Friday, February 11, 2005
Torture
Check out this very disturbing piece by Frank Herbert. Condoners of torture generally frame the discussion in a way that assumes that the actual guilt of the suspect is a certainty. Their scenarios usually follow along the lines: suspect has direct knowledge of location of biological weapon that will kill 200,000 people if we don't torture him until he reveals where it is. Left wing liberals place the civil rights of this scumbag as a higher priority than the lives of the innocent victims of his evil intentions. While in fact what actually happens is; suspect is the co-worker of a guy whose brother is suspected of being a terrorist. Better torture him just in case he knows something, but we better do it in a foreign country where he cannot count on any legal protections. Freedom aint free mutherf...er!
Maher Arar is a 34-year-old native of Syria who emigrated to Canada as a teenager. On Sept. 26, 2002, as he was returning from a family vacation in Tunisia, he was seized by American authorities at Kennedy Airport in New York, where he was in the process of changing planes.
Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was not charged with a crime. But, as Jane Mayer tells us in a compelling and deeply disturbing article in the current issue of The New Yorker, he "was placed in handcuffs and leg irons by plainclothes officials and transferred to an executive jet."
Check out this very disturbing piece by Frank Herbert. Condoners of torture generally frame the discussion in a way that assumes that the actual guilt of the suspect is a certainty. Their scenarios usually follow along the lines: suspect has direct knowledge of location of biological weapon that will kill 200,000 people if we don't torture him until he reveals where it is. Left wing liberals place the civil rights of this scumbag as a higher priority than the lives of the innocent victims of his evil intentions. While in fact what actually happens is; suspect is the co-worker of a guy whose brother is suspected of being a terrorist. Better torture him just in case he knows something, but we better do it in a foreign country where he cannot count on any legal protections. Freedom aint free mutherf...er!
Maher Arar is a 34-year-old native of Syria who emigrated to Canada as a teenager. On Sept. 26, 2002, as he was returning from a family vacation in Tunisia, he was seized by American authorities at Kennedy Airport in New York, where he was in the process of changing planes.
Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was not charged with a crime. But, as Jane Mayer tells us in a compelling and deeply disturbing article in the current issue of The New Yorker, he "was placed in handcuffs and leg irons by plainclothes officials and transferred to an executive jet."
In an instant, Mr. Arar was swept into an increasingly common nightmare, courtesy of the United States of America. The plane that took off with him from Kennedy "flew to Washington, continued to Portland, Maine, stopped in Rome, Italy, then landed in Amman, Jordan."
Any rights Mr. Arar might have thought he had, either as a Canadian citizen or a human being, had been left behind. At times during the trip, Mr. Arar heard the pilots and crew identify themselves in radio communications as members of "the Special Removal Unit." He was being taken, on the orders of the U.S. government, to Syria, where he would be tortured.
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