Torturers-Я-US

Today I will talk about the case of a Canadian citizen kidnapped by the US Government and sent to Syria. Here is the New Yorker’s description from 2005:

Two and a half years ago, American officials, suspecting Arar of being a terrorist, apprehended him in New York and sent him back to Syria, where he endured months of brutal interrogation, including torture. When Arar described his experience in a phone interview recently, he invoked an Arabic expression. The pain was so unbearable, he said, that “you forget the milk that you have been fed from the breast of your mother.”

Since we do not want to torture suspects, we turn them over to governments that do torture. That way our hands are "clean." The New Yorker continues:

Most of the photos of this kind of torture are too graphic to use hereA year later, in October, 2003, Arar was released without charges, after the Canadian government took up his cause. Imad Moustapha, the Syrian Ambassador in Washington, announced that his country had found no links between Arar and terrorism. Arar, it turned out, had been sent to Syria on orders from the U.S. government, under a secretive program known as “extraordinary rendition.” This program had been devised as a means of extraditing terrorism suspects from one foreign state to another for interrogation and prosecution. Critics contend that the unstated purpose of such renditions is to subject the suspects to aggressive methods of persuasion that are illegal in America—including torture.

How does the CIA feel about these programs? 

Dan Coleman, an ex-F.B.I. agent who retired last July, because of asthma, scoffed at the idea that a C.I.A. agent was now having compunctions about renditions. The C.I.A., Coleman said, liked rendition from the start. “They loved that these guys would just disappear off the books, and never be heard of again,” he said. “They were proud of it."

Are you proud of it? Maybe you are, but I am not. Canada concluded that Arar was innocent. Canada was not proud of itself, and gave Maher Arar $10 million plus legal fees for Canada's part in the fiasco. Even more astounding for a government, the House of Commons unanimously apologized!

What about the ones who just disappeared? We will never know. It is the rare case that becomes public, and even then the publicity on the case in minimal. How much have you heard about these two cases? There was some on this case, but yesterday's case I had not heard about until National Review misreported it.  

At least we can be thankful that the US does not have secret torture prisons. Can't we? More tomorrow