US and Canadian "errors" led to man's torture - probe By David Ljunggren Reuters 18 Sep 2006 OTTAWA - Canadian police wrongly identified an Ottawa software engineer as an Islamic extremist, prompting U.S. agents to deport him to Syria, where he was tortured, an official inquiry concluded on Monday. Maher Arar, who holds Canadian and Syrian nationality, was arrested in New York in September 2002 and accused of being an al-Qaeda member. In fact, said the judge who led the probe, all the signs point to the fact Arar was innocent. Arar, 36, says he was repeatedly tortured in the year he spent in Damascus jails, and the inquiry agreed that he had been tortured. He was freed in 2003. Judge Dennis O'Connor, who was asked by the Canadian government in 2004 to examine what had happened, found the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had wrongly told U.S. authorities that Arar was an Islamic extremist. "The provision of this inaccurate information ... (was) totally unacceptable" and guaranteed the United States would treat Arar as a serious threat, O'Connor said. "I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr Arar has committed any offense or that his activities constitute a threat to the security of Canada." Civil rights advocates said the case of Arar and three other Canadians who ended up in Syrian jails raised suspicions that Canada might be outsourcing interrogation to nations where torture was commonplace. O'Connor said the case of the other three men was troubling and warranted further investigation. But he found no evidence that the Canadian government had played any direct role in the U.S. decision to deport Arar to Syria. Arar, calling on the government to hold accountable the officials he said were responsible for his ordeal, had tears in his eyes when asked by reporters for his reaction. "Today Justice O'Connor has cleared my name and restored my reputation," said Arar, who has launched a lawsuit against Ottawa seeking compensation. O'Connor's three-volume report castigated the Mounties for slipshod work in the wake of the 9/11 suicide attacks. It said the Mounties exaggerated Arar's importance and later asked U.S. customs agents to put Arar and his wife on a special watch list, calling them "Islamic extremist individuals suspected of being linked to the Al Qaeda terrorist movement". U.S. agencies declined to be questioned by O'Connor as to why they had deported Arar. "I do conclude it is very likely that they relied on information received from the RCMP in making the decision to remove Mr Arar to Syria," the judge wrote. Public Security Minister Stockwell Day, who has overall responsibility for the forces of law and order, said he was satisfied with the finding that Canadian officials had not played a direct role in the U.S. decision to deport Arar to Syria. "What happened to Mr Arar is very regrettable. We hope ... never to see this happen again," he told reporters. Arar first came to police attention in October 2001 when he was seen talking to another man already being investigated for possible al-Qaeda links. O'Connor found that police made a number of serious mistakes in the Arar case. The unit probing possible terror networks was poorly supervised and was comprised largely of financial fraud experts, who had little experience of national security cases. Police gave all the files from their probe to the United States without screening the data for inaccuracies or following internal rules that limited what they could hand over. "It was a breathtakingly incompetent investigation ... a disaster," said Marlys Edwardh, a lawyer for Arar. O'Connor criticized unnamed Canadian officials, whom he said had leaked confidential and sometimes inaccurate information about Arar both before and after his release in a bid to demonstrate he really was a threat to national security.

False RCMP information 'very likely' led to Arar deportation, inquiry concludes Last Updated Mon, 18 Sep 2006 18:33:05 EDT CBC News The U.S. decision to send Maher Arar to Syria was "very likely" based on inaccurate and misleading information from the RCMP, according to an inquiry report released Monday, but there is no evidence Canadian officials played a direct role in his detention or deportation. But Justice Dennis O'Connor, who led the public inquiry into the case, concluded that Canadian officials did leak information to damage Arar's reputation. O'Connor also concluded that Arar was an innocent victim and was not involved in al-Qaeda activities in any way, as U.S. officials had alleged. "I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offence or that his activities constituted a threat to the security of Canada," wrote the judge. Arar, who then lived in Ottawa, was travelling back to Canada from a family vacation in Tunisia in September 2002 when he was pulled off a plane in New York. Within days, he was sent to Syria, where he says government officials detained him, systematically tortured him and kept him in jail for a year. RCMP gave U.S. distorted information The judge concluded that RCMP investigators without much experience wrongly gave their U.S. counterparts inaccurate, unfair and overstated evidence about the Syrian-Canadian engineer's alleged terrorist sympathies. "The RCMP provided American authorities with information about Mr. Arar that was inaccurate, portrayed him in an unfairly negative fashion and overstated his importance in the RCMP investigation," O'Connor said at a news conference on Monday. "It is very likely that, in making the decision to detain and remove Mr. Arar to Syria, the U.S. authorities relied on information about Mr. Arar provided by the RCMP," O'Connor concluded. O'Connor said the RCMP asked American authorities to look out for Arar and his wife Monia Mazigh in the U.S. The agency described the couple as "Islamic extremist individuals suspected of being linked to the al-Qaeda terrorist network," according to the report. "The RCMP had no basis for this description," O'Connor said. The judge also criticized the RCMP, which shared information with U.S. authorities, without screening it for relevancy, reliability or privacy concerns. And he accused RCMP officials of giving a sanitized summary of the Arar case to top government officials in order to cover up the RCMP mistake. The judge, who reviewed hundreds of documents about the case, supported Arar's claims that he