[Mb-civic] OP-ED COLUMNIST Torture, American Style By BOB HERBERT

[Michael Butler]

 The New York Times
February 11, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Torture, American Style
By BOB HERBERT

Maher Arar is a 34-year-old native of Syria who emigrated to Canada as a
teenager. On Sept. 26, 2002, as he was returning from a family vacation in
Tunisia, he was seized by American authorities at Kennedy Airport in New
York, where he was in the process of changing planes.

Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was not charged with a crime. But, as Jane
Mayer tells us in a compelling and deeply disturbing article in the current
issue of The New Yorker, he "was placed in handcuffs and leg irons by
plainclothes officials and transferred to an executive jet."

In an instant, Mr. Arar was swept into an increasingly common nightmare,
courtesy of the United States of America. The plane that took off with him
from Kennedy "flew to Washington, continued to Portland, Maine, stopped in
Rome, Italy, then landed in Amman, Jordan."

Any rights Mr. Arar might have thought he had, either as a Canadian citizen
or a human being, had been left behind. At times during the trip, Mr. Arar
heard the pilots and crew identify themselves in radio communications as
members of "the Special Removal Unit." He was being taken, on the orders of
the U.S. government, to Syria, where he would be tortured.

The title of Ms. Mayer's article is "Outsourcing Torture." It's a detailed
account of the frightening and extremely secretive U.S. program known as
"extraordinary rendition."

This is one of the great euphemisms of our time. Extraordinary rendition is
the name that's been given to the policy of seizing individuals without even
the semblance of due process and sending them off to be interrogated by
regimes known to practice torture. In terms of bad behavior, it stands side
by side with contract killings.

Our henchmen in places like Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Uzbekistan and Jordan are
torturing terror suspects at the behest of a nation - the United States -
that just went through a national election in which the issue of moral
values was supposed to have been decisive. How in the world did we become a
country in which gays' getting married is considered an abomination, but
torture is O.K.?

As Ms. Mayer pointed out: "Terrorism suspects in Europe, Africa, Asia and
the Middle East have often been abducted by hooded or masked American
agents, then forced onto a Gulfstream V jet, like the one described by Arar.
... Upon arriving in foreign countries, rendered suspects often vanish.
Detainees are not provided with lawyers, and many families are not informed
of their whereabouts."

Mr. Arar was seized because his name had turned up on a watch list of terror
suspects. He was reported to have been a co-worker of a man in Canada whose
brother was a suspected terrorist.

"Although he initially tried to assert his innocence, he eventually
confessed to anything his tormentors wanted him to say," Ms. Mayer wrote.

The confession under torture was worthless. Syrian officials reported back
to the United States that they could find no links between Mr. Arar and
terrorism. He was released in October 2003 without ever being charged and is
now back in Canada.

Barbara Olshansky is the assistant legal director of the Center for
Constitutional Rights, which is representing Mr. Arar in a lawsuit against
the U.S. I asked her to describe Mr. Arar's physical and emotional state
following his release from custody.

She sounded shaken by the memory. "He's not a big guy," she said. "He had
lost more than 40 pounds. His pallor was terrible, and his eyes were sunken.
He looked like someone who was kind of dead inside."

Any government that commits, condones, promotes or fosters torture is a
malignant force in the world. And those who refuse to raise their voices
against something as clearly evil as torture are enablers, if not
collaborators.

There is a widespread but mistaken notion in the U.S. that everybody seized
by the government in its so-called war on terror is in fact somehow
connected to terrorist activity. That is just wildly wrong.

Tony Blair knows a little about that sort of thing. Just two days ago the
British prime minister formally apologized to 11 people who were wrongfully
convicted and imprisoned for bombings in England by the Irish Republican
Army three decades ago.

Jettisoning the rule of law to permit such acts of evil as kidnapping and
torture is not a defensible policy for a civilized nation. It's wrong. And
nothing good can come from it.

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