Maher Arar

This article (via Brad DeLong, via Crooked Timber) is about the Maher Arar case. It outlines the basic story, which many of you will be familiar with: a Canadian citizen, changing planes at JFK, is deported to Syria where he is tortured for months and then released. (Arar is a joint Canadian-Syrian citizen but had not been to Syria for 16 years. I vaguely remember reading, though I do not have a cite for this, that the reason he's a joint citizen is that Syria did not allow him to renounce his citizenship there.)

The article, an editorial by a Con. Law professor at Mount Holyoke, contains some new details, about exactly what happened to Arar,

So, they put Arar on a private plane and flew him to Washington, D.C. There, a new team, presumably from the CIA, took over and delivered him, by way of Jordan, to Syrian interrogators. This covert operation was legal, our Justice Department later claimed, because Arar is also a citizen of Syria by birth....

The Syrians locked Arar in an underground cell the size of a grave: 3 feet wide, 6 feet long, 7 feet high. Then they questioned him, under torture, repeatedly, for 10 months. Finally, when it was obvious that their prisoner had no terrorist ties, they let him go, 40 pounds lighter, with a pronounced limp and chronic nightmares.

and about what the government's basis for suspicion was.

The Syrians believed that Arar might be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Why? Because a cousin of his mother's had been, nine years earlier, long after Arar moved to Canada. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police reported that the lease on Arar's apartment had been witnessed by a Syrian- born Canadian who was believed to know an Egyptian Canadian whose brother was allegedly mentioned in an al Qaeda document.

There are also some suggestions that this is not an isolated case or a horrible mistake:

Our intelligence agencies have a name for this torture-by-proxy. They call it "extraordinary rendition." As one intelligence official explained: "We don't kick the s -- out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the s -- out of them."

This secret program for torturing suspects has been authorized, if that is the right word for it, by a secret presidential finding. Where the president gets the authority to have anyone tortured has never been explained.

This is not an objective news story. It's an editorial, by someone very sympathetic with Arar and disgusted with his government. But it is fairly clear that something terrible happened, to a citizen of one of our closest allies, because of us. It seems very likely that it happened even though he was innocent. And our government is more or less unrepentant, and does not promise not to do the same thing again.

Why the hell isn't this a scandal? Why isn't it a major story with investigative reporters at big dailies assigned, front page stories and weekly follow-ups, calls for Congressional investigation? (Apparently it is in Canada.) I don't know if it's even been covered on television at all (I bet PBS has done something, but I have little confidence in the 24 hour news channels).

To a limited extent I'm part of the problem. I read it several weeks ago, and I thought "that's awful," but I moved on and sort of forgot about it. It took Pyle's outraged editorial, DeLong's call for impeachment , Brian Weatherson's saying he'd "be disappointed if no one from the administration ends up in jail over this", to light a fire under me. And I don't know if those would have sufficed, if not for studying immigration law last semester and having a very close friend questioned by the Department of Homeland Security because of what was pretty clearly racial profiling (he said to me afterwards "I don't want to think about what could have happened if I wasn't a citizen".)

Well, we in the blogosphere like to pat ourselves on the back for succeeding where the conventional media fail. I've got some background in journalism, some knowledge of immigration law and the Freedom of Information Act, a few minor connections in the field, and free Lexis-Nexis. I'm going to poke into this story further. Don't expect much--it's probably well beyond my capabilities and available time, & I'll probably just end up re-hashing what the Canadian press has done. But I'll see what I can do.

Comments

[Katherine]

That last article I linked to is via CalPundit, he and especially Jeanne D'Arc have been covering this some.

The bubbly and vivacious ambassador to Canada is the former governor of my state, who reminds me that as little as I like living in "Mittsachusetts" it could be worse.

[Factory]

I'm not too surprised that it did not get much coverage in the US. There seems to be a very large meme going around the US blogosphere (and media for that matter) that if something, somehow, doesn't affect Americans, then it doesn't matter.
This seems to be reflected, when talking about legal and civil rights, by adopting a legalistic stance on matters such as the Arar case, and completely ignoring the moral ideas behind the framing of the law.
Strangely enuff I don't tend to see this attitude as mainly a rightist attitude, it tend to affect all the spectrum.

[Jesurgislac]

I vaguely remember reading, though I do not have a cite for this, that the reason he's a joint citizen is that Syria did not allow him to renounce his citizenship there.