was tortured during his imprisonment. But O'Connor said reports were prepared by government officials after Arar's release that had the "effect of downplaying the mistreatment or torture to which Mr. Arar had been subjected." He also slammed Canadian officials for leaking "confidential and sometimes inaccurate information about the case to the media for the purpose of damaging Mr. Arar's reputation or protecting their self-interests or government's interests." O'Connor came up with 23 recommendations, including one that states the government should assess Arar's claims for compensation. The public inquiry into the engineer's detention, deportation and alleged torture involved more than 120 days of testimony and cost $15 million by the time it concluded the main phase of its hearings in September 2005. "I wanted to repair my reputation," Arar said following the release of the report. "Today, Judge O'Connor has cleared my reputation. "I ask the prime minister to put these recommendations into effect without delay." PM promises government action Prime Minister Stephen Harper said the government does intend to act, but gave no indication of the specific moves it'll make. "Probably in the few weeks to come we'll be able to give you more details on that," he said. Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day, who has responsibility for the RCMP, said he's just received the report and needs time to study it. A damage suit filed by Arar against the government was put on hold during the inquiry. Day indicated there's unlikely to be any quick movement on financial compensation. "Certain civil actions have already been commenced by Mr. Arar and really we have to let those lawyers discuss those," he said.

Flashback: Kidnapped and tortured Canadian's lawsuit against U.S. dismissed by Federal Court by Tim Harper Toronto Star Feb. 17, 2006 WASHINGTON -- A U.S. federal court has dismissed a lawsuit against the Bush administration brought by Ottawa engineer Maher Arar, essentially giving Washington the green light to continue its practice of sending terrorist suspects to third countries where they could be tortured. Brooklyn District Court Judge David Trager cited the need for national security and secrecy in making his decision, but also raised the possibility of Canadian complicity in the decision to send Arar, now 35, to Syria in 2002, where he was tortured for almost a year. "The need for much secrecy can hardly be doubted," Trager wrote in an 88-page judgment. "One need not have much imagination to contemplate the negative effect on our relations with Canada if discovery were to proceed in this case and were it to turn out that certain high Canadian officials had, despite public denials, acquiesced in Arar's removal to Syria." Canadian officials have always denied complicity in the decision to send Arar to Syria after he was held in U.S. custody for 13 days, but Arar said yesterday Justice Dennis O'Connor, who is examining the role Canadian officials played in the affair, should make special note of the judge's comments. He also vowed he would never give up his quest to reverse the "evil" done against him. The Syrian-born Canadian engineer was detained as a suspected terrorist during a stopover in New York as he returned from a vacation in September 2002. After being held virtually incommunicado by U.S. officials, he was sent to Syria, where he said he was tortured and held in a tiny cell he likened to a "grave" for nearly a year. He was never charged before Syria returned him to Canada. O'Connor is expected to issue an interim report next month. The Arar suit was the first court test of the Bush administration policy of "extraordinary rendition," a practice often referred to as the outsourcing of torture. Arar's is just one of a number of well-documented cases in which suspects have been shipped to third countries with dubious human rights records where interrogation methods outlawed in the U.S. can be used. Trager acknowledged Arar's fears of torture in Syria were real and he cited the U.S. State Department's own report on human rights abuses there. He said such decisions were beyond the realm of his court. "A judge who declares on his or her own ... authority that the policy of extraordinary rendition is under all circumstances unconstitutional must acknowledge that such a ruling can have the most serious of consequences to our foreign relations or national security or both," Trager wrote. Arar said that is exactly what courts are for. "If the courts will not stop this evil act, who is going to stop this administration? "Where do we go? The United Nations? We -- me and others who have been subjected to this -- are normal citizens who have done no wrong. "They have destroyed my life. They have destroyed other lives. But the court system does not listen to us. "The court system is what distinguishes the West from the Third World. When a court will not act because of `national security,' there is no longer any difference between the West and the Third World." His lawyers vowed to continue the fight. "This ruling sets a frightening precedent," said Maria LaHood, one of a team of lawyers who took up Arar's case at the Center for Constitutional Rights, based in New York. "U.S. officials sent Maher Arar to Syria to be detained and interrogated through torture. To allow the Bush administration to continue to evade accountability and continue to hide behind the smokescreen of `national security' is to do grave and irreparable damage to the U.S. constitution and the guarantee of human rights that people in this country could once be proud of." Barbara Olshansky, the center's deputy legal director, said: "We will not accept this decision and are ... continuing our campaign to obtain the truth ... and demand accountability (from) the Bush administration." Arar's action named U.S. officials who held him and who ran key government departments. The claims in the lawsuit include violations of Arar's right not to be tortured under foreign law as guaranteed by the Torture Victim Protection Act. The U.S. government asserted the "state secrets" privilege, arguing the lawsuit must be dismissed because allowing it to proceed would necessarily involve the disclosure of sensitive information that would threaten national security or diplomatic relations if made public. A justice official said the ruling pleased the government.

