IS the INS allowed to endanger foreign nationals?

Great Debates
1

Remember the Canadian citizen who was “disappeared” by the INS?

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=139651&highlight=syria+deported+canada

Well Syria, about a year later and under pressure to please the US have declared him a member of Al Queda.

http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030429.uarar0429/BNStory/International

Now, I was about to launch my very first Pit Rant on this but I’m at work and I get enough funny looks for my outbursts. The INS deliberately deported a Canadian Citizen of +10 years, carrying a valid Canadian passport, to a third country without alerting the Canadian government and has continued to withhold the information they used to label the man a threat to national security.

I don’t care if the slack jawed, slope headed, Neolithic throwbacks at INS thought he was the Antichrist riding the whore of Babylon, you do not make a citizen of another country disappear.

2

Actually this isn’t unusual at all -for the US. A while ago, they did a similar thing with a German citizen of Syrian descent. When he went to Syria to visit some extended family (or for business, I don’t remember), he was arrested on pressure of the US who wanted to interrogate him IN SYRIA ('cause they can do so more effectively there) -and they insisted that the German government not be informed. German authorities only found out months later. It is a clear incitement of another nation to break the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, but given that the US has a track record to the moon and back of violating said convention and has been repeatedly slapped on its fingers by the ICJ for it, no one is really surprised.

3

Well I want to know what statute gives the INS the authority to send a Canadian citizen anywhere other than back on the plane he arrived on. Next time I’m down Wisconsin way is there a statute that will have me whisked off to Country X under the vague National security threat label?

Let’s make it that simple.

4

What is the basis for the inference that Syria made this determination “under pressure to please the U.S.”?

  • Rick
5

I’m inferring that

  1. Syria has held this man for ~ 1 year with no charges.
  2. Syria is, as of 2-3 weeks ago, the focus of US interest.
  3. Syria/US engagement relies on Syria providing to the US things of value such as Iraqi leaders, WMD, and/or Al Qaeda information.

The point of the OP stands on its own.

What statute allows the INS take foreign nationals, deny them consular service, refuse to provide information to that citizen’s government backing the charges (if you call the nebulous “national security” a charge) and the deportation of the foreign national to a destination not his country of citizenship or the country of his originating flight.