Canadians Fault U.S. for Its Role in Torture Case

As George Bush continues to argue that Article 3 of Geneva Conventions needs to be amended in order to allow CIA operatives to engage in "alternative" interrogation techniques, a case has come to light in Canada which perfectly highlights the excesses of Bush's War on Terror and the plight of innocents caught up in it.

Indeed, I notice that in his wish to subject people to these novel interrogation techniques President Bush and his cronies seem to have removed the presumption of innocence from suspects. I mean, I'm presuming you certainly wouldn't torture anyone that you thought might be innocent, so we can only deduce that, in Bush's new America, guilt is simply presumed and torture is deemed the only way to get the guilty to talk.

A Canadian government commission report into the case of a Canadian computer engineer has exonerated the engineer of any ties to terrorism and lambasted the US security services for transferring the man to Syria where he was imprisoned and tortured.

“I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offense or that his activities constituted a threat to the security of Canada,” Justice Dennis R. O’Connor, head of the commission, said at a news conference.

“The American authorities who handled Mr. Arar’s case treated Mr. Arar in a most regrettable fashion,” Justice O’Connor wrote in a three-volume report, not all of which was made public. “They removed him to Syria against his wishes and in the face of his statements that he would be tortured if sent there. Moreover, they dealt with Canadian officials involved with Mr. Arar’s case in a less than forthcoming manner.”

The Syrian-born Mr. Arar was seized on Sept. 26, 2002, after he landed at Kennedy Airport in New York on his way home from a holiday in Tunisia. On Oct. 8, he was flown to Jordan in an American government plane and taken overland to Syria, where he says he was held for 10 months in a tiny cell and beaten repeatedly with a metal cable. He was freed in October 2003, after Syrian officials concluded that he had no connection to terrorism and returned him to Canada.

This entire sorry case took place because Mr Arar met with Abdullah Almalki, a man already under surveillance by a newly formed Mounted Police intelligence unit known as Project A-O Canada. It now transpires that the two men discussed where to buy low cost ink jet printer cartridges. After this fateful conversation the Canadian Mounted Police requested that Mr Arar be included in a database that alerts United States border officers to suspect individuals.

When Mr Arar returned from holiday, the FBI told the Canadians that they intended to interview him and return him to Switzerland. The Canadians supplied the FBI with a list of questions they would like Mr. Arar to answer, all of them based on erroneous information.

The Canadian police “had no idea of what would eventually transpire,’’ the commission said. “It did not occur to them that the American authorities were contemplating sending Mr. Arar to Syria.”

While the F.B.I. and the Mounted Police kept up their communications about Mr. Arar, Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs was not told about his detention for almost three days. Its officials, acting on calls from worried relatives, had been trying to find him. Similarly, American officials denied Mr. Arar’s requests to speak with the Canadian Consulate in New York, a violation of international agreements.

Evidence presented to the commission, said Paul J. J. Cavalluzzo, its lead counsel, showed that the F.B.I. continued to keep its Canadian counterparts in the dark even while an American jet was carrying Mr. Arar to Jordan. The panel found that American officials “believed — quite correctly — that, if informed, the Canadians would have serious concerns about the plan to remove Mr. Arar to Syria.”

Mr. Arar arrived in Syria on Oct. 9, 2002, and was imprisoned there until Oct. 5, 2003. It took Canadian officials, however, until Oct. 21 to locate him in Syria. The commission concludes that Syrian officials at first denied knowing Mr. Arar’s whereabouts to hide the fact that he was being tortured. It says that, among other things, he was beaten with a shredded electrical cable until he was disoriented.

American officials have not discussed the case publicly. But in an interview last year, a former official said on condition of anonymity that the decision to send Mr. Arar to Syria had been based chiefly on the desire to get more information about him and the threat he might pose. The official said Canada did not intend to hold him if he returned home.

What I find most staggering about this case is the almost routine way in which Mr Arar was dispatched to Syria. This was not a man who was known to police and the FBI, Arar was not a known terrorist suspect who's name and activities had long been under surveillance by the authorities. This was man who's name had come up during an investigation, indeed, this was someone on whom the authorities had almost no information.

And yet still the FBI made the decision to send this man to Syria "to get more information on him and the threat he might pose".

This is staggering stuff. Arar was tortured to find out if he posed a threat.

When one looks at cases like this one it becomes impossible to believe that torture is not a routine part of Bush's War on Terror. The main argument Bush is having with his fellow Republicans is over whether he has to continue sending people like Mr Arar abroad to be tortured or whether the FBI can now carry out this kind of treatment at home.

In the light of cases like this one, Bush's claims that the US don't do torture have never sounded more hollow.

The question now, is what kind of country America truly is. The answer will come with it's reaction to Bush's demands.

Click title for full article.

Related Articles:

Canadian Was Falsely Accused, Panel Says

Tags: Article 3, Geneva Conventions, Arar, torture, Syria, Canada, US, FBI,