Flashback: Lawyer says rendition 'part of a larger pattern' By Colin Brown and Jerome Taylor 28 December 2005 The lawyer of a man who claims he was taken to Syria by the CIA and tortured said yesterday there were examples of similar cases. His remarks sparked renewed demands for a full inquiry into "extraordinary rendition" in the UK. Lorne Waldman, the human rights lawyer representing Maher Arar, said it was "ridiculous" for the US Ambassador to London, Robert Tuttle, to deny any renditions by the US of terrorist suspects to Syria had taken place. Mr Tuttle denied there was evidence of a rendition to Syria but the US Embassy in London later issued a clarification admitting there were reports of one case involving Mr Arar. "The case of Mr Arar is too public for someone to claim they are not aware of it," Mr Waldman said on BBC radio. "To suggest, as the US ambassador did, that they were not aware of the case is ridiculous." The lawyer said other suspects had also been shipped for torture by the CIA to Syria. "This is part of a larger pattern. We know of other cases of other individuals who have been rendered," said Mr Waldman. "He [Maher Arar] landed in Jordan - and was driven overland by the Jordanians to Syria - in the same CIA plane that was used to render other people to Egypt and other countries where they were tortured. So this was part of a well-known, well-documented pattern." There was further embarrassment for the US when a former British ambassador to Damascus, Henry Hogger, appeared to confirm that Syria was being used by the CIA. "What was going on in Syria at the time was not unlike the way it has been described," Mr Hogger said. The US and Syria had worked together, particularly on counter-terrorism, despite public antagonism, he added. A spokesman for the Commons all-party group on rendition said: 'The momentum for a full inquiry is now becoming unstoppable. There are now inquiries in European countries, including Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and a public inquiry in Canada. Why should Britain be the odd one out?" Mr Arar's lawyer said he had been "brutally physically tortured" and had been held in a cell about the size of two coffins without light for months. Mr Waldman's claims appear to be backed by the case of a German citizen, Syrian-born Mohammed Haydar Zammar, who claims to have spent four years in a Syrian dungeon after he was abducted in Morocco and transported to Damascus, as part of the US "extraordinary rendition" programme.

