Truth, Justice and the Un-American Way

Published on Tuesday, December 5, 2006 by the Christian Science Monitor
Truth, Justice, and the Un-American Way
by John Cavanagh

My organization, the Institute for Policy Studies, gave its annual human rights award this fall to Maher Arar, an innocent man the Bush administration falsely accused of being linked to Al Qaeda. His chilling case represents an opportunity for the new Democratic leadership in Congress to show the world that America has not entirely forgotten its proud history on human rights.
The general outline of Mr. Arar's story has been widely publicized. He is the joint Canadian-Syrian citizen who was detained at New York's JFK Airport in 2002 and "rendered" to Syria, a country the United States State Department accuses of routinely using torture. Syrian intelligence agents brutally tortured Arar - a fact confirmed by a Canadian inquiry - before releasing him nearly a year later without charging him.

Arar protested to the Canadian government and it conducted an in-depth inquiry into his case. When it declared him innocent of all terrorist ties in September, the Canadian House of Commons swiftly passed a unanimous motion apologizing to Arar. The head of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which provided misleading evidence against Arar to US agents that led to his arrest, also apologized to him and his family.

The Bush administration refused to cooperate with that Canadian inquiry and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales continues to deny any wrongdoing. I sent Mr. Gonzales a letter in early October requesting that, at a minimum, he clear Arar's name and lift the ban on his entry to the United States so that he could attend the awards ceremony in Washington.

I never received a response, and Arar had to send a videotaped acceptance speech. The personal details in his account reduced many of the 500 people gathered at the ceremony at the National Press Club in Washington to tears: His description of the first time he saw his cell, a grave-sized hole, where he spent 10 months of his life. In his words, his first beating was "painful to the point that I forgot every moment I had ever enjoyed in my life."

The loudest gasp from the audience came when Arar recounted how a US immigration official in New York defended the decision to render him to Syria by explaining that the INS (now known as US Citizenship and Immigration Services) was not the agency that had signed the Geneva Convention against torture.

"For me, what that really meant is we will send you to torture and we don't care," Arar told the crowd.

The rest of the article is at: http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1205-33.htm

NOT!

"The head of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which provided misleading evidence against Arar to US agents that led to his arrest, also apologized to him and his family."

:eyes: