Reading Maher Arar’s complaint, filed in New York district court over
his deportation to Syria, is a bit like reading the synopsis of a
Kafka novel. The main character is detained, he is questioned,
moved from place to place, asked to sign mysterious documents, then
flown to other countries where he is imprisoned, tortured, and made
to confess to things he has never done. And then suddenly,
mysteriously, he is released. He is never charged with anything.
His former tormentors even now claim he was innocent all along.
Except in Kafka’s fictional universe, the main character doesn’t
get a chance to sue the pants off of everybody once it’s all over.
Mr. Arar is suing the Syrian government, the Jordanians, and the
entire American law enforcement establishment, everyone it seems
except the country that did the initial spying on him, Canada. He’s
asking for unspecified damages to compensate him for his year-long
ordeal.
If the American suit ever winds up in front of a jury, it might
provide some answers in this strange case. The whole affair has
garnered an enormous amount of publicity in Canada (see yesterday’s
article on the subject) and some in the U.S. At the moment,
public sympathy for the Syrian-born Canadian citizen is high and
many have accepted all his allegations at face value.
As it now appears, the INS seems to have deported Arar on the
flimsiest of pretexts, simply because he was acquainted with a
couple of other terrorist suspects under surveillance by the
Canadian police. It is known that he was traveling on a Canadian
passport. At present it is not known whether Arar had a Syrian
passport in his possession, which would make the deportation to
Syria more reasonable, at least officially. But he actually wound
up initially being flown to Jordan, and the Jordanians drove him to
Syria. Except for unauthorized leaks and an INS document stating
that they determined he was a member of al Qaeda, the case for
Arar’s deportation to Syria has not been made public.
THE CASE MAY NEVER be made. After announcing the public inquiry,
Canadian Public Safety Minister Anne McLellan jetted off to D.C. to
assure her American counterparts that none of their intelligence
gathering would be compromised by the aforementioned inquiry. Since
most of the information gathered on Arar prior to his deportation
apparently originated in Canada, this may be something of a hollow
gesture. It is not known whether she will seek a reciprocal
assurance from the U.S. concerning Canadian intelligence
sources.
Arar has filed his lawsuit through the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), an organization
whose view of rights seems a little arbitrary — they helped
establish the “buffer zone” law around abortion clinics, curtailing
protests of people they apparently don’t agree with. Reading
through their history, a litany of '60s radicalism — Black
Panthers, abortion rights, feminist rights, Zapatistas — I would
say that it’s a safe assumption these people are not friends of the
current administration. This might go some way in explaining why
the lawsuit targets by name the Attorney General, the head of the
FBI, and the Secretary of State for Homeland Security, along with
others who were more directly involved.
Looming over the whole mess are the allegations of mistreatment
by the Syrians. At a press conference on January 22 announcing the
lawsuit, CCR lawyer Barbara Olshansky, displaying a knack for
visual aids, held up a thick black cable she claimed was similar to
the one Arar was beaten with while being interrogated overseas.
The main charge is that the American authorities knew, or ought
to have known, what the Syrians would do to Arar, namely beat him
with that thick cable, among other indignities. If they did know —
and if the Syrians did do it — this would be in contravention of
the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel,
Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which the U.S.
ratified in 1994, and the U.S. Torture Victims Protection Act of
1991. According to the CCR, Arar’s case marks the first time that
American officials have been accused under the latter.
IN NOVEMBER, Attorney General John Ashcroft stated that Arar’s
deportation was carried out entirely within the law, claiming the
U.S. had sought and received assurances from the Syrians that Arar
would be treated humanely. And the Syrians claims to have honored
this, denying that Arar was ever physically harmed. For the moment,
few seem to be taking either of these official positions at face
value.
That might be because the official American position is that the
Syrians do practice torture. The lawsuit quotes a State Department
report on Syria:
…there was credible evidence that security forces
continued to use torture, although to a lesser extent than in
previous years…Although it occurs in prison, torture was most
likely to occur while detainees were being held at one of the many
detention centers run by the various security services throughout
the country, especially while the authorities were attempting to
extract a confession or information.
In fact, the Syrians did extract information out of Arar. He
says he signed a confession stating he was in Afghanistan at an al
Qaeda training camp, which he now claims he did only to stop a
beating he could no longer bear. After he was released, the Syrians
said they considered him completely innocent, which might raise the
logical (if slightly inhuman) question: What good is torture if all
you get is a bunch of crap information you made up yourself? Why
would the American intelligence want that?
But putting such esoteric questions aside, Arar’s lawsuit makes
a broader allegation. Section 24 of the claim states that “since
September 11, 2001, the United States has undertaken covert
‘extraordinary renditions,’ removing non-U.S. citizens detained in
this country and elsewhere and suspected…of terrorist
activity to countries, including Syria, where interrogations under
torture are routine.”
In other words, the CCR is contending that the Arar case is just
part of a pattern of illegal activity being carried out by some of
the highest law enforcement officers in the land. Pretty strong
stuff, and possibly tough to prove in a court of law, presuming it
is ever meant to go that far. Maybe this will be one of those
things where everybody settles out of court and walks away.
