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You are here: Home / Politics / War on Terror / War on Terror aka GSAVE® / Unacceptable

Unacceptable

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Whatever it is that makes America great, it sure is not this:

Canadian intelligence officials passed false warnings and bad information to American agents about a Muslim Canadian citizen, after which U.S. authorities secretly whisked him to Syria, where he was tortured, a judicial report found Monday.

[…] The inquiry, which focused on the Canadian intelligence services, found that agents who were under pressure to find terrorists after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, falsely labeled an Ottawa computer consultant, Maher Arar, as a dangerous radical. They asked U.S. authorities to put him and his wife, a university economist, on the al-Qaeda “watchlist,” without justification, the report said.

Arar was also listed as “an Islamic extremist individual” who was in the Washington area on Sept. 11. The report concluded that he had no involvement in Islamic extremism and was on business in San Diego that day, said the head of the inquiry commission, Ontario Justice Dennis O’Connor.The inquiry, which focused on the Canadian intelligence services, found that agents who were under pressure to find terrorists after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, falsely labeled an Ottawa computer consultant, Maher Arar, as a dangerous radical. They asked U.S. authorities to put him and his wife, a university economist, on the al-Qaeda “watchlist,” without justification, the report said.

Barring a long-overdue sense of shame, count on the usual suspects to put out the Frayed Electrical Cable Cookbook to show how great life was for innocent Canadian Maher Arar under CIA and Syrian captivity.

You can bet that there are more Maher Arars out there. Glenn Greenwald has a rundown of a few more that we know about – count the number times that the US invokes the State Secrets doctrine to cover up erroneous maltreatment exactly like Maher Arar’s. Given our present government’s manic bent for secrecy the actual number of innocent people taken from their previous lives, denied contact with their family and cruelly tortured, in some cases to death, is certainly far higher than we know. The AP suggests that the number could be staggering:

In the few short years since the first shackled Afghan shuffled off to Guantanamo, the U.S. military has created a global network of overseas prisons, its islands of high security keeping 14,000 detainees beyond the reach of established law.

Disclosures of torture and long-term arbitrary detentions have won rebuke from leading voices including the U.N. secretary-general and the U.S. Supreme Court. But the bitterest words come from inside the system, the size of several major U.S. penitentiaries.

Keep Maher Arar in mind when defenders put the best face on our system:

Every U.S. detainee in Iraq “is detained because he poses a security threat to the government of Iraq, the people of Iraq or coalition forces,” said U.S. Army Lt. Col. Keir-Kevin Curry, a spokesman for U.S.-led military detainee operations in Iraq.

That’s right, we ship an innocent Canadian citizen to Syria to be cruelly tortured with frayed electrical cables based on the “best” intelligence of US and Canadian authorities acting on their home turf, and Lt. Col. Curry wants us to believe that our intelligence in Iraq and Afghanistan is airtight enough to reliably tell a cabdriver from a jihadi. Funny, the FBI doesn’t need a translator or a Canada expert to mistakenly finger Maher Arar. Maybe if the US had Arabic translators and mideast experts to sort through the area’s byzantine cultural currents we might hope to reach the FBI’s stellar false-positive rate. Since we don’t have enough of either it is a statistical certainty that the occupation will have a false-positive rate that is orders of magnitude worse.

This parable should clarify what people mean when we talk about the government’s torture policy. Those who continue to argue that the question is whether to torture terrorists simply have no credibility. Torture advocates, revolting as that concept may be in our supposedly enlightened country, want to punish bin Laden and instead end up whipping innocent westerners like Maher Arar with frayed electrical cables. When one demands that the government have the right to mistreat its captives and in the same breath argues that the government should escape accountability for acting wrongly then mistakes like Arar become simply inevitable. Anybody who pretends otherwise is fooling himself.

Reader Interactions

42Comments

  1. 1.

    The Other Steve

    It appears to me that the Republican strategy here is to support torture, solely because the Democrats are against it. That is, they don’t really care about the morality of the issue, they are simply using it as a defining political opportunity.

    The GOP has made some electoral gains in recent years based on a perceived morality, but with this embrace of a highly immoral principle for purely partisan reasons does the GOP not risk a backlash?

