azron123
I can break you with my mind. Watch, I'll do it.   SSHOLE |
Posts: 1505 Registered: 3/6/2003 Offline
|
2/25/2005 at 13:28  |
This was in todays New York Times. It's scarey and makes me feel ashamed of what the country is doing.
Quote:
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Thrown to the Wolves
By BOB HERBERT
Published: February 25, 2005
OTTAWA
If John Ashcroft was right, then I was staring into the malevolent, duplicitous eyes of pure evil, the eyes of a man with the mass murder of Americans on his mind. But all I could really see was a polite, unassuming, neatly dressed guy who looked like a suburban Little League coach.
Advertisement
If Mr. Ashcroft was right, then Maher Arar should have been in a U.S. prison, not talking to me in an office in downtown Ottawa. But there he was, a 34-year-old man who now wears a perpetually sad expression, talking about his recent experiences - a real-life story with the hideous aura of a hallucination. Mr. Arar's 3-year-old son, Houd, loudly crunched potato chips while his father was being interviewed.
"I still have nightmares about being in Syria, being beaten, being in jail," said Mr. Arar. "They feel very real. When I wake up, I feel very relieved to find myself in my room."
In the fall of 2002 Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, suddenly found himself caught up in the cruel mockery of justice that the Bush administration has substituted for the rule of law in the post-Sept. 11 world. While attempting to change planes at Kennedy Airport on his way home to Canada from a family vacation in Tunisia, he was seized by American authorities, interrogated and thrown into jail. He was not charged with anything, and he never would be charged with anything, but his life would be ruined.
Mr. Arar was surreptitiously flown out of the United States to Jordan and then driven to Syria, where he was kept like a nocturnal animal in an unlit, underground, rat-infested cell that was the size of a grave. From time to time he was tortured.
He wept. He begged not to be beaten anymore. He signed whatever confessions he was told to sign. He prayed.
Among the worst moments, he said, were the times he could hear babies crying in a nearby cell where women were imprisoned. He recalled hearing one woman pleading with a guard for several days for milk for her child.
He could hear other prisoners screaming as they were tortured.
"I used to ask God to help them," he said.
The Justice Department has alleged, without disclosing any evidence whatsoever, that Mr. Arar is a member of, or somehow linked to, Al Qaeda. If that's so, how can the administration possibly allow him to roam free? The Syrians, who tortured him, have concluded that Mr. Arar is not linked in any way to terrorism.
And the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a sometimes-clownish outfit that seems to have helped set this entire fiasco in motion by forwarding bad information to American authorities, is being criticized heavily in Canada for failing to follow its own rules on the handling and dissemination of raw classified information.
Official documents in Canada suggest that Mr. Arar was never the target of a terror investigation there. One former Canadian official, commenting on the Arar case, was quoted in a local newspaper as saying "accidents will happen" in the war on terror.
Whatever may have happened in Canada, nothing can excuse the behavior of the United States in this episode. Mr. Arar was deliberately dispatched by U.S. officials to Syria, a country that - as they knew - practices torture. And if Canadian officials hadn't intervened, he most likely would not have been heard from again.
Mr. Arar is the most visible victim of the reprehensible U.S. policy known as extraordinary rendition, in which individuals are abducted by American authorities and transferred, without any legal rights whatever, to a regime skilled in the art of torture. The fact that some of the people swallowed up by this policy may in fact have been hard-core terrorists does not make it any less repugnant.
Mr. Arar, who is married and also has an 8-year-old daughter, said the pain from some of the beatings he endured lasted for six months.
"It was so scary," he said. "After a while I became like an animal."
A lawsuit on Mr. Arar's behalf has been filed against the United States by the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. Barbara Olshansky, a lawyer with the center, noted yesterday that the government is arguing that none of Mr. Arar's claims can even be adjudicated because they "would involve the revelation of state secrets."
This is a government that feels it is answerable to no one.
E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com
____________________
If you give a man a fire you keep him warm for one night.
If you set him on fire you keep him warm for the rest of his life.
|
| |
dragonstaff
Too old to Rock and Roll...too young to die  SSHOLEPosts: 756 Registered: 8/19/2004 Offline
|
2/25/2005 at 14:58 |
This would have to be the most reprehensible act of any legal government since Uncle Adolf's final solution! To kidnap a citizen of a friendly foreign nation whilst he is changing planes ( not even trying to enter the country ), and then ship him off to a third country ( that was until recently considered an outlaw state and big sponsor of terror ) to be tortured is a crime of monstrous proportion. I t sort of leaves the Mann Act looking a touch hypocritical as well.
Please, if I ever suggest that I am going to visit the States whilst this criminal or his cronies are in power, remind me of this.
Someone shoot him, soon, before he does something really stupid and sends all to kingdom-come.
____________________
The Grumpiest Alpha
To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today. - Isaac Asimov |
| |
shitbox
my balls your chin, get used to that idea  SSHOLEPosts: 932 Registered: 1/9/2005 Offline
|
2/25/2005 at 21:08 |
Somthing similar happened to a friend of mine...only the perpetrating country was MEXICO not Syria. His crime... buying 30 hydrocondone (vicodin) and attempting to bring them into the US. Accidents do happen...shit seems to also.
