Robert Scheer: An administration's descent into barbarism [View All]

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An administration's descent into barbarism
Robert Scheer
Wednesday, September 20, 2006


WHAT AN outrage for President Bush to invoke the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in his address to the United Nations, a day after a Canadian government commission accused the United States of rendering one of its citizens to Syria for torture. Did no one on his staff inform the president that Article 5 of that declaration explicitly states "No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment?" For those, such as Bush, who regard torture as a variant of college fraternity hazing, it would be instructive to consider the fate of Maher Arar as revealed in that devastating Canadian judicial report released on Monday. Arar, a Canadian citizen and engineer who had fled repressive Syria two decades earlier as a teenager, was seized by the FBI at JFK airport and "rendered" to the government of Syria for nearly a year of being whipped with a "shredded electrical cable until he was disoriented" -- that is, when he was not confined to his coffin-size cage.

The United States transported Arar to the very same Syria which Bush has been condemning since his first days in office, and as he did again on Tuesday, calling Syria "a crossroad for terrorism." So, will anyone in that somnambulant White House press corps dare ask the president why he would turn over a prisoner to such a government? And an innocent one at that?

Yes, innocent. On Monday, the Canadian justice who headed a 30-month investigation of this case concluded that, "I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence that Mr. Arar has committed any offense." The judge employed characteristic Canadian restraint in concluding in his damning three-volume, 822-page report that "The American authorities who handled Mr. Arar's case treated Mr. Arar in a most regrettable fashion. 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." To put it a bit more bluntly: U.S. officials lied to their Canadian counterparts and never revealed that Arar was "rendered" to Syria precisely to be tortured.

In fact, the outsourcing of torture, as U.S. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., exposes so brilliantly on his Web site, has been the official and all-too-common practice of this president since 9/11. Foreign citizens have been stolen off the streets of even close democratic allies of the United States and sent to be tortured by regimes otherwise branded as fascist by this president.

more:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/09/20/EDG6PKDTN01.DTL