Topic: Torture
Torture by Proxy: The Case of Maher Arar
Does the US send terror suspects to other countries to be tortured?
by RS Davis
(libertarian)
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Back in 2006, Jacob Sullum wrote about this 36 year old Canadian telecommunications engineer, Maher Arar, who. along with his economist wife, was investigated by authorities in Canada for ties to terrorism. The link was ultimately found to be inconsequential, yet they and their daughters still were somehow labelled "Islamic Extremist individuals suspected of being linked to the Al Qaeda terrorist movement." What happened next is terrifying:
Returning from Tunisia on September 26, 2002, Arar was detained at New York's JFK International Airport and held for 12 days. Concluding that Arar was a member of Al Qaeda, the Immigration and Naturalization Service sent him not to Canada but to Syria, where he was born, despite his repeated objections that he would be tortured there.
But the nightmare doesn't end there. He was kept in Syrian prisons for a year in a tiny cell, where he was tortured into signing a confession:The cable is a black electrical cable, about two inches thick. They hit me with it everywhere on my body. They mostly aimed for my palms, but sometimes missed and hit my wrists they were sore and red for three weeks. They also struck me on my hips, and lower back. Interrogators constantly threatened me with the metal chair, tire and electric shocks...
...They used the cable on the second and third day, and after that mostly beat me with their hands, hitting me in the stomach and on the back of my neck, and slapping me on the face. Where they hit me with the cables, my skin turned blue for two or three weeks, but there was no bleeding. At the end of the day they told me tomorrow would be worse...
He broke down crying as he related to his interviewer the "screams of women being beaten and the cries of the babies" that he could hear as he waited, terrified, in his cramped cell for the next round of torture and interrogation. Fellow prisoner Abdullah Almalki said he could "distinguish if someone is being tortured by the tire, the chair, electricity; each one had a different type of screaming."...They used the cable on the second and third day, and after that mostly beat me with their hands, hitting me in the stomach and on the back of my neck, and slapping me on the face. Where they hit me with the cables, my skin turned blue for two or three weeks, but there was no bleeding. At the end of the day they told me tomorrow would be worse...
After a year, Syria finally let him go. Imad Moustapha, a Syrian official, concluded: "We tried to find anything. We couldn't." He shared his results with US Officials, as "We always share information with anybody alleged to be in close contact with al Qaeda with the United States."
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice denies the practice, and the US government maintains it "sought assurances with respect to Mr. Arar's treatment," but a report made in June of 2006 by the Council of Europe estimated that 100 people had been kidnapped off EU soil by the CIA and routed through secret detention centers to places that will beat you until you'll confess even to the assassination of President Lincoln.
According to The Washington Post, it goes like this:
To carry out its mission, the CTC relies on its Rendition Group, made up of case officers, paramilitaries, analysts and psychologists. Their job is to figure out how to snatch someone off a city street, or a remote hillside, or a secluded corner of an airport where local authorities wait.
Members of the Rendition Group follow a simple but standard procedure: Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip. Their destinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA's own covert prisons -- referred to in classified documents as "black sites," which at various times have been operated in eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe.
From there, it is alleged that they are then sent to prisons in countries where civil liberties are considered quaint, like Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Morroco, and Uzbekistan. Former CIA agent Robert Baer said: "If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear -- never to see them again -- you send them to Egypt."
Everyone from the ACLU to The Washington Post to the human-rights-obsessed Council of Europe say it is happening. It seems the only ones denying it is the Bush Administration. President Bush said in no certain terms in 2005:
But let me say something: the United States government has an obligation to protect the American people. It's in our country's interests to find those who would do harm to us and get them out of harm's way. And we will do so within the law, and we will do so in honoring our commitment not to torture people. And we expect the countries where we send somebody to, not to torture, as well. But you bet, when we find somebody who might do harm to the American people, we will detain them and ask others from their country of origin to detain them. It makes sense. The American people expect us to do that. We -- we still at war.
Canada has since apologized to Mr Arar, exonerating him completely and paying him $10 million. On the other hand, here in the United States, we haven't even changed his terrorist status, and The Second Circuit US Court of Appeals in New York threw out his case because, technically, he was never on American soil.
The dissenting judge on the case, Robert D Sack, was shocked, calling it a "legal fiction" and saying Arar "was, in effect, abducted while attempting to transit at J.F.K. Airport." Apparently, someone else on the court was listening, because The New York Times reports that they have decided, without being asked, to re-hear the case in front of the full 12 judges.
Maher Arar may yet get some justice for what was done to him, but I don't know if we'll ever get any honest answers on the policy of extraordinary rendition.
©2008 RS Davis, all rights reserved. You must have written permission from the author in order to republish this work.
Published: Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Last modified: Tuesday, August 19, 2008
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Reader Comments:
Posted By: Dan Alba
Date: 2008-08-22 17:01:53
Sorely-needed article. Thanks for writing it. That there aren't 200+ thumbs up is a travesty and a testament to the sick apathy programmed into the sheeple by the state-worshiping, empire-apologizing corporate media. Accomplices to NeoZioNazi crimes against humanity, the whole lot.