Of all the stories, many of them horrific, on the Bush administration abusing detainees, Canadian computer engineer Maher Arar’s is among the most disheartening. Today, Justin Rood notes that Arar is going to get a formal apology from the Canadian government, though that isn’t quite as appropriate as an apology from the United States.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper will give a formal apology to Maher Arar, the Canadian software engineer whom the United States detained and extradited to Syria, where he was brutally tortured.
The announcement, which appears to be a public rebuke of the official U.S. position that Arar may be a terrorist, is set for 12:15, according to Harper’s office. Arar will hold a separate news conference at 2 p.m.
Arar’s case has caused a deepening rift between Canada and the United States, which has to date refused to apologize for their treatment of Arar and will not remove him from its terrorist watch list. Yesterday, the National Post reported that the U.S. ambassador to Canada “scolded” a top Canadian offical for insisting Arar’s name be removed from the U.S. watch list.
Bush Administration officials have delivered secret briefings to the Canadian government in the hopes of justifying Arar’s presence on the watch list, but Canada continues to press the U.S. to clear Arar. “It simply does not alter our opinion that Mr. Arar is not a threat, nor is his family,” Canadian Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said.
Good. The sooner the administration backs down from “scolding” Canadian officials over this, the better. Canada was wrong to deport Arar several years ago, and now it is making amends.
The Bush administration? Not so much.
Keep in mind, the record on this is already pretty clear.
A [Canadian] government commission on Monday exonerated a Canadian computer engineer of any ties to terrorism and issued a scathing report that faulted Canada and the United States for his deportation four years ago to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured.
The report on the engineer, Maher Arar, said American officials had apparently acted on inaccurate information from Canadian investigators and then misled Canadian authorities about their plans for Mr. Arar before transporting him to Syria. […]
But its conclusions about a case that had emerged as one of the most infamous examples of rendition — the transfer of terrorism suspects to other nations for interrogation — draw new attention to the Bush administration’s handling of detainees. And it comes as the White House and Congress are contesting legislation that would set standards for the treatment and interrogation of prisoners.
“The American authorities who handled Mr. Arar’s case treated Mr. Arar in a most regrettable fashion,” Justice O’Connor wrote in a three-volume report, not all of which was made public. “They removed him to Syria against his wishes and in the face of his statements that he would be tortured if sent there. Moreover, they dealt with Canadian officials involved with Mr. Arar’s case in a less than forthcoming manner.”
You don’t say. Bush administration officials? Misleading another country about an innocent detainee they had tortured? Who would have guessed.
Arar was seized in September 2002, held for questioning for 12 days, then flown by jet to Jordan and driven to Syria. He was kept in a coffin-size dungeon for 10 months and beaten repeatedly with a metal cable. He eventually confessed to having trained in Afghanistan — a country he’d never been to.
Now, administration officials won’t back down, won’t apologize, and won’t stop asking the world to trust their judgment on overseeing detention of suspected terrorists.
The mind reels.