Deported Canadian Terror Suspect Details Torture in Syria

An article in the Washington Post documents a US method of dealing with
"terrorists". But first, a few choice rules from the Geneva Convention:

• Prisoners must be allowed to communicate with their families.
  They must not be subjected to "violence, insults and public curiousity."


• Prisoners may not be murdered, tortured or subjected to scientific experiments.


• POWs must be provided with reasonable and hyginic shelter,
  including food, clothing and medical care. They can't be used as human
  shields. If they are forced to work, they must be compensated and
  provided with reasonable workplace conditions.


• POWs may be tried by their captors in a fair and impartial manner, and they are entitled to competent representation.

And one for good measure:

• Occupiers of a land must honor the safety, dignity, religious beliefs and cultural mores of the people there.

That said, on to the issue at hand:

A Canadian citizen who was detained last year at John F.
Kennedy International Airport in New York as a suspected terrorist said
Tuesday he was secretly deported to Syria and endured 10 months of
torture in a Syrian prison.
Maher Arar, 33, who was released last month, said at a news conference
in Ottawa that he pleaded with U.S. authorities to let him continue on
to Canada, where he has lived for 15 years and has a family. But
instead, he was flown under U.S. guard to Jordan and handed over to
Syria, where he was born. Arar denied any connection to terrorism and
said he would fight to clear his name. U.S. officials said Tuesday that
Arar was deported because he had been put on a terrorist watch list
after information from "multiple international intelligence agencies"
linked him to terrorist groups. Officials, speaking on condition of
anonymity, said that the Arar case fits the profile of a covert CIA
"extraordinary rendition" -- the practice of turning over low-level,
suspected terrorists to foreign intelligence services, some of which
are known to torture prisoners.
-snip-
"This is when my nightmare began," he said. "I was pulled aside by
immigration and taken [away]. The police came and searched my bags. I
asked to make a phone call and they would not let me." He said an FBI
agent and a New York City police officer questioned him. "I was so
scared," he said. "They told me I had no right to a lawyer because I
was not an American citizen." Arar said he was shackled, placed on a
small jet and flown to Washington, where "a new team of people got on
the plane" and took him to Amman, the capital of Jordan. Arar said U.S.
officials handed him over to Jordanian authorities, who "blindfolded
and chained me and put me in a van. . . . They made me bend my head
down in the back seat. Then these men started beating me. Every time I
tried to talk, they beat me." Hours later, he said, he was taken to
Syria and there he was forced to write that he had been to a training
camp in Afghanistan. "They kept beating me, and I had to falsely
confess," he said. "I was willing to confess to anything to stop the
torture." Arar said his prison cell "was like a grave, exactly like a
grave. It had no light, it was three feet wide, it was six feet deep,
it was seven feet high. . . . It had a metal door. There was a small
opening in the ceiling. There were cats and rats up there, and from
time to time, the cats peed through the opening into the cell." Steven
Watt, a human rights fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights in
Washington, said Arar's case raised questions about U.S.
counterterrorism measures. "Here we have the United States involved in
the removal of somebody to a country where it knows persons in custody
of security agents are tortured," Watt said. "The U.S. was possibly
benefiting from the fruits of that torture. I ask the question: Why
wasn't he removed to Canada?"
Syria, where use of torture during imprisonment has been documented by
the State Department, maintains a secret but growing intelligence
relationship with the CIA, according to intelligence experts. "The
Syrian government has provided some very useful assistance on al Qaeda
in the past," said Cofer Black, former director of counterterrorism at
the CIA who is now the counterterrorism coordinator at the State
Department. One senior intelligence official said Tuesday that Arar is
still believed to have connections to al Qaeda. The Justice Department
did not have enough evidence to detain him when he landed in the United
States, the official said, and "the CIA doesn't keep people in this
country."

Um, that's kind of the problem. We remove them from this country so we
don't have to bother with pesky "laws" or "rights".

Posted by flow Frazao on November 5, 2003 at 08:01 AM | Permalink