Flashback: Playing with words to hide horror Salman Rushdie Jan. 10, 2006 Beyond any shadow of a doubt, the ugliest phrase to enter the English language in 2005 was "extraordinary rendition." To those of us who love words, this phrase's brutalization of meaning is an infallible signal of its intent to deceive. "Extraordinary" is an ordinary enough adjective, but its sense is being stretched here to include more sinister meanings that your dictionary will not provide: "secret," "ruthless" and "extralegal." As for "rendition," the English language permits four meanings: a performance, a translation, a surrender — this meaning is now considered archaic — or an "act of rendering," which leads us to the verb "to render," among whose 17 possible meanings you will not find "to kidnap and covertly deliver an individual or individuals for interrogation to an undisclosed address in an unspecified country where torture is permitted." Language, too, has laws, and those laws tell us that this new American usage is improper — a crime against the word. Every so often the habitual Newspeak of politics throws up a term whose calculated blandness makes us shiver with fear — yes, and loathing. "Clean words can mask dirty deeds," New York Times columnist William Safire wrote in 1993, in response to the arrival of another such phrase, "ethnic cleansing." "Final solution" is a further, even more horrible locution of this Orwellian, double-plus-ungood type. "Mortality response," a euphemism for death by killing that I first heard during the Vietnam War, is another. This is not a pedigree of which any newborn usage should be proud. People use such phrases to avoid using others whose meaning would be problematically over-apparent. "Ethnic cleansing" and "final solution" were ways of avoiding the word "genocide," and to say "extraordinary rendition" is to reveal one's squeamishness about saying "the export of torture." However, as Cecily remarks in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, "When I see a spade, I call it a spade," and what we have here is not simply a spade, it's a shovel — and it's shovelling a good deal of ordure. Now that Republican Senator John McCain has forced upon a reluctant White House his amendment putting the internationally accepted description of torture — "cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment" — into American law, in spite of Vice-President Dick Cheney's energetic attempts to defeat it, the growing belief that the Bush administration could be trying to get around the McCain amendment by the "rendition" of persons adjudged torture-worthy to less delicately inclined countries merits closer scrutiny. We are beginning to hear the names and stories of men seized and transported in this fashion: Maher Arar, a Syrian Canadian, was captured by the CIA on his way to the United States and taken via Jordan to Syria where, according to his lawyer, he was "brutally physically tortured." Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen of Kuwaiti-Lebanese origin, was kidnapped in Macedonia and taken for interrogation to Afghanistan, he says, where he was repeatedly beaten. Syrian-born Mohammed Haydar Zammar says he was grabbed in Morocco and then spent four years in a Syrian dungeon. Lawsuits are underway. The lawyers for the plaintiffs suggest their clients were only a few of the victims; that in Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria and perhaps elsewhere, the larger pattern of the extraordinary-rendition project is yet to be uncovered. Inquiries are underway in Canada, Germany, Italy and Switzerland. The CIA's own internal inquiry admits to "under 10" such cases, which, to many ears, sounds like another bit of double-talk. Tools are created to be used and it seems improbable, to say the least, that so politically risky and morally dubious a system would be set up and then barely employed. The U.S. authorities have been taking a characteristically robust line on this issue. On her recent European trip, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice more or less told European governments to back off the issue — which they duly, and tamely, did, claiming to have been satisfied by her assurances. Soon afterward, at the end of December, the German government ordered the closing of an Islamic centre near Munich after finding documents encouraging suicide attacks in Iraq. This is a club which, we are told, al-Masri often visited before being extraordinarily rendered to Afghanistan. "Aha!" we are encouraged to think. "Obvious bad guy! Render his sorry butt anywhere you like!" What's wrong with this kind of thinking is that, as Isabel Hilton of The Guardian wrote last July, "The delusion that officeholders know better than the law is an occupational hazard of the powerful and one to which those of an imperial cast of mind are especially prone ... When disappearance became state practice across Latin America in the '70s it aroused revulsion in democratic countries, where it is a fundamental tenet of legitimate government that no state actor may detain — or kill — another human being without having to answer to the law." In other words, the question isn't whether or not a given individual is "good" or "bad." The question is whether or not we are — whether or not our governments have dragged us into immorality by discarding due process of law, which is generally accorded to be second only to individual rights as the most important pillar of a free society. The White House, however, plainly believes that it has public opinion behind it in this and other contentious matters such as secret wiretapping. Cheney recently told reporters, "When the American people look at this, they will understand and appreciate what we're doing and why we're doing it." He may be right for the moment, though the controversy shows no signs of dying down. It remains to be seen how long the American people are prepared to go on accepting that the end justifies practically any means Cheney cares to employ. In the beginning is the word. Where one begins by corrupting language, worse corruptions swiftly follow. Sitting as the Supreme Court to rule on torture in December 2005, Britain's law lords spoke to the world in words that were simple and clear. "The torturer is abhorred not because the information he produces may be unreliable," Lord Rodger of Earlsferry said, "but because of the barbaric means he uses to extract it." "Torture is an unqualified evil," Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood added. "It can never be justified. Rather, it must always be punished." The dreadful probability is that the United States' outsourcing of torture will allow it to escape punishment. It will not allow it to escape moral obloquy.

