Leahy to AG Gonzales - Canadian Maher Arar was tortured in Syria at our behest. Care to comment?

[democracy1st]

Run time: 07:15 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFk3OLuu8hM   Posted on YouTube: November 05, 2009 By YouTube Member: firedoglake Views on YouTube: 465   Posted on DU: November 04, 2009 By DU Member: democracy1st Views on DU: 427

 
Leahy to AG Gonzales - Canadian Maher Arar was tortured in Syria at our behest. Care to comment? Asked and NOT answered on 18 January, 2007, at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
Visit: http://firedoglake.com

[gateley]

1. Whoa. Awesome. nt

[waiting for hope]

2. Nice speech there Leahy -

Where is your comment on this?

A court decision that reflects what type of country the U.S. is
By Glenn Greenwald
Tuesday, Nov 3, 2009 04:04 PST

It's not often that an appellate court decision reflects so vividly what a country has become, but such is the case with yesterday's ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Arar v. Ashcroft (.pdf). Maher Arar is both a Canadian and Syrian citizen of Syrian descent. A telecommunications engineer and graduate of Montreal's McGill University, he has lived in Canada since he's 17 years old. In 2002, he was returning home to Canada from vacation when, on a stopover at JFK Airport, he was (a) detained by U.S. officials, (b) accused of being a Terrorist, (c) held for two weeks incommunicado and without access to counsel while he was abusively interrogated, and then (d) was "rendered" -- despite his pleas that he would be tortured -- to Syria, to be interrogated and tortured. He remained in Syria for the next 10 months under the most brutal and inhumane conditions imaginable, where he was repeatedly tortured. Everyone acknowledges that Arar was never involved with Terrorism and was guilty of nothing. I've appended to the end of this post the graphic description from a dissenting judge of what was done to Arar while in American custody and then in Syria.

~Snip~

By stark and very revealing contrast, the U.S. Government has never admitted any wrongdoing or even spoken publicly about what it did; to the contrary, it repeatedly insisted that courts were barred from examining the conduct of government officials because what we did to Arar involves "state secrets" and because courts should not interfere in the actions of the Executive where national security is involved. What does that behavioral disparity between the two nations say about how "democratic," "accountable," and "open" the United States is?

Yesterday, the Second Circuit -- by a vote of 7-4 -- agreed with the government and dismissed Arar's case in its entirety. It held that even if the government violated Arar's Constitutional rights as well as statutes banning participation in torture, he still has no right to sue for what was done to him. Why? Because "providing a damages remedy against senior officials who implement an extraordinary rendition policy would enmesh the courts ineluctably in an assessment of the validity of the rationale of that policy and its implementation in this particular case, matters that directly affect significant diplomatic and national security concerns" (p. 39). In other words, government officials are free to do anything they want in the national security context -- even violate the law and purposely cause someone to be tortured -- and courts should honor and defer to their actions by refusing to scrutinize them.

~Snip~

A court decision that reflects what type of country the U.S. is

[sattahipdeep]

7. We grind their bones to make our bread. And why?

As the great people’s historian Howard Zinn has pointed out,
Winthrop’s much-quoted description of the 17th-century
Massachusetts Bay Colony as a “city upon a hill”, a place of
unlimited goodness and nobility, was rarely set against the
violence of the first settlers, for whom burning alive some 400
Pequot Indians was a “triumphant joy”. The countless massacres
that followed, wrote Zinn, were justified by “the idea that American
expansion is divinely ordained”.


AMY GOODMAN: That was Maher Arar describing his own ordeal before the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee. I shouldn’t exactly say “before” the committee; he’s not allowed into the United States, so he spoke via video conference, barred from entering this country. I mean, that is a very graphic description, Maria LaHood. What exactly does this mean, that the US government can take someone from US soil, US citizen or otherwise, and send them off to another country that they know engages in torture?

MARIA LAHOOD: Absolutely, and even that if they intend them to be tortured. And it doesn’t have to be a foreign citizen. This decision is broad enough to affect any of us. Basically, if the federal government decides to do something that it purports to be in our national security to do, they could torture any of us, they could kill any of us, and there would be no relief in the federal courts.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/3/appeals_court_rul...

[Hulk]

3. I just want to slap his shit eating grin puss....

What a shame that pathetic, shallow and cowardly man was EVER the Attorney General of this country. An absolute shame!

[jgraz]

4. I tried to watch it, but had to stop as soon as Smirky McBrainDead started speaking.

[JDPriestly]

5. Gonzales does not have an honest bone in his body.

Do you see that smirk on his face? I'm sure he will present some sort of "evidence" that the U.S. really thought it had good reason to believe that Maher Arar was a terrorist. And I for one will not believe that evidence to be true.

The Bush gang were thugs. They just enjoyed being cruel. That is my opinion of them. I know that a lot of people who know them personally say they seemed to be "nice" people, but I seriously doubt it.

[MrModerate]

6. Why is Gonzales not in prison?

Preferably in Syria.