  2. 2.

    DougJ

    Anyone want to bet that over at Free Republic they’re saying the guy was probably guilty and joking about doing this with Joe Wilson and Harry Reid?

  3. 3.

    Sojourner

    It appears to me that the Republican strategy here is to support torture, solely because the Democrats are against it.

    I’m not sure I agree. Watching Bush on television last Friday, all I could think of was this man is scared. He’s looking for the Republican congress to legalize what are likely to be war crimes. My fear is that the congress will ditch all remaining semblances of morality and bail this f*cker out. To the everlasting shame of this once-great country.

  4. 4.

    DougJ

    Actually, it’s a bit worse than I thought:

    To: 308MBR

    What’s new and different is that this Muslim was delivered to the Syrians by the US and Canada. That makes it news.

    6 posted on 09/18/2006 10:10:15 PM PDT by cydcharisse
    [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies ]
    To: cydcharisse

    You’re right of course. This is a process that should be repeated a few million MORE times.

    7 posted on 09/18/2006 10:27:38 PM PDT by 308MBR (When you call islam “medieval”, muslims get mad and act even more “medieval”.)
    [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | View Replies ]

    and then there’s this:

    To: Turbopilot

    We maybe should not be torturing mooselimbs, what isn’t in contention is the fact that we should be torturing N.Y. Times staff.

    12 posted on 09/19/2006 1:43:07 AM PDT by Joe Boucher (an enemy of islam)
    [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies ]

  5. 5.

    Punchy

    Tim–

    Your first blockquote is all jacked up. Repeats itself. Says the same thing twice. Cut and paste error, IMO.

  8. 8.

    canuckistani

    Colin Powell is right. America is losing their moral authority in the war on terror.

    And up here, expect to see some mountie heads rolling in the snow. This is just too horrible for words.

  9. 9.

    Keith

    This kind of shit is why I get so pissed off when I hear the usual talking heads say that these people being rendered or aggressively interrogated or whatever deserve it because they’re the “worst of the worst”. It’s also the reason why our system is *supposed* to be based on presumption of innocence. How many times do we hear that these people *are* terrorists because they were swept up on the field of battle? It’s bullshit noise stated as fact when the reality is that we did not take 14000 prisoners of war in Afghanistan; some were given to us, and some were taken inside the US, often based on hearsay.
    We’ve sold our soul to the devil but are too much in debt to buy it back.

  11. 11.

    Hyperion

    a bit OT but… via Kos

    In what could be the most troubling development in the War on Terror since it began, Pakistan has released nearly all of the Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists it has had in custody since the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

  12. 12.

    RSA

    Here’s a bit more detail on the last part of the story, which Tim F. mentions briefly, and I’m sure everyone’s aware of it (sorry, broken link):

    Federal Court Judge David Trager dismissed the federal lawsuit brought on behalf of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was “rendered” to Syria by U.S. authorities where he was tortured and held in prison for nearly a year. In his ruling, Judge Trager determined that he could not review the decision by U.S. officials to send Mr. Arar to Syria to be tortured, because it was a question of national security and foreign relations.

    Unbelievable. Accountability is everything in government.

  13. 13.

    Punchy

    Yglesias throws this freaking CRAZY idea out there:

    At this point, I think I need to bring up what one might call the Craziest Goddamn Thing I’ve Heard In a Long Time. This story came to me last week from an anonymous individual who I would say is in a position to know about such things. According to this person, the DOD has (naturally) been doing some analysis on airstrikes against Iran. The upshot of the analysis was that conventional bombardment would degrade the Iranian nuclear program by about 50 percent. By contrast, if the arsenal included small nuclear weapons, we could get up to about 80 percent destroying. In response to this, persons inside the Office of the Vice President took the view that we could use the nukes — in other words, launch an unprovoked nuclear first strike against Iran — and then simply deny that we’d done so. Detectable radiation in the area of the bombed sites would be attributed to the fact that they were, after all, nuclear facilities we’d just hit.

    Holy Jesus potato chips….this is just lunitical…

  14. 14.