____________________
"Kill him! Kill the fuckin' indian! What am I watching here two fuckin' fags!?"
Rodney Dangerfield as Ed Wilson
|
| |
InfectionConnection
SIR BABYHEAD  Posts: 98 Registered: 9/24/2003 Offline
|
2/25/2005 at 21:18 |
fuck |
| |
ghostrider
liberal exit  SSHOLEPosts: 2446 Registered: 7/29/2004 Offline
|
2/25/2005 at 21:52 |
____________________
I build plastic bonfires on the beach and skip batteries into the lake ~ Cockroach |
| |
ragoo
We are not amused.  SSHOLEPosts: 663 Registered: 9/4/2004 Offline
|
2/25/2005 at 22:16 |
Haha, you don't fool me, Ghost. I know yer really cryin' inside.
____________________
Interjections show excitement or emotion. They're generally set apart from a sentence by an exclamation point, or by a comma when the feeling's not as strong. |
| |
azron123
I can break you with my mind. Watch, I'll do it. SSHOLEPosts: 1505 Registered: 3/6/2003 Offline
|
2/28/2005 at 11:04 |
This is a follow up on the original article from todays NY Times.
Quote:
COLUMNIST
It's Called Torture
By BOB HERBERT
Published: February 28, 2005
s a nation, does the United States have a conscience? Or is anything and everything O.K. in post-9/11 America? If torture and the denial of due process are O.K., why not murder? When the government can just make people vanish - which it can, and which it does - where is the line that we, as a nation, dare not cross?
When I interviewed Maher Arar in Ottawa last week, it seemed clear that however thoughtful his comments, I was talking with the frightened, shaky successor of a once robust and fully functioning human being. Torture does that to a person. It's an unspeakable crime, an affront to one's humanity that can rob you of a portion of your being as surely as acid can destroy your flesh.
Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen with a wife and two young children, had his life flipped upside down in the fall of 2002 when John Ashcroft's Justice Department, acting at least in part on bad information supplied by the Canadian government, decided it would be a good idea to abduct Mr. Arar and ship him off to Syria, an outlaw nation that the Justice Department honchos well knew was addicted to torture.
Mr. Arar was not charged with anything, and yet he was deprived not only of his liberty, but of all legal and human rights. He was handed over in shackles to the Syrian government and, to no one's surprise, promptly brutalized. A year later he emerged, and still no charges were lodged against him. His torturers said they were unable to elicit any link between Mr. Arar and terrorism. He was sent back to Canada to face the torment of a life in ruins.
Mr. Arar's is the case we know about. How many other individuals have disappeared at the hands of the Bush administration? How many have been sent, like the victims of a lynch mob, to overseas torture centers? How many people are being held in the C.I.A.'s highly secret offshore prisons? Who are they and how are they being treated? Have any been wrongly accused? If so, what recourse do they have?
President Bush spent much of last week lecturing other nations about freedom, democracy and the rule of law. It was a breathtaking display of chutzpah. He seemed to me like a judge who starves his children and then sits on the bench to hear child abuse cases. In Brussels Mr. Bush said he planned to remind Russian President Vladimir Putin that democracies are based on, among other things, "the rule of law and the respect for human rights and human dignity."
Someone should tell that to Maher Arar and his family.
Mr. Arar was the victim of an American policy that is known as extraordinary rendition. That's a euphemism. What it means is that the United States seizes individuals, presumably terror suspects, and sends them off without even a nod in the direction of due process to countries known to practice torture.
A Massachusetts congressman, Edward Markey, has taken the eminently sensible step of introducing legislation that would ban this utterly reprehensible practice. In a speech on the floor of the House, Mr. Markey, a Democrat, said: "Torture is morally repugnant whether we do it or whether we ask another country to do it for us. It is morally wrong whether it is captured on film or whether it goes on behind closed doors unannounced to the American people."
Unfortunately, the outlook for this legislation is not good. I asked Pete Jeffries, the communications director for House Speaker Dennis Hastert, if the speaker supported Mr. Markey's bill. After checking with the policy experts in his office, Mr. Jeffries called back and said: "The speaker does not support the Markey proposal. He believes that suspected terrorists should be sent back to their home countries."
Surprised, I asked why suspected terrorists should be sent anywhere. Why shouldn't they be held by the United States and prosecuted?
"Because," said Mr. Jeffries, "U.S. taxpayers should not necessarily be on the hook for their judicial and incarceration costs."
It was, perhaps, the most preposterous response to any question I've ever asked as a journalist. It was not by any means an accurate reflection of Bush administration policy. All it indicated was that the speaker's office does not understand this issue, and has not even bothered to take it seriously.
More important, it means that torture by proxy, close kin to contract murder, remains all right. Congressman Markey's bill is going nowhere. Extraordinary rendition lives.
E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com
____________________
If you give a man a fire you keep him warm for one night.
If you set him on fire you keep him warm for the rest of his life. |
| |
BeachGoat
DARTH MENSES  Posts: 431 Registered: 10/31/2003 Offline
|
3/1/2005 at 21:38 |
____________________
|
| |
|
