Torture
I heard this story on NPR yesterday while taking my cat to the vet. I came home and went looking for more information. I figured this has to be the biggest news story going right now, right? Nowhere to be seen on the front page of cnn.com. Not on the BBC News front page. It's not even on the NPR front page--I had to do a search to find the story! I even went back through three pages of Dailykos. The only place this story is getting any play is on Marc Cooper's blog.
Maher Arar is a Syrian-born Canadian citizen. For reasons that nobody knows, his name ended up on a terrorist watch list (along with his wife, six-year-old daughter and six-month-old son). He was arrested for no reason beyond being on that list while on a layover in New York, extradited to one of our secret prisons in Syria, tortured until he made false confessions (and I mean serious torture--not "stress positions" or "exposure to cold," but beaten with cables), and thrown into a tiny cell where he was held for 10 months.
We've known that cases like Maher Arar's existed for a long time, just by simple mathematical probability. As we get new revelations about how many prisoners we have in this war on terror, I've started to wonder if the majority of them weren't cases like Arar's. But this is the smoking gun. This is the proof of how misguided...no, fuck that, how flat-out EVIL the course this administration is pursuing is. This story is breaking in the middle of a congressional battle to codify this administration's strategy into law (a battle which the spineless Democrats are distancing themselves from...wha?). THIS IS A HUGE STORY. Instead, the story of the day seems to be that some looney South American politician called Bush "the devil."
This also sheds light on the debate over racial profiling at airports. I hear so many people say things like "I don't care if we hurt the Arabs' feelings. Our security is more important than being sensitive and politically correct." This illustrates that we're not just talking about people being "offended" or "having their feelings hurt." And no, I don't think my security or safety are more important. Even if I felt that these strategies could eventually result in a world where I would be 100% safe from a terrorist attack (an absurd premise, anyway), it is more important to me that the U.S. government not commit these acts of inhuman torture in the name of keeping me safe.
Maher Arar is a Syrian-born Canadian citizen. For reasons that nobody knows, his name ended up on a terrorist watch list (along with his wife, six-year-old daughter and six-month-old son). He was arrested for no reason beyond being on that list while on a layover in New York, extradited to one of our secret prisons in Syria, tortured until he made false confessions (and I mean serious torture--not "stress positions" or "exposure to cold," but beaten with cables), and thrown into a tiny cell where he was held for 10 months.
We've known that cases like Maher Arar's existed for a long time, just by simple mathematical probability. As we get new revelations about how many prisoners we have in this war on terror, I've started to wonder if the majority of them weren't cases like Arar's. But this is the smoking gun. This is the proof of how misguided...no, fuck that, how flat-out EVIL the course this administration is pursuing is. This story is breaking in the middle of a congressional battle to codify this administration's strategy into law (a battle which the spineless Democrats are distancing themselves from...wha?). THIS IS A HUGE STORY. Instead, the story of the day seems to be that some looney South American politician called Bush "the devil."
This also sheds light on the debate over racial profiling at airports. I hear so many people say things like "I don't care if we hurt the Arabs' feelings. Our security is more important than being sensitive and politically correct." This illustrates that we're not just talking about people being "offended" or "having their feelings hurt." And no, I don't think my security or safety are more important. Even if I felt that these strategies could eventually result in a world where I would be 100% safe from a terrorist attack (an absurd premise, anyway), it is more important to me that the U.S. government not commit these acts of inhuman torture in the name of keeping me safe.
posted by Chris Oliver at 8:32 AM
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