I don't know about the rest of you, but every day I wake up and give thanks
to God that I'm on the 'Right' side in the War on Terrorism... Tony Blair,
we're gonna miss you so much!
Jon Cloke
Newcastle University
Syria and the US: Fellow Travelers at the Crossroads for Terrorism
By Amy Goodman and David Goodman
September 20, 2006
At his address to United Nations this week, George W. Bush declared that
Syria was “the crossroads for terrorism.” Maher Arar knows this first hand.
He was kidnapped and sent to be tortured in Syria at the behest of the Bush
administration.
On September 18, a Canadian government commission concluded in a 1,195 -page
report that Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen, was sent to be tortured in
Syria by American authorities, who falsely accused the computer engineer of
being an Islamic terrorist. Prime Minister Stephen Harper told Parliament on
Tuesday that Arar had “been done a terrible injustice.”
Arar was arrested in September 2002 at JFK Airport in New York while
changing planes on his way home to Toronto. Twelve days later he was placed
on a private jet with CIA agents who were part of a “special removal unit,”
flown to Jordan, and driven to Syria, where he was handed over to Syrian
military intelligence for interrogation. In Syria, Arar was severely beaten
with metal cables, and spent ten months confined to a grave-like cell before
being released without charge.
Maher Arar was the victim of what the U.S. government calls “extraordinary
rendition”—sending suspects to foreign countries to be harshly interrogated.
The program began in 1995, under the Clinton administration, when the CIA
undertook a series of kidnappings of suspected terrorists in Europe.
Suspects were shipped to Egypt, where some were tortured and others were
killed. One of the more spectacular operations took place in the spring of
1998 in Albania. According to the Wall Street Journal, Albanian secret
police, with their CIA advisors observing from a waiting car, kidnapped an
Islamic militant named Shawki Salama Attiya. Over the next few months, four
other suspected Islamic militants were abducted in Albania, and another
suspect was killed in a gun battle. The men were bound, blindfolded, and
taken to an abandoned air base, from which they were flown to Cairo on a CIA
plane and handed over to Egyptian security officials for interrogation.
Attiya charged later that he was hung from his limbs, given electrical
shocks to his genitals, dragged on his face, and imprisoned in a cell
knee-deep with fetid water. Two other suspects captured that day were
executed by hanging.
The rendition program has been “extraordinary” not only for the brazenness
with which it flouts international law, but for how many innocent lives have
been lost as a result of it. On August 5, 1998, an Arab-language newspaper
in London published a letter from the International Islamic Front for Jihad.
The letter promised revenge for the Albanian operation, vowing to retaliate
against the U.S. in a “language they will understand.” Two days later, the
U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were blown up, killing 224 people.
Since September 11, 2001, the extraordinary rendition program has morphed
into a global round-up. Suspects are being abducted around the world and
dumped in places like Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and Bagram, Afghanistan. These
two off-shore American prisons now hold over 1,000 people. Many of these
prisoners have never been charged and they languish out of view and outside
protection of the law. Others, like the German citizen Khaled el-Masri, have
been kidnapped by the U.S. and tortured only to be found to have no ties
whatsoever to terrorism.
Human rights groups estimate that hundreds of people have been rendered to
countries well known for torturing prisoners. In the case of Syria, the Bush
administration could be confident that Arar and the other prisoners it sent
there would be savaged. According to the U.S. State Department 2001 human
rights report on Syria, published seven months before Arar was sent to
Syria:
Former prisoners and detainees report that torture methods include
administering electrical shocks; pulling out fingernails; forcing objects
into the rectum; beating, sometimes while the victim is suspended from the
ceiling; hyperextending the spine; and using a chair that bends backwards to
asphyxiate the victim or fracture the victim's spine.
In fact, President Bush has cited Syria’s abysmal human rights record as a
reason to isolate and possibly attack the country.
The Bush administration is now ensnared in its own web of deceit. On
September 19, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales responded to the Canadian
findings by claiming that the U.S. acted lawfully in sending Arar to Syria.
“Mr. Arar was deported under our immigration laws,” said Gonzales, who
insisted that Arar was not the victim of a rendition. It was an absurd
claim: why wouldn’t the U.S. deport Arar to Canada, where he is a citizen?
The answer is obvious: the Bush administration wanted Arar to be tortured,
and could be confident of this outcome if he were handed to the Syrians.
Gonzales tried to hedge, “Even if it were a rendition…we seek to satisfy
ourselves that they will not be tortured. …And if in fact he had been
rendered to Syria, we would have sought those same kind of assurances.”
When President Bush made torture a centerpiece of his foreign policy, he
bound himself intimately to the world’s worst human rights abusers. When it
comes to torture, as Maher Arar learned, Syria and the U.S. are fellow
travelers at the “crossroads for terrorism.”
© 2006 The Foundation for National Progress
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