[QUOTE=Two and a Half Inches of Fun]
He was only detained. Are you arguing that every person being held before deportation is being imprisoned? The detainment was not tranfered to Syrian officials. When Arar was transferred to Syrian officials the detainment ended and Syrian custody began. What happened to him in Syria is not covered by the Constitution. What the Syrian government does to a Syrian citizen is not a US Constitution issue.
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Syria claims he’s a Syrian citizen. Arar doesn’t. The Canadian government doesn’t, though somewhere along the way there might have been a mix-up. Are you under the impression the U.S. government is not aware of how Syria treats prisoners? For that matter, why was he even in a Syrian prison? He’d committed no crime in Syria. Did the Syrians have any reason to view Ara as a terrorism suspect before the U.S. handed him over, announcing “This man is a terrorism suspect” ? By the argument you present, it’s perfectly acceptable for the U.S to take a prisoner to international waters and torture him or hand him over to a known torturer.
It does? Nothing in the text says that. Fortunately, there’s the 14th and *Brown v Mississippi* to take up the slack. The U.S. government is forbidden to impose cruel or unusual punishments, and to violate due process. It doesn’t magically become legal if they get a third party to do so on their behalf. Why was he turned over to Syrian custody at all? If all the U.S. wanted to do was deport him, just have an officer escort him to a plane bound for Syria, watch him board, watch the plane take off, and that’s that.
Arar doesn’t claim so. If, say, Angola claims you as a citizen, do you have dual citizenship? Are there circumstances where you can be deported to Angola?
Well, the courts can decide that. The argument for fifth, sixth, eighth, and fourteenth violations appears plausible to me on its face, and I’m not some kind of terrorist supporter or anti-Bush fanatic.
Arar is not a teenager. For such a petty crime as in your analogy, an adult would be released on his own recognizance. He did not have the shit beaten out of him by an angry father. He was tortured at length by professional interrogators. Your analogy is pointless. Mine is better - U.S. officials made a point of putting Arar into Syrian custody, knowing full well what would happen to him, to get information they themselves could not extract without constitutional violation. As I see it, this attempt at distancing themselves in no way mitigates that violation. It is, in fact, something that should be actively discouraged, because in the jet age it’s fairly easy to quickly remove someone from U.S. soil, torture them, and return to present the extracted information to a U.S. court.
Honestly, I don’t believe you.
Then after the findings of such an investigation are published, we’ll have more to discuss.