(9th in a series on a Canadian citizen who was deported by the United States to Syria and apparently tortured there. Previous posts in the series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.)
Obviously, Arar has not been proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and could never be proved guilty on the evidence listed in the previous post. That much is beyond dispute.
One point I forgot to mention in the previous post, and which I ought to have emphasized: Arar has never been charged with anything. Not in the United States, not in Canada, not even in Syria. This means that the U.S. and Canada at no point felt that they had probable cause (or the Candian legal equivalent) to arrest him. (The U.S. government also did not decide that sending him to Guantanamo was warranted.)
But even forgetting due process and burdens of proof--I think he is innocent. I am a liberal, card carrying ACLU type, who will be representing asylum seekers next semester, so I was probably predisposed to think that. And of course I don't know for sure; it's impossible to know without seeing the evidence against him. But the more I read about this case, the more convinced I am of it.
Most of the evidence against him is kept secret, and revealed only by anonymous government officials who sometimes say contradictory things--and who quite obviously have an incentive to tar Arar so that deporting him looks more justified. The evidence that is not disputed seems to be that his lease was signed by someone who was on an Al Qaeda watch list (he also had lunch with that guy, Almalki, at one point, but we don't know if he's guilty either--I'll go into Almalki more in another post); and that he confessed under torture in Syria to attending a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. Neither of these is very convincing proof of guilt. You have the Department of Justice refusing to acknowledge that Arar was tortured, even though they can only cite the Syrian government's assurances of this.
On the other hand you have this sympathetic father of two. You have his coworkers, one of whom was with him on September 11, shocked that he would be suspected. You have his statements, which sound very credible. Many aspects of his account are independently confirmed by press accounts before and after his release, and by multiple human rights organizations. He does not contradict himself. If any part of his statement has been proved false, I do not know of it. He has been charged with no crime, ever. The U.S. renewed his work permit five months before his capture, without incident. He is calling for a public inquiry to refute the charges against him. And while I haven't seen him speak, I've read a lot of his words, and he comes off as very credible and believable. At any rate, I believe him.
The main question that remains for me is: why on earth would the U.S. do what it did unless they had some compelling evidence? That's the million dollar question. I will explain why I think it's a difficult question, and give my best guess at the answer, in my next posts. Tune in tomorrow...(or perhaps later this afternoon.)
You are now up to post 16, but I'm only up to your current post - 9 - so without the benny of knowledge of your future posts, i'll posit an answer to this question.
Because they wanted to. Because they could.
I'm a big lefty too, but how cool is it to be able to ship someone off to a foreign country to get tortured into giving you information you want? Can you say power trip? Invincibility? Hubris?
To understand this perspective, you have to get inside the heads of the current regime in DC - they remain virtually untouchable, even by pols on the same side of the aisle! (e.g. John McCain, Bob Barr) I'm sure it helps them (Bush, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, etc) not to be bothered too much by principle, or morals, or anything like that, but c'mon folks, could anyone really claim to be surprised by a simple deportation? Of a Canadian, much less?
I mean, for the past couple of years in the U.S., we've had mainstream politicians and press folks and think tankers extolling the virtues of torture, America's right to it, and justifying it in any number of ways - in whole books sometimes! I've read it - it's unbelieveable - it's unthinkable - but it's been happening. Thus, I'm not surprised by the horror of this case, and I would not at all be surprised by the lack of seriousness with which this situation would be treated at a U.S. port of call. Shoot - I wouldn't even doubt if it was seen as a 'practice run' for the U.S. government's new terror policies. The game has changed in the U.S. to be sure. The right wing holds a lock on everything. The tide of anger is rising. The War on Iraq saved Bush's ass this time, but by 2008 we might once again be having class riots in the U.S.
Posted by: Peter | January 22, 2004 at 01:43 AM