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 .