I have read the same thing: all the reports say that Maher Arar was travelling on a Canadian passport, that he had become a naturalized Canadian citizen in 1991, and that he had as far as he was concerned renounced his Syrian citizenship: but that Syria doesn't accept that native-born Syrians have a right to renounce Syrian citizenship.

But it is fairly clear that something terrible happened, to a citizen of one of our closest allies, because of us. It seems very likely that it happened even though he was innocent. And our government is more or less unrepentant, and does not promise not to do the same thing again.

Why should they? They have been doing the same sort of thing all along to citizens of allied countries in Bagram Airbase and Guantanamo Bay.

Factory:Strangely enuff I don't tend to see this attitude as mainly a rightist attitude, it tend to affect all the spectrum.

I think so. See: You see, the trouble is, I'm not actually American ...

[Slartibartfast]

I'm going to wait for more in the way of fact to come out. Sure, this needs to be investigated. HAS to be investigated. A serious accusation has been made, and someone needs to be held accountable.

But DeLong calling for a Bush impeachment is an indication of how unhinged otherwise rational people can be when suffering from BHS. There's nothing anywhere in there that has anything whatever to do with Bush. Unless, maybe, Bush had written an executive order making it all happen.

[Mark S.]

Slart, Bush did have to issue a presidential finding authorizing the use of extraordinary rendition. It's in the original article cited by BdeL. The author of the editorial asks, rhetorically, from whence the President derives the power to authorize torture. It's a good question.

[Slartibartfast]

Per SFGate (which I usually find to be something to the left of objective):

This secret program for torturing suspects has been authorized, if that is the right word for it, by a secret presidential finding. Where the president gets the authority to have anyone tortured has never been explained.

Hasn't been explained at all, as far as I'm concerned. Hell, its very existence is suspect. SFGate: shoddy reporting since, well, we can't remember.

[Katherine]

The stuff about the presidential authorization was the weakest part of the article, I thought. We simply don't know what Bush's involvement was, if any. I am almost 100% certain it fell far hort of, "yes, deport this Candian to Syria, where he will probably be tortured based on weak evidence." Calls for impeachment are premature at best. But it took DeLong's calling for the President's impeachment, and Crooked Timber's call for someone going to jail--to make me realize that it hadn't even occured to me that there had to be an investigation, or that someone, and possibly someone relatively high up, could lose their job over this. I am not comfortable with that level of complacency, and I think it's much, much more harmful than some overheated blog rhetoric.

[Thorley Winston]

But DeLong calling for a Bush impeachment is an indication of how unhinged otherwise rational people can be when suffering from BHS. There's nothing anywhere in there that has anything whatever to do with Bush.

True, it is every bit as silly as someone calling for Clinton’s impeachment after Ruby Ridge, Waco, or Elian Gonzales. Looks like Brad Delong is every bit as "rational" as Jerry Falwell.

[Slartibartfast]

I agree, Katherine. Kimmitt noted this situation a while back mid-November), and I think it just took this long to come up to the collective consciousness. Because in the blogosphere, unlike in the dailies, a story dies when there's a dearth of fact.

I have to confess that when I read it, I thought it inevitable that the Canadian government would press the U.S. government very hard for an investigation into the matter. Oh, via Kimmitt (again), here's more on the matter. From WaPo, no less.

[Slartibartfast]

Do I need to put a few exclamation points on the end of the last post, so people will go read the WaPo article? Someone did in fact make the call, and that person no longer has his job.

If Arar's account is truthful, he needs to lose more than his job. He, along with anyone else involved.

[Katherine]

Slarti--thank you, thank you. I'm going to post that on the main page.

[Slartibartfast]

:)

I exist only to serve man. [/Twilight Zone]

[Rita Lauzon]

QUESTION: Has Maher Arar taken a terrorist training course in Middle East ?

[matttbastard]

ANSWER: No.

[Andrew Milner]

Maher Arar: 27 January 2007
A public apology from the Canadian Prime Minister, compensation of US$8.0mil. Head of RCMP resigns in disgrace. And still the United States of Torture refuses to acknowledge its gross mistake. On a blog site recently, someone accused me of being an obese, blond, blue-eyed, closet Nazi, SUV driving American. Now that's really getting nasty. American citizen is an accident of birth, but you don't have to live there.