him substantial compensation."

He can also direct the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute any violation of federal criminal laws that occurred.

[Solly Mack]

9. I remember

K&R

[EFerrari]

10. K&R

[amborin]

11. "erroneous and inflamatory evidence"

Innocent Man Rendered to Syria, Held and Tortured for One Year

— By Clara Jeffery

| Tue Sep. 19, 2006 8:12 AM PDT


"Closing (well, except for the well-deserved lawsuits I presume) another dark chapter in the war on terror, Canadian citizen Maher Arar has been completely cleared by a Canadian judicial commission. In a 822-page report, the commission, lead by Justice Dennis O'Connor, ripped the Mounties apart for giving U.S. authorities erroneous and inflammatory "evidence" against Arar, which led to his being detained during a stopover in JFK airport, rendered to Syria, where he was held and tortured for one year.

And let's be clear what we mean by torture here. This isn't just sleep deprivation. This is a Canadian computer consultant returning from a family vacation who, with no ability to access the "evidence" against him, gets bundled off to Syria and beaten with electrical cables.


Arar, a 31-year-old computer consultant and Canadian citizen, was en route from Zurich to Montreal to attend to business following a family vacation in Tunisia, according to a lawsuit he filed against U.S. officials in 2004. He was standing in line waiting to pass immigration inspection when an immigration officer asked him to step aside to answer some questions.
As FBI agents, immigration officials and NYPD officers questioned Arar, he asked to consult an attorney. U.S. officials told Arar that only U.S. citizens had the right to a lawyer and locked him up in the Metropolitan Detention Center in New York City, where he endured more interrogation about his friends, the mosques he attended, his letters and e-mails. U.S. officials then demanded that he "voluntarily" agree to be sent to Syria, where he was born, instead of home to Canada (Arar holds dual citizenship). Arar refused, according to Amnesty International, explaining that he was afraid he would be tortured in Syria for not completing his military service. After more than a week in detention, U.S. authorities determined that Arar was "inadmissible" to the United States based on secret evidence and notified him that he would be deported to Syria.
They took him to New Jersey in the middle of the night and loaded him onto a small plane that stopped in Washington, D.C., and then Rome before proceeding to Jordan. Local authorities in Jordan chained and beat Arar, bundled him in a van and drove him across the border to Syria, where Arar was beaten with electrical cables, interrogated about his acquaintances and beliefs, and kept in a tiny cell for months at a time.

The full O'Connor report is not available (due to, you guessed it, security concerns), but news reports indicate that basically after 9/11 the RCMP not only saw terrorists behind every tree but then passed on raw intelligence that had not been analyzed for accuracy to the even more hot-headed U.S. intelligence forces. Via the Globe and Mail:

"The Mounties, the report continues, should have flagged the material as being from unproven sources and should have taken precautions to make sure it was not used in U.S. deportation proceedings…
U.S. officials refused to testify at the Canadian inquiry. But the report says it "is very likely" they relied on the faulty RCMP intelligence when they decided to send Mr. Arar to Syria, the country of his birth, rather than home to Canada.
"The RCMP provided American authorities with information about Mr. Arar which was inaccurate, portrayed him in an unfair fashion and overstated his importance to the investigation," the report says. "The RCMP had no basis for this description, which had the potential to create serious consequences for Mr. Arar in light of American attitudes and practices" at that time, the report says.
The Mounties also erroneously told the Americans Mr. Arar was in the Washington area on Sept. 11, 2001, when, in fact, he was in San Diego.

When Arar got back, the Mounties mounted a smear campaign against him…Boy, this all sounds so familiar.

The O'Connor report also calls for the further independent investigation of the cases of three other Canadian Muslim men—Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muyyed Nurredin —who were likewise rendered and claim to have been tortured.

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2006/09?page=5