I've been writing about the case of Maher Arar since December 2003. He is the innocent Canadian man who was seized by U.S officials on his way back to Canada and then, at the order of the Justice Department, "renditioned" to Syria, where it was known that the authorities would torture the alleged "terrorist." They did, brutally. He was finally released, and his innocence was confirmed by the Canadian government, which paid him some $9 million for its part in his ordeal. – The United States, on the other hand, made no apologies, no restitution; instead, the government has resolutely blocked any attempt by Arar to seek justice in American courts.

Now the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has dismissed his case, ruling instead that the Executive Branch can capture and torture innocent people as they please, with no legal remedy for the victim, as long as they evoke, however spuriously, the sacred doctrine of "national security." Indeed, it is entirely accurate to say that "national security," as determined solely by the president and his designated minions, is now the actual constituion of the United States, the principle by which the state is shaped and governed. Scott Horton at Harper's has the details.

Below is the first piece I wrote on the Arar case. It should be noted that all the draconian authoritarian powers discussed in this article – almost six years and two presidential elections later – are still in force, and still being rigorously defended by the Obama Administration.

There is a horrible scandal eating away the heart of the American body politic. Among the many corrupted currents loosed upon the nation by the Bush Regime, this scandal is perhaps the worst, for it abets all the others and breeds new pestilence, new perversions at every turn.

Last month, Maher Arar of Canada detailed his ordeal at the hands of Attorney General John Ashcroft's shadowy security "organs." On his way back home from a family holiday in Tunis, the Syrian-born Arar -- 16 years a Canadian citizen -- was seized at a New York airport. Jailed and interrogated without charges, on unspecified allegations of unspecified connections to unspecified terrorist groups, he was then summarily deported, without a hearing, to Syria. When he told the Homeland Chekists he would be tortured there -- his family was marked down as dissidents by Syria's Baathist regime -- the Chekists replied that their organ "was not the body that deals with the Geneva Conventions regarding torture." They shackled him and flew him to the American-friendly regime in Jordan; from there he was bundled across the border to Damascus.

But this is not the scandal we were speaking of.

For 10 months and 10 days, Arar was held in a dank cell in Syria: a "grave," he called it, a three-by-six unlighted hole filled with cat and rat piss falling down from the grating overhead. He was beaten over and over, often with electrical cable, for weeks on end, kept awake for days, made to witness and hear even more exquisite tortures applied to other prisoners. He was forced to sign false confessions. Ashcroft's Baathist comrades had a pre-set storyline they wanted filled in: that Arar had gone to Afghanistan, attended terrorist training camps, was plotting mayhem -- the usual template. Arar, who had spent years working as a computer consultant for a Boston-based high-tech firm, had done none of those things. Yet he was whipped, broken and tortured into submission.

But this is not the scandal we were speaking of.

Arar's case is not extraordinary. In the past two years, the Bushist organs have "rendered" thousands of detainees, without charges, hearings or the need to produce any evidence whatsoever, into the hands of regimes which the U.S. government itself denounces for the widespread use of torture. Apparatchiks of the organs make no secret of the practice -- or of their knowledge that the "rendered" will indeed be beaten, burned, drugged, raped, even killed. "I do it with my eyes open," one renderer told the Washington Post. Detainees -- including lifelong American residents -- have been snatched from the homes, businesses, schools, from streets and airports, and sent to torture pits like Syria, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan -- even the stateless chaos of Somalia, where Ashcroft simply dumped more than 30 Somali-Americans last year, without charges, without evidence, without counsel, and with no visible means of support, as the London Times reports.

But this is not the scandal we were speaking of.

Of course, the American organs needn't rely exclusively on foreigners for torture anymore. Under the enlightened leadership of Ashcroft, Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and other upstanding Christian statesmen, America has now established its own centers for what the organs call "operational flexibility." These include bases in Bagram, Afghanistan and Diego Garcia, the Indian Ocean island that was forcibly depopulated in the 1960s to make way for a U.S. military installation. Here, the CIA runs secret interrogation units that are even more restricted than the American concentration camp on Guantanamo Bay. Detainees -- again, held without charges or evidentiary requirements -- are "softened up" by beatings at the hands of military police and Special Forces troops before being subjected to "stress and duress" techniques: sleep deprivation (officially condemned as a torture method by the U.S. government), physical and psychological disorientation, withholding of medical treatment, etc. When beatings and "duress" don't work, detainees are then "packaged" -- hooded, gagged, bound to stretchers with duct tape -- and "rendered" into less dainty hands elsewhere.

But this is not the scandal we were speaking of.

Not content with capture and torture, the organs have been given presidential authority to carry out raids and kill "suspected terrorists" (including Americans) on their own volition -- without oversight, without charges, without evidence -- anywhere in the world, including on American soil. In addition to this general license to kill, Bush has claimed the power to designate anyone he pleases "an enemy combatant" and have them "rendered" into the hands of the organs or simply killed at his express order -- without charges, without evidence, with no judicial or legislative oversight whatsoever. The life of every American citizen -- indeed, every person on earth -- is now at the disposal of his arbitrary whim. Never in history has an individual claimed such universal power -- and had the force to back it up.

But this is not the scandal we were speaking of.

