Arar #3

Here's a useful timeline of the case from CBC News.

And here's a Washington Post article from November 19, 2002, with more information on who approved Arar's removal to Syria. (Thanks to reader Slartibartifast for the link.):

Then-Deputy Attorney General Larry D. Thompson, in his capacity as acting attorney general, signed the highly unusual order, citing national security and declaring that to send the man, Maher Arar, home to Canada would be "prejudicial to the interests of the United States," according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.....

A couple of questions/comments:

1) Based on these two DOJ web pages, the Deputy Attorney General is the second highest ranking person in the entire Justice Department.

(From the DOJ job description:"The Deputy Attorney General is authorized to exercise all the power and authority of the Attorney General....In the absence of the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General acts as the Attorney General.")

So this was approved at a very high level. This cuts both ways. On the one hand, it is very upsetting to know that the second most important person in the Justice Department, acting as the Attorney General, would do this. On the other hand, it suggests that this power is reserved for unusual cases, not something that happens to everyone who is on the watch list and can be easily deported to a suitably nasty country. It also makes me wonder why they suspected Arar, and whether it was more than the unimpressive connections that Pyle cites.

(The article says "One U.S. official said yesterday 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." If that's true it could have been a routine watch-list stop that became something more. I don't think this would be acceptable even if Arar was guilty of something, or if he wasn't guilty but they had good reason to believe it was. But it would be less flagrantly unacceptable.)

I do not know how unusual/routine it is for the Deputy Attorney General to act as the Attorney General. The thought immediately crossed my mind "why wasn't Ashcroft acting as the Attorney General?" but for all I know the Deputy has the night shift, or Ashcroft was sick that week.

2) "then-Deputy Attorney General." Larry D. Thompson is no longer Deputy Attorney General. He stepped down on August 11, 2003, and is now a visiting professor* at the University of Georgia law school.

His departure appears to have been voluntary--there's a very complimentary press release here, including 'quotations' from Ashcroft:

"Larry was more than a Deputy Attorney General to me. He was my partner. He worked shoulder to shoulder with me at a time when history necessitated dramatic changes in the way the Justice Department did its job." (etc.)

Of course it's possible that he was privately asked to resign over this case. (If so I wouldn't have included that quotation in the press release, which really made me cringe. But that may be my bias showing through.) August 11 is before the story really broke. But it's shortly after a human rights group reported that Arar was being tortured, and Arar's wife asked Canada to recall its ambassador from Syria. (August 6th and 7th).

(There's plenty of other good stuff in the Post story, which I may get to in a later post. Very much worth a read.)

* I hesitated to post that link, since it contains a phone # that may be a general University line but may be Thompson's extension. I don't want to be indirectly responsible for any harassment--we don't know exactly what happened, and I trust you all to know better than that.

Comments

[Slartibartfast]

Although I'd like to see this story fleshed out with a lot more in the way of fact, I don't at all support sending suspects out to be tortured. It's almost exactly the same as if we'd done it ourselves.

Michael Kimmitt's the first one I knew of that paid any attention to this story. His first post on the subject was so full of hanky-wringing (yet remarkably fact-free) angst that I completely missed his second post on the subject, which contains the link to the WaPo article. Curiously, he seems to have given up all attention to this matter after the second post. All that concern, and so little attention span.