The American Military's Cult Of Cruelty By Robert Fisk 18 September, 2006 The Independent In the week that George Bush took to fantasising that his blood-soaked "war on terror" would lead the 21st century into a "shining age of human liberty" I went through my mail bag to find a frightening letter addressed to me by an American veteran whose son is serving as a lieutenant colonel and medical doctor with US forces in Baghdad. Put simply, my American friend believes the change of military creed under the Bush administration--from that of "soldier" to that of "warrior"--is encouraging American troops to commit atrocities. From Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo to Bagram, to the battlefields of Iraq and to the "black" prisons of the CIA, humiliation and beatings, rape, anal rape and murder have now become so commonplace that each new outrage is creeping into the inside pages of our newspapers. My reporting notebooks are full of Afghan and Iraqi complaints of torture and beatings from August 2002, and then from 2003 to the present point. How, I keep asking myself, did this happen? Obviously, the trail leads to the top. But where did this cult of cruelty begin? So first, here's the official US Army "Soldier's Creed", originally drawn up to prevent anymore Vietnam atrocities: "I am an American soldier. I am a member of the United States Army--a protector of the greatest nation on earth. Because I am proud of the uniform I wear, I will always act in ways creditable to the military service and the nation that it is sworn to guard ... No matter what situation I am in, I will never do anything for pleasure, profit or personal safety, which will disgrace my uniform, my unit or my country. I will use every means I have, even beyond the line of duty, to restrain my Army comrades from actions, disgraceful to themselves and the uniform. I am proud of my country and it's flag. I will try to make the people of this nation proud of the service I represent for I am an American soldier." Now here's the new version of what is called the "Warrior Ethos": I am an American soldier. I am a warrior and a member of a team. I serve the people of the Unites States and live the Army values. I will always place the mission first. I will never accept defeat. I will never quit. I will never leave a fallen comrade. I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough, trained and proficient in my warrior tasks and drills. I always maintain my arms, my equipment and myself. I am an expert and I am a professional. I stand ready to deploy, engage and destroy the enemies of the United States of America in close combat. I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life. I am an American soldier. Like most Europeans--and an awful lot of Americans--I was quite unaware of this ferocious "code" for US armed forces, although it's not hard to see how it fits in with Bush's rantings. I'm tempted to point this out in detail, but my American veteran did so with such eloquence in his letter to me that the response should come in his words: "The Warrior Creed," he wrote, "allows no end to any conflict accept total destruction of the 'enemy'. It allows no defeat ... and does not allow one ever to stop fighting (lending itself to the idea of the 'long war'). It says nothing about following orders, it says nothing about obeying laws or showing restraint. It says nothing about dishonourable actions ...". Each day now, I come across new examples of American military cruelty in Iraq and Afgha-nistan. Here, for example, is Army Specialist Tony Lagouranis, part of an American mobile interrogation team working with US marines, interviewed by Amy Goodman on the American Democracy Now! programme describing a 2004 operation in Babel, outside Baghdad: "Every time Force Recon went on a raid, they would bring back prisoners who were bruised, with broken bones, sometimes with burns. They were pretty brutal to these guys. And I would ask the prisoners what happened, how they received these wounds. And they would tell me that it was after their capture, while they were subdued, while they were handcuffed and they were being questioned by the Force Recon Marines ... One guy was forced to sit on an exhaust pipe of a Humvee ... he had a giant blister, third-degree burns on the back of his leg." Lagouranis, whose story is powerfully recalled in Goodman's new book, Static, reported this brutality to a Marine major and a colonel-lawyer from the US Judge Advocate General's Office. "But they just wouldn't listen, you know? They wanted numbers. They wanted numbers of terrorists apprehended ... so they could brief that to the general." The stories of barbarity grow by the week, sometimes by the day. In Canada, an American military deserter appealed for refugee status and a serving comrade gave evidence that when US forces saw babies lying in the road in Fallujah--outrageously, it appears, insurgents sometimes placed them there to force the Americans to halt and face ambush--they were under orders to drive over the children without stopping. Which is what happens when you always "place the mission first" whenyou are going to "destroy"--rather than defeat--your enemies. As my American vet put it: "the activities in American military prisons and the hundreds of reported incidents against civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere are not aberrations--they are part of what the US military, according to the ethos, is intended to be. Many other armies behave in a worse fashion than the US Army. But those armies don't claim to be the "good guys" ... I think we need... a military composed of soldiers, not warriors." Winston Churchill understood military honour. "In defeat, defiance," he advised Britons in the Second World War. "In victory, magnanimity." Not any more. According to George W Bush this week "the safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad" because we are only in the "early hours of this struggle between tyranny and freedom". I suppose, in the end, we are supposed to lead the 21st century into a shining age of human liberty in the dungeons of "black" prisons, under the fists of US Marines, on the exhaust pipes of Humvees. We are warriors, we are Samurai. We draw the sword. We will destroy. Which is exactly what Osama bin Laden said.