The Arar Case Goes to Trial in New York

[Sunspace]

Maher Arar gets his week in court.

Arar, a Canadian citizen (born in Syria), was detained at New York’s JFK Airport while traveling from Jordan to Montreal, and shipped to Syria, where he was tortured. Link.

Canadian Maher Arar made history in a Brooklyn courtroom yesterday when his lawyers forced the Bush administration to defend its treatment of him when he was detained in the United States, then whisked off to face torture in Syria.

Lawyers for the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights became the first to challenge Washington’s policy of “extraordinary rendition” in a court of law.

Rendition, a practice used with some frequency by U.S. President George W. Bush in his war on terror, is the name attached to a policy by which terrorist suspects are sent to other countries for interrogation, and often face torture.

Arar was on his way home to Canada in September 2002, when U.S. authorities detained him at New York’s JFK airport, holding him without access to a lawyer and ultimately sending him to Syria, his country of birth, where he says he was imprisoned for more than a year and tortured.

[lieu]

Completely aside from the obviously disturbing practice of Rendition, why is it that Syria, no friend to the US in it’s war on terror and certainly not one to do it’s bidding, tortured Arar, a Syrian by birth?

[jayjay]

@lieu

Completely aside from the obviously disturbing practice of Rendition, why is it that Syria, no friend to the US in it’s war on terror and certainly not one to do it’s bidding, tortured Arar, a Syrian by birth?

From Maherarar.ca:

They ask why Arar does not want to go to Syria, and Arar tells them he is afraid he will be tortured there. He says he did not do his military service before leaving Syria, he is a Sunni Muslim, and his mother’s cousin was accused of being part of the Muslim Brotherhood and imprisoned. They ask him to sign a document, and he refuses.

[saoirse]

I am still not getting how they can send an individual to country other than his own? If they don’t hold him in America, and he can’t stay, then he gets deported, which means to Canada, right? What am I missing?

[Helen_s_Eidolon]

It was a technicality. He still had Syrian citizenship, although he hadn’t been there since he was 16 and left to avoid military duty. Of course, he also had Canadian citizenship, where he had a home, a family and a plane ticket.

[Northern_Piper]

It’s also unclear exactly what role the Canadian security/RCMP played in the Arar affair. There have been suggestions that the Canadian security agencies didn’t want him back in Canada, so fed the US some of their information on Arar, which the US then used to characterise him as a terrorist threat. On the other hand, there’s been some suggestion that the US agencies told the Canadian agencies that they were willing to deport Arar to Canada if he would be charged in Canada. The response allegedly was that our agencies did not have any grounds to charge him, and couldn’t charge him just because the US agencies wanted him charged.

The whole thing is pretty murky. Our federal government has set up a public inquiry to try to get to the bottom of it. None of our agencies has come out looking very good, so far.

[Rysto]

@LaurAnge

It was a technicality. He still had Syrian citizenship, although he hadn’t been there since he was 16 and left to avoid military duty.

And Syria, IIRC, doesn’t allow its citizens to renounce their citizenship, which is why he was still technically a Syrian citizen.