    The Other Steve

    I’m not sure I agree. Watching Bush on television last Friday, all I could think of was this man is scared. He’s looking for the Republican congress to legalize what are likely to be war crimes. My fear is that the congress will ditch all remaining semblances of morality and bail this f*cker out. To the everlasting shame of this once-great country.

    It may be a combination of things.

    But I was listening to Fred Barnes and Mort Kondracke, and they said that the Republican plan for the 2006 elections was to get the Democrats to vote against torture and then run that as an issue against them in the election.

    I think Bush is scared that the plan may not be working, mainly because a handful of Republicans have rebelled and said “Look, we’re not going to vote for torture just to further your political goals”. If the Republicans lose control of the House and Senate, Bush is in for a world of conflict and he fundamentally hates conflict and argument.

    I’m outlining this, because not only do I think there is truth here, but framing the debate in this way brings scrutiny to Republican tactics which helps to educate the voters.

    Not only should Democrats be standing up and saying “this is wrong”, they ought to be pointing out the motivation behind the Republicans action. That is, they aren’t just cruel morons, they’re political partisan morons.

  15. 15.

    Tsulagi

    First, a little housekeeping to lessen the burden for little tranny Annie Coulter. She’s been meaning to get to this and could use the help. Thank God the grownups worthless fucking retards are now in charge!

    Great, so we’ve been rendering friendly country’s citizens from within our own borders to known torture chambers. Gee, I thought one of the retardnuts talking points was that we had to whack Saddam because he did torture chamber kind of shit. Oh well, I guess if it has the seal of approval from Falwell’s Jesus it’s okay and patriotic. Big difference.

    Predictable result from torture in this situation. He confessed to anything they wanted to hear even though it was false. How many times would you have to hit these stupid, spineless assholes upside the head with a baseball bat attempting to knock something into the void about torture? IT DOESN’T WORK SHITHEAD!

    They secretly rendered a Canadian citizen while he was in NYC. You think they’d have great qualms doing that also to a U.S. citizen? Maybe it’s already happened. Moral authority? They never had it. As long as there are Bush type Republicans in office they will continue to tear down this country.

  16. 16.

    The Other Steve

    Punchy – It’s sad. I thought MAD(Mutual Assured Destruction) was a sound deterant. If that is what Cheney and the boys are advocating as a response to Iran, ok.

    In fact, I still think that is the way to respond to Iran, simply make it clear that if they use a nuke, their country will be turned into a sheet of glass.

    Although, you know, there’s a bizarre correlation here with the book Dune. Perhaps GW Bush is really Muad’Dib? Did we ever consider that?

  17. 17.

    The Other Steve

    Although, yeah… the whole sending a Canadian citizen to Syria to torture him, kind of puts a damper on the Republicans are just promoting torture as an election issue.

    The whole idea of sending him to Syria really sickens me.

  18. 18.

    p.lukasiak

    Does anyone remember how Bushco got the UN to nullify international jurisdiction for war crimes perpetrated by occupation forces in Iraq, based on the solemn promise to prosecute those war criminals ourselves.

    Now Bush is trying to make it impossible for anyone who engaged in torture (with official sanction) to be prosecuted for war crimes.

    Guess what….the next time the US asks for it to be allowed to handle its own war criminals, the answer will be “Hell no!” The wingnuts should be really proud of Bush for this….

  19. 19.

    Punchy

    The whole idea of sending him to Syria really sickens me.

    Oh! To be a drill-bit and electrical cord salesman in Syria and Eygpt in October of 2001!! Imagine how rich I’d be right now!

  20. 20.

    Keith

    Although, you know, there’s a bizarre correlation here with the book Dune. Perhaps GW Bush is really Muad’Dib? Did we ever consider that?

    Except the “spice” (or more accurately, the “spice blow”) has given him a permanent jaw twitch instead of glowing blue eyes. All hail Muad’Ipshit!

  21. 21.

    RSA

    Perhaps GW Bush is really Muad’Dib?

    Luckily enough, the administration has more than one good candidate to play the fat, evil Baron Harkonnen.

  23. 23.

    Rusty Shackleford

    Karen Hughes was on Hardball last night spouting the BushCo company line. The “define/redefine” meme is disingenuous. The Geneva Conventions “defined” the guidelines and Bush is attempting to “redefine” them. The doublespeak by Hughes is criminal.

