Daily Update
A weblog of the post 9/11 world
updated 11:00 a.m. ET November 21, 2003
Treatment of Canadian 'symbol of post-9/11 excess'
Sixteen months ago the US sent a Syrian-born Canadian, Maher Arar, to Syria, alleging that he had ties to Al Qaeda. Recently, however, the circumstances behind his deportation from the US, and his recent release by the Syrian government, have started to generate
calls for an inquiry into the actions of officials in both Canada and the US. Mr. Arar, a Canadian engineer, was arrested by US officials at JFK International Airport in September, 2002, as he was returning home to Ottawa from a trip to the Middle East. After it was determined that Arar could not be charged with any crime in the US, American officials sent Arar to Syria, although he asked to be sent back to Canada.
The Washington Post reports that a senior Justice Department official
personally approved the deportation.
The
Post quotes one US official as saying that when apprehended at the airport, Arar had the names of "a large number of known Al Qaeda operatives, affiliates or associates" in his wallet or pockets. But the charge d'affaires at the Syrian Embassy in Washington says the only reason the took Arar was as
a favor and to win good will with the US. Recently the Syrian ambassador to Canada said officials could not establish that he was linked in any way to the Al Qaeda terrorist network.
Arar spent 16 months in a Syrian prison, where
he was tortured. He was suddenly released in October and returned to Canada. Canada officials have already said he will not be charged with any crime.
The Toronto Star reports that US Attorney-General John Ashcroft tried to "publicly wash his hands" of the Maher Arar affair Thursday, saying his department
acted within the law because it accepted Syrian assurances that the Ottawa man would not be tortured if he was sent back to his birthplace. US officials say Arar had ties to Al Qaeda (he once had an apartment lease co-signed by another Syrian-Canadian suspected of having terrorist links)and that he confessed to having attended a training camp in Afghanistan. But in the interview with
The New York Times, Mr. Arar said that he would have
said anything to stop his beatings, so intense that he urinated on himself twice, and that he had never been to Afghanistan or Syria or anywhere nearby since he came with his family to Montreal at 17, almost two decades ago. Canadian and Syrian officials have been unable to find any evidence that Arar visited an Al Qaeda training camp.
Writing recently in the
Globe and Mail, Aubrey Macklin says there are
several problems with the US's actions against Arar, including the fact the US ignored international law and US law when it decided to send Arar to Syria.
In the event of more than one country of citizenship, the citizen can exercise his or her right to enter against either country of citizenship. The choice belongs to the one who has the right. If the dual citizen does not wish to return to either, the sending country may face a dilemma, but no such dilemma was faced here. When choosing from among countries of citizenship, international human rights law, as well as US law, dictates that a person must NOT be sent to a country that presents a substantial risk of torture. Syria is just such a country. Thus the purpose of Ashcroft's comments that Arar was only sent to Syria after receiving assurances he would not be tortured, which turned out not to be true. But as
The Washington Post points out, in a Nov. 7 speech, President Bush said Syria has left its people "
a legacy of torture, oppression, misery and ruin." Spokesmen at the Justice Department and the CIA declined to comment on why they believed the Syrian assurances to be credible. In New York, the Center for Consitutional Rights, which has
taken up the Arar case in the US, denounced Ashcroft.
"This case crystallizes the danger of this period in US history ��� when you can be held on the flimsiest of evidence, or non-evidence, based on the suspicion that one might have done something," said Ron Daniels of the New York-based rights center. "This is exactly the point ��� Americans, even as they want to fight the war against terrorism, do not want to sacrifice what this country stands for in the pursuit of this war on terrorism. Because if we do that, we have lost our soul as a nation."
Meanwhile, Canadian authorities seemed to disagree about their government's role in the deportation of Arar to Syria. On Wednesday, Canadian Solicitor General Wayne Easter admitted that his department had
shared information on Arar with the US. But then on Thursday, Canadian foreign minister Bill Graham told the
Financial Times that Canada had
nothing to do with the deportation decision.
"The decision with respect to Mr. Arar was made in the US on the basis of information they had from various sources - they're not being specific as to exactly what sources - and I think that goes a long way to satisfy, at least from a Canadian perspective, that Canadians were not involved in the decision to deport Mr. Arar to Syria." Haroon Siddiqui of the
Toronto Star writes that for all the Canadian (and American) government's efforts to ignore the Arar case,
it isn't going away. In fact, he says, it look like the media is just beginning to pick up steam in covering the case. He quotes New Democrat Member of Parliament Alexa McDonough (a former leader of the left-of-center NDP), who (along with Arar's wife) refused to let the Arar case disappear from public view, saying she speculates that given Washington's official insistence that it did no wrong, some American officials might welcome the opportunity to appear before a Canadian inquiry, if there is one.
"They may want to come forward and set the record straight on what they did or didn't do and what Canada's role was," she said in a telephone interview. "Ironically, the fear in Ottawa may be that Canada's role will come out."
A growing number of Canadian
politicians (including ministers of the government) and writers are also
calling for an official inquiry into what happened to Arar.
But as Robyn Blumner points out in a column in the
St. Petersburg Times, Arar isn't the only individual that the US has turned over to a country that practices torture. She refers to a recent
Washington Post article that showed that, despite President Bush's recent statements about the horrors of torture, the "Bush administration is
condoning and even facilitating the torture of terrorist suspects" through a process known as "extraordinary rendition."
Suspects have been sent to Syria, Morocco, Egypt and Jordan, countries whose abusive practices have been documented and condemned by the State Department's annual human rights report. "We don't kick the s--- out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the s--- out of them," an unnamed official who had participated in the rendering of prisoners told the
Post. Along with the prisoner, the CIA provides the foreign intelligence services a list of questions it wants answered.
The question of whether or not it is right to ever use torture had been much debated in the Us recently. Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz has come out in favor of "
torture warrants" in order to get information from terrorists. And Mark Bowden, writing in The Atlantic Monthly, also argued that some
limited forms of torture may be acceptable in certain circumstances.
But Human Rights Watch's Tom Malinowski says repeated evidence shows that torture "is a wonderful way of
getting false concessions out of innocent people. It is a terrible way of getting the truth out of guilty people." Philip Heyman, former deputy attorney-general of the US, says torture is "a prescription for
losing a war for support of our beliefs in the hope of reducing the casualties from relatively small battles."
Meanwhile, in his recent interview with
The New York Times, Maher Arar says his life
will never be the same.
"My life and career are destroyed," he said matter-of-factly. "To brand someone as a terrorist after 9/11 – I don't think it will be easy to return to normal life."
Also...
•
War critics astonished as Richard Perle admits invasion was illegal (
Guardian)
•
Some see slur against Islam in a 'B.C.' outhouse strip (
Washington Post)
•
Al Qaeda's terror style spreading (
MSNBC)
•
Resistance to the Patriot Act is growing in the American heartland (
Newsweek)
•
And down comes the statue... but this time it's Trafalgar Square (
Guardian)
• Feedback appreciated. E-mail
Tom Regan
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