All of the above facts -- each of them manifest violations of international law and/or the U.S. Constitution  --  have been cheerfully attested to, for years now, by the organs' own appartchiks, in the Post, the NY Times, Newsweek, the Guardian, the Economist and other high-profile, mainstream publications. The stories appear -- then they disappear. There is no reaction. No outcry in Congress or the courts -- the supposed guardians of the people's rights -- beyond a few wan calls for more formality in the concentration camp processing or judicial "warrants" for torture. And among the great mass of "the people" itself, there is -- nothing. Silence. Inattention. Acquiescence. State terrorism -- lawless seizure, filthy torture, official murder -- is simply accepted, a part of "normal life," as in Nazi Germany or Stalin's empire, where "decent people" with "nothing to hide" approved and applauded the work of the "organs" in "defending national security."

This is the scandal, this is the nation's festering shame.This acquiescence to state terror will breed -- and attract -- a thousand evils for every one it supposedly prevents. 

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Magmak1 said:

	... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO-MbnxSn68
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November 04, 2009 | url
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Sean O'Neil said:

... if anyone wants to know how these developments arise, they only need to ask their friends -- "have you been tracking the loss of individual civil rights over the past 15 years?" I'll be astounded if anyone comes back here to report the answer of "Yes," and I'll die of shock if anyone's "Yes" response was joined by a litany of the events which have destroyed individual civil rights. Whenever I discuss these things with friends, I am told that I spend too much time focused on "news" and not enough time focused on "the positive." Is my experience universal? Anomalous? Somewhere between the two?

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November 04, 2009
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Magmak1 said:

	... Your experience is near-universal. I was told by someone quite close to me that I needed to seek "help" from mental health practitioners. In over five years of "posting" and "blogging" about such things, I can still count the volume of "collegiality" using only my fingers and toes (and they're not all annotated with names yet). Kool-Aid is selling well these days.
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November 04, 2009 | url
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yankee 30 said:

Cheer up Remember the ending scene in Monty Python's 'Life of Brian'? A bunch of guys singing the joyful ditty, 'Always Look on the Bright Side of Life'....,each one nailed to his own cross. ___________ For whatever it's worth, here in Italy today, the high court in Milan convicted (in absentia) former Milan CIA station chief, Robert Seldon Lady, and 22 of his American colleagues to 8 and 5 years respectively for the kidnapping of Abu Omar, on Feb. 17, 2003. Abu was 'rendered' into the "shadowy security "organs"" in Egypt, apparently tortured, and released four years later. No charges were ever filed.

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November 04, 2009
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Chas said:

Well put A well-written, utterly horrifying piece. Two minor points. To say that he was tortured "brutally" is redundant. All torture is brutal by its very nature. He was simply tortured. True, some torture is worse, some may be applied over a longer period of time, but how does one determine the point at which it becomes "brutal"? It is all brutal. Furthermore, it is of utterly no consequence that Arar is innocent. Were he the worst, most evil, most heinous criminal that ever lived, he still would not deserve to be tortured. To stress his innocence is to imply, or at least to leave the door open to argument, that were he guilt some amount of torture might be justified. It is not. Ever. His innocence adds irony, but it is not germane to the issue.

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November 05, 2009
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Kim Alphandary said:

Consequences. The way i see it. The torture, the renditions, the bailout. They all add up to something -- the acceptance of the illegal. With people becoming more and more desperate. They're going to imitate their leaders. Instead of lawlessness being perpetrated by the elite. It's going to expand into all areas of this society of ours. When I was in Kenya, one of my jobs was to taste the Ugali every morning to make sure the chef was not stealing sugar. This is the kind of stuff I'm referring to. There is going to be a full-scale return to the crooked.

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Jimmy Montague said:

You're right, Chris. I finally quit writing about it because nobody gives a shit. It's a fact that, to me, absolutely refutes the idea that democracy and even liberalism itself, as concepts, have any validity whatever. I've talked to people who will talk (most don't want to hear a word of it) in truckstops and bars and diners and in lunchrooms at work. If you hang around the same places, you quickly get a reputation as a troublemaker or a 'smart-alecky sumbitch'. I've endured verbal, in-your-face abuse, physical blows, and even death threats for my trouble. The Internet provides me with stacks of hate mail and I am permanently barred from several forums. So there it is for me. I've chucked it in -- not because I don't care but because nobody else cares and I'm tired of busting my head and breaking my heart over and over and over again. The rich want only to keep their gravy train running. The blue collars want solutions, but the only one they're prepared to accept is to bust somebody's head. The well of American democracy has been poisoned. The water can only be purified with blood.

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November 05, 2009
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Jimmy Montague said:

Kim Alphandary is also right -- Kim wrote "With people becoming more and more desperate. They're going to imitate their leaders. Instead of lawlessness being perpetrated by the elite. It's going to expand into all areas of this society of ours." That's what happens when leaders throw the rule of law out the window. Stupid George W. Bush declared that the Constitution is 'just a goddam piece of paper,' and America was all over at that point. Bush is such a stupid SOB, he thought he could call down shit-rains on people he hates and that would be the end of it. The American people are likewise stupid enough to believe that your civil rights and my civil rights are negotiable and can even be revoked but THEIR civil rights remain secure. It's actually different expressions of the same, stupid idea, but that is why the country laid down for Bush's BS -- because at bottom the American proles and G.W. Bush are as one. America is evil because its leaders are evil: American leaders are evil because America is evil. It's a chicken-or-egg situation and in the end it makes no difference if the chicken or the egg is at fault because the cat is now out of the bag (How's that for mixing a few metaphors?).

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November 05, 2009
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