    MATTHEWS: General Colin Powell knows everything you just said and he‘s also come out and said the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism because of our treatment of terror suspects. How do you respond to General Powell?

    HUGHES: Well I haven‘t talked with him recently about this issue, but the president believes that this CIA program, that the CIA‘s ability to interrogate very senior level al Qaeda prisoners and remember, there are no more prisoners in CIA control. They‘re now all in Guantanamo. But should we capture tomorrow a senior al Qaeda leader and should that leader have information that might prevent an attack on America, the president feels it‘s very important that we be able to question that person and that the rules be clear for those who are involved in the questioning.

    And what he is proposing are the very same standards that Senator McCain championed last year, that the Geneva Convention, Common Article III, which is right now very vague. It basically says (INAUDIBLE) affront against personal dignity. Well, you know, some criminals, some terrorists, might say being handcuffed is an affront against their personal dignity.

    MATTHEWS: Yes.

    HUGHES: Certainly put in jail is an affront against. So what the president is trying to do is define what that means, using the standards that Senator McCain championed last year, which are a prohibition on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. What that does is that gives you a clear body of case law, so that you know what your people can and can‘t do, rather than some vague standard. And there is widespread international precedent for this, for the United States to, in our own courts, clearly define, more clearly define our obligations under international law.

    MATTHEWS: But the president, according to reports, has already approved the water boarding of Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, KSM as he calls him. Why go to Congress now, after you‘ve used this rough treatment of detainees, to get approval for that kind of method?

    HUGHES: Well Chris, what the president has said is that we do not torture, that we have not tortured, that, yes, we have had to use some techniques and he did not specify which ones and said he would not, because it would help the terrorists know what to train against. That‘s one of the reasons they‘ve had to use techniques, is because they clearly have training that helps them resist normal interrogation.

    The president has said that he believes at this point in the process it‘s important that we clearly define for our own people, now that the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court decision made an important, I‘m not a lawyer Chris, but I‘ve talked to the lawyers about this. It made a very important legal distinction. It held that this Common Article III of the Geneva Convention applies to our war against al Qaeda and therefore the questioners, our CIA operatives who are questioning these terrorists, could be subject to being found guilty of war crimes if they did not comply with the standards. Well the standards aren‘t clear.

    So they have to know the rules. They have to know what they‘re complying with and that‘s why the president went to Congress to try to clarify this. We‘re not trying to, I‘ve seen it reported that we‘re trying to redefine. We‘re not redefining anything. We‘re trying to define it and clarify it and make it clear what the rules are, so that our people won‘t violate those rules.

  25. 25.

    ImJohnGalt

    I read a piece today about Mr. Arar, who has been characterized as a wacky fundamentalist in some press reports (thankfully, few Canadian ones). How many fundamentalists have wives who walk about completely un-burkaed? Furthermore, how many have wives with PhD’s? My understanding is that the extreme fundamentalist Muslims are definitely anti-“that whole edumacated women” thing.

  26. 26.

    Pb

    Blah. Who do you have to beat the crap out of without justification to get the other 30% of America to notice? Definitely not any sort of Iraqi or Afghani–and not a Canadian Muslim either, apparently. But what about an American soldier? Nah, probably not that either. Face it, they’re way beyond reasoning with at this point.

  28. 28.

    Keith

    I really wanted to see someone try to defend this (in a non-spoof).

    The surreal thing is hearing administration people try to defend this turd. You can’t even bring up specific arguments with them because they pull that “Well, we can’t talk about specific interrogation methods because the Enemy will Adapt & Win”. It’s similar to their legal strategy of asking courts to dismiss challenges to it because you can’t talk about it.

  29. 29.

    matt

    Who taught you that torture was wrong? Who taught you about human rights? Who taught you about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights? Who taught you about the importance of the rule of law? Who taught you about America? Your parents, your teachers, your church, watching tv?

    Serious questions, no snark. It seems like a lot of people never learned any of that, which is really, really sad. But I’m interested in hearing your stories..maybe this could be something cool.

  30. 30.

