There is nothing about torture that is good or positive. The act itself is one of the most brutal and heinous that humans have ever committed. The affect on a society that condones torture is one of rising fear and brutality. The information (if it can be called that) gained under torture is so suspect as to be worthless. Perhaps the worst aspect is that torture, once accepted is used not only on enemies or bad people, but innocent victims as well.
On Monday the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of one such innocent victim of torture, Mr. Maher Arar, a Syrian born Canadian citizen. In 2002 he was returning to Canada from a trip abroad. At a stop over at JFK Airport he was detained by the US Government and held in solitary confinement for two weeks without access to an attorney. Mr. Arar was then deported, not to his nation of citizenship, Canada but, to Syria and put in the hands of the Syrian intelligence services, who are well known for their torture activities.
"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"
This was done after the criminal Bush administration had declared Mr. Arar a member of Al Qaeda without any sort of due process of law. He was a victim of "extraordinary rendition" to a country known to practice torture and against the tenets of the Torture Victims Protection Act, international law and U.S civil law. Mr. Arar was held in Syria for nearly a year where he was tortured into a false confession of attending an Al Qaeda training camp.
After all that time the Syrian government came to the conclusion, even with the false confession, that he had no ties to any criminal or terrorist organization and released him. He was never charged with a crime in his home country of Canada or in the U.S.
Since that time the Canadian government has found that its part in the affair (giving false or misleading information to the U.S which led to Mr. Arar being arrested) was wrong. They have officially apologized and paid him a $10 million dollar settlement. Sadly the United States government, including the Obama Administration has not in any way admitted fault or even a willingness to let the case be adjudicated.
The core of the Government’s resistance to this case has been the "state secrets" assertion. The Government, starting with the Bush administration, has asserted that in order to defend itself from the charges of having an innocent man sent to a place they could be reasonably sure he would be tortured, it would have to show too much of the internal processes in both intelligence gathering and foreign affairs. This may even be true as the crime here is one of deciding to torture and then deciding to send an innocent man to be tortured by a third party based on false information from another country.
The problem for anyone that cares about the rule of law is that this assertion of "state secrets" is one that actively covers up the commission of a crime. The "state secrets" privilege was carved out in order to protect the overall interests of the nation where they conflict with the interests of an individual. The idea is that there are times when the surrounding facts of a case would cause more damage to national security than the damage to the individual warrants.
The law is never perfect; it can not be, so there are often compromises like this to try to further the idea of justice or balance. Sadly when you have a lawless administration like the Bush administration this privilege can and will be abused. The Supreme Court’s decision to let the dismissal by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals stand without hearing the case all but grantees that Mr. Arar will not see justice in the United States.
However, it does not mean that he is out of options. On Monday, after the Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal, Mr. Arar and his attorney’s from theCenter for Constitutional Rights announced that the Canadian government is not finished investigating this case. While a commission found some fault in the way that Canada handled the intelligence they passed on, it is now known that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), which is the Canadian national police organization, similar to the U.S. Federal Marshall's Service, is in the midst of a criminal investigation of both U.S and Syrian officials.
As with the Spanish investigation of the torture of their citizens, the RCMP is taking its responsibilities under the law more seriously than the United States. There is little information at this time as to the scope of this investigation but it seems likely that high level members of the Bush administration including former AG Ashcroft, former FBI Director Robert Muller and other executive branch members up to and including Vice President Cheney and President Bush are under scrutiny.
President Bush’s recent bragging about the torture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed by waterboarding and the Cheney families spirited defense of the illegal torture of other Al Qaeda suspects may be coming back to bite them. If the RCMP are as through as they are claimed to be, there is every chance that we will see the ability of members of the criminal Bush administration to travel to Canada ended. There is very little chance that we will extradite any of the Bush administration executive branch members to Canada or Spain to stand trial, even if they are eventually indicted. Still it is to be hoped that when this administration, or some future one sees that the rest of the world is not willing to go along with the "looking forward, not back" they will take the action that is richly needed and investigate our own shameful history of torture.
A society never really gets past torture until it indicts and prosecutes those who order and carry out torture. It can take a year or it can take decades, but until that door is closed by the public accountability under the law, there is always the chance that another innocent like Maher Arar will be singled out and subjected to torture by mistake. I have come to the point where I recognize that our political establishment is too cowardly to face the fact of our state sponsored torture. We can only hope for a more courageous administration in the future to end this squalid chapter in U.S. history.
The floor is yours.