|
Somnabulist
Location: corner of No and Where
|
This is why neither torture, denying people due process rights, or any other human right is acceptable:
Quote:
Who is Maher Arar? He doesn’t fit the mold of public hero. A man of slight build, unassuming character and average looks, Arar is strident yet soft-spoken. Before his detention at J.F.K., he was an apolitical workaholic who was obsessed only with making ends meet and spending free time with his family. “Engineers by nature are machines,” he says. “They work 9 to 9. They do what they’re told to do.” But it wasn’t a bad life. The Damascus native, now 34, immigrated to Canada with his family in 1987 and became a citizen four years later. By 1997, he was making a decent living in Ottawa amid the city’s high-tech boom. Two years later, while his wife Monia Mazigh was completing a Ph.D. in finance at McGill, Arar took a job at the MathWorks, a Boston-area computer company. In 2001, wanting to be near family and friends, he returned full-time to Ottawa and started a consultancy specializing in wireless technology.
That life came to an abrupt end on Sept. 26, 2002, when Arar was pulled aside while passing through J.F.K. after a vacation in Tunisia, where most of his wife’s family lives. He was detained at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, where he says U.S. authorities questioned him for 10 days. Then, in the middle of the night, he was put into shackles and spirited away via Jordan to Syria, a country he hadn’t been to in 16 years— despite the fact that he was a naturalized Canadian citizen traveling on a Canadian passport en route to Canada.
Arar ended up in a dark, 1-m by 2-m cell he calls the “grave” in the Syrian military intelligence agency’s Palestine branch in Damascus. He was held there without charge for 10 months and 10 days. During his first two weeks, he claims, he was interrogated about people he had known in Canada, sometimes for 18 hours at a time, and tortured. One punishment, he says, was repeated lashings with a 5-cm black metal cable on his palms, wrists, lower back and hips. The mental ordeal was also brutal, he said in November 2003 at one of the most dramatic press conferences ever televised in Canada. “The second and third days were the worst,” he told the world that day. “I could hear other prisoners being tortured, and screaming.” During his first week in prison, he says, he falsely confessed that he had received military training in Afghanistan.
Many would have crumbled emotionally under such duress, but Arar hung tough. Finally, almost a year later, on Oct. 5, 2003, the Syrians released him, saying publicly that they considered him “completely innocent.” When Arar made it back to Canada, Amnesty International’s Neve was among those who met him at the airport in Montreal. “There is absolutely no doubt in my mind,” Neve declared at the time, “that he has been through a horrific ordeal.”
Arar now faced a dilemma: whether or not to go public with his story. He says most members of his family, who grew up in Syria under the oppressive rule of Hafez Assad, advised him to get on with his life and not cause problems for relatives still in Syria. But there was also the opposing pressure of many unnamed sources who were leaking stories to the media alleging that Arar was not the innocent he claimed to be.
In the end, Arar says, he decided he had a “responsibility as a Canadian and as a human being to talk about it,” and not just for his own sake. “There are people who are being tortured now as we speak,” he says. “There are people who are being jailed unjustly.” Mazigh, who ran unsuccessfully for the New Democratic Party in the 2004 federal election, says she supports his decision, but it has been a rough period. Going public, she says, led to “total confusion about our feelings, about our relations, about our new life.” Her husband, she says, is “absolutely a different person” from the one she met and married a decade ago. Others close to Arar describe him as distraught, stressed out. Mazigh works full-time at n.d.p. headquarters in Ottawa, while Arar, unable to find a job, stays home most days helping care for their young children. He spends hours each day responding to the various political and legal issues that affect his case, his reputation and the broader cause he has agreed to defend.
Canadians have warmed to these media-awkward souls, Arar and Mazigh, partly because they are so typical—a young couple, both professionals with Canadian university degrees, struggling to raise two children. Canada’s Muslims and Arabs, especially those who are from “problem countries” with suspected links to terrorism, can easily identify with them, says Riad Saloojee, head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations—Canada. Among Arar’s many supporters, the perception is that what happened to him could happen to almost anyone else. Muslims “live in the shadow of Arar,” Saloojee says. “There has been a loss of confidence in the Canadian government as to its commitment to the citizenship of Canadian Arabs and Muslims.”
Arar’s case points to the risks inherent in America’s dominant role in the post-9/11 world. It appears that U.S. officials triggered the entire episode, but they have offered little in the way of explanation and refuse to participate in the Canadian inquiry. Arar may get some answers if his U.S. lawsuit survives its first major challenge—a motion to dismiss the case on technical grounds. If the case moves to the discovery phase, says Steven Watt, one of Arar’s U.S. attorneys, “that should enable us to get our hands on documentation that would definitively show what the U.S. involvement was in his removal to Syria, and the extent of it, as well as that of Canada.”
|
http://www.timecanada.com/CNOY/story.adp?year=2004
P.S. The U.S. government is attempting to dismiss Arar's lawsuit on "national security" grounds. At least Blair might have had the balls to apologize.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...11.html?sub=AR
__________________
"You have reached Ritual Sacrifice. For goats press one, or say 'goats.'"
|