    Perry Como

    Mistakes will happen in every war. While I feel bad for Mr. Arar, he’s collateral damage in our war against Islamofascism. Luckily the mistake was recognized and he is now a free man. That proves the system works.

  31. 31.

    Pb

    matt,

    Well of course parents teach by example, but I learned about The Constitution in school–we read it and stuff.

  32. 32.

    sglover

    My understanding is that the “evidence” against Mr. Arar is this: The brother of one of his co-workers is supposed to be a terrorist!

    I wonder if the extremely tenuous nature of this “case” might penetrate the skulls of even our brain-dead, daddy-figure-craving, idiot right-wingers? Arar could have been anyone — any one of us.

  33. 33.

    Tsulagi

    If the retardocons are so gung ho to have someone else run juice through someone’s balls, how about we follow Israel’s example? Now those guys have some experience in terrorism, interrogation techniques including torture, and all that stuff. Plus they have great motivation to get it right. For them it’s not “over there,” it’s there.

    In 1999, after extensively considering the issue, the Israeli Supreme Court banned torture. Their finding was that in addition to being inhumane, torture doesn’t work and harmed Israeli interests. Pre-Bush, our military and intelligence services had also come to the same conclusions years ago.

    The Israeli Supreme Court also found the “ticking time bomb” scenario so pushed by proponents of torture didn’t happen. That was Hollywood.

    But maybe in an effort to placate the hardliners, that Supreme Court ruled that if authorities were certain there was a ticking time bomb situation, and they were certain they had someone in custody who had and was refusing to divulge information that could avert the attack, they could immediately authorize torture. No limits. Plus no prior court approval required since time would be critical in the situation.

    You can picture our “leaders” salivating over that. Yeah, that’s what we want! Until they hear the kicker. The Israeli Supreme Court ruled they had better be correct about the situation and the person in custody. If wrong, the authority approving torture, not the interrogators, would be subject to prosecution. You can see our admin going limp over that part. Responsibility and accountability are concepts they can’t even see let alone begin to grasp.

  34. 34.

    matt

    Pb, that’s what’s really interesting to me. I’m beginning to wonder if that wasn’t the case for a lot of people.

    I think we all grow up in our little words and as we get older, we realize that what’s normal to us, isn’t necessarily normal for other people.

    I just always assumed that in social studies class, everyone learns about “America”, but maybe that’s not the case?

    That’s kind of why I wanted to get everyone’s take on how they came about believing what they believe about our country.

  35. 35.

    Krista

    The inquiry, which focused on the Canadian intelligence services, found that agents who were under pressure to find terrorists after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, falsely labeled an Ottawa computer consultant, Maher Arar, as a dangerous radical.

    At least there WAS an inquiry — we’re not as far gone as I feared.

  36. 36.

    Pb

    matt,

    Maybe they were playing hookey that week or something, and only got the usual rabid nationalism indoctrination, but missed that whole boring ‘Constitution’ part. That is to say, they just know that America is the greatest nation in the world, but they don’t know why.

  37. 37.

    matt

    they just know that America is the greatest nation in the world, but they don’t know why.

    Post. of. the. year.

    There’s so much insight and truth in that single sentence, reading it was like having an epiphany.

  38. 38.

    Beej

    Every once in a while some university Poli Sci class or law school club conducts this little experiment: They question people on the street in an American city and ask them if they would be in favor of 1) a law that allowed everyone to say whatever they wanted about the President and other elected officials and anything else they wanted to comment upon, so long as it didn’t cause a riot or physical harm and it wasn’t obscene; 2)a law stating that government should stay out of religion and religious institutions should stay out of government; 3) a law stating that newspapers, radio, and TV should be able to broadcast anything they want in their news broadcasts so long as it is true. . . . Well, you get the drift. Every time they try it the result is the same. A majority of those questioned not only don’t recognize the questions as taken directly from the First Amendment, but don’t think law like that should be passed. So much for educating people about the Constitution. God help us all!!

  40. 40.

    Tsulagi

    AG Gonzales has said it was a deportation

    Now if you believe that, I really, really have to stop asking the rhetorical question how stupid can Bush apologists be. They’d know no bounds.

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