Oct 25, 2007 04:30 AM
Thomas Walkom
The most painful element of Condoleezza Rice's admission that the U.S. made mistakes handling the Maher Arar case is how grudging her non-apology is.
Rice, now U.S. President George W. Bush's secretary of state, acknowledged to a congressional committee yesterday that her government blew it when it arrested Arar in New York five years ago and bundled him off to Syria to be tortured for information.
But she didn't apologize for the substantive injustice done to Arar. She didn't apologize for deporting a Canadian citizen to Syria (a country he left as a teenager) rather than Canada. She didn't apologize for her government's role in mistakenly identifying Arar as an Al Qaeda terrorist. Nor did she apologize for the U.S. government's so-called extraordinary rendition program, of which the Arar case was but one example.
And in spite of a judicial inquiry in Canada that concluded Arar was tortured during his year-long imprisonment in a Syrian dungeon, she didn't apologize for that. Indeed, she didn't even acknowledge it, referring instead to "claims" of mistreatment. (This from someone whose own state department regularly publishes reports detailing Syria's use of torture.)
All she did was say that her government erred by not telling Ottawa ahead of time that it was deporting Arar to Syria.
"We do not think this case was handled as it should have been," she told the House of Representatives foreign affairs committee. "Our communication with the Canadian government about this was by no means perfect. In fact, it was quite imperfect."
Which, in itself, is somewhat of an understatement.
As Justice Dennis O'Connor's inquiry into the Arar affair found, the U.S. not only failed to tell Canada it was deporting Arar to Syria, it lied.
On the very day that the removal decision was being made in New York, FBI agents were still telling the RCMP that he would soon be returned to Canada.
In spite of repeated requests for information, the Americans didn't tell Canada's foreign affairs department they had sent Arar anywhere until two days after he'd been wakened at 4 a.m., hustled into a small plane and flown to the Middle East. Even then, they refused to say where they had sent him.
So, yes, there were some "communication" problems.
But these pale beside the substance of what happened to the Canadian computer engineer courtesy of the Bush government (and, as Canada has acknowledged, the RCMP) – the savage beatings, the nightmare of being locked up in a rat-infested grave-like dungeon for months on end, the whittling away of hope.
Arar is still recovering.
Yet, as British journalist Stephen Grey details in his book Ghost Plane, the Canadian's experience is not unique. Grey estimates hundreds around the world have been scooped up secretly by American agents as part of Bush's so-called war on terror and flown, without trial, to U.S. proxy states in the Middle East and Europe so they can be tortured for information.
What makes Arar so unusual is that he is one of the few to get out alive and tell his story.
Which, perhaps, is why the U.S. government still feels compelled to discredit him, still keeps him on a no-fly list, still leaks damaging stories about him to the media.
And which is perhaps why Rice's mea culpa yesterday was so grudging. For if Washington were to acknowledge the full scale of its crimes against Maher Arar, it would have to lay open this whole shameful business.
Thomas Walkom
The most painful element of Condoleezza Rice's admission that the U.S. made mistakes handling the Maher Arar case is how grudging her non-apology is.
Rice, now U.S. President George W. Bush's secretary of state, acknowledged to a congressional committee yesterday that her government blew it when it arrested Arar in New York five years ago and bundled him off to Syria to be tortured for information.
But she didn't apologize for the substantive injustice done to Arar. She didn't apologize for deporting a Canadian citizen to Syria (a country he left as a teenager) rather than Canada. She didn't apologize for her government's role in mistakenly identifying Arar as an Al Qaeda terrorist. Nor did she apologize for the U.S. government's so-called extraordinary rendition program, of which the Arar case was but one example.
And in spite of a judicial inquiry in Canada that concluded Arar was tortured during his year-long imprisonment in a Syrian dungeon, she didn't apologize for that. Indeed, she didn't even acknowledge it, referring instead to "claims" of mistreatment. (This from someone whose own state department regularly publishes reports detailing Syria's use of torture.)
All she did was say that her government erred by not telling Ottawa ahead of time that it was deporting Arar to Syria.
"We do not think this case was handled as it should have been," she told the House of Representatives foreign affairs committee. "Our communication with the Canadian government about this was by no means perfect. In fact, it was quite imperfect."
Which, in itself, is somewhat of an understatement.
As Justice Dennis O'Connor's inquiry into the Arar affair found, the U.S. not only failed to tell Canada it was deporting Arar to Syria, it lied.
On the very day that the removal decision was being made in New York, FBI agents were still telling the RCMP that he would soon be returned to Canada.
In spite of repeated requests for information, the Americans didn't tell Canada's foreign affairs department they had sent Arar anywhere until two days after he'd been wakened at 4 a.m., hustled into a small plane and flown to the Middle East. Even then, they refused to say where they had sent him.
So, yes, there were some "communication" problems.
But these pale beside the substance of what happened to the Canadian computer engineer courtesy of the Bush government (and, as Canada has acknowledged, the RCMP) – the savage beatings, the nightmare of being locked up in a rat-infested grave-like dungeon for months on end, the whittling away of hope.
Arar is still recovering.
Yet, as British journalist Stephen Grey details in his book Ghost Plane, the Canadian's experience is not unique. Grey estimates hundreds around the world have been scooped up secretly by American agents as part of Bush's so-called war on terror and flown, without trial, to U.S. proxy states in the Middle East and Europe so they can be tortured for information.
What makes Arar so unusual is that he is one of the few to get out alive and tell his story.
Which, perhaps, is why the U.S. government still feels compelled to discredit him, still keeps him on a no-fly list, still leaks damaging stories about him to the media.
And which is perhaps why Rice's mea culpa yesterday was so grudging. For if Washington were to acknowledge the full scale of its crimes against Maher Arar, it would have to lay open this whole shameful business.
..... what is the big deal?