BOB HERBERT: The Torture of Liberty (on the Arar Rendition Case)

[BurtWorm]

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/09/21/opinion/21herbert.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

After traveling to Ottawa to interview Maher Arar last year, I wrote: “If John Ashcroft was right, then I was staring into the malevolent, duplicitous eyes of pure evil ... But all I could really see was a polite, unassuming, neatly dressed guy who looked like a suburban Little League coach.”

It turns out John Ashcroft was wrong. After an exhaustive investigation, a government commission in Canada ruled definitively and unequivocally this week that Maher Arar was no terrorist. He was nothing more than a quiet family man who found himself sucked into a vortex of incompetence, hysteria and a so-called war on terror that has gone completely haywire.

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If this were just a bad but honest mistake, we might be able to simply wish Mr. Arar well and vow never to let it happen again. Instead, the United States is about to ensure that many more individuals who are falsely accused are deprived of the single most fundamental tool they need to establish their innocence.

In the push to enact legislation dealing with the interrogation and prosecution of terror suspects, both the White House and dissident Republicans in the Senate intend to strip away the hallowed safeguard of habeas corpus for some noncitizens held in U.S. custody outside the United States.

Habeas corpus (literally “produce the body”) is a legal proceeding that allows one to challenge his or her detention in a court of law. It is the most significant safeguard against arbitrary imprisonment. Someone deprived of this right — which is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and has been recognized by various societies all the way back to the Middle Ages — can be locked up, whether innocent or guilty of any offense, and never heard from again.

I can’t believe that most Americans think this is all right.

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