Outsourcing torture?

Rick Holmes / Byline

Wednesday, November 26, 2003



Now that Jessica Lynch has had her week on primetime, I'm looking forward to the TV movie about Maher Arar. I only wish it could be directed by Alfred Hitchcock, who made a specialty of tales involving ordinary people swept up by international intrigue.

Some of the movie could be filmed in the Boston area. Arar was born in Syria and moved to Canada when he was 17, but he lived in Framingham for awhile with his wife and daughter in an upstairs apartment on the south side of town. He worked at MathWorks in Natick as an engineer before moving back to Canada to start his own consulting firm.

"This is who I am," Arar, 33, said early this month. "I am a father and a husband. I am a telecommunications engineer and entrepreneur. I have never had trouble with the police, and have always been a good citizen.

"So I still cannot believe what has happened to me, and how my life and career have been destroyed."

Arar's nightmare began Sept. 22, 2002, at JFK airport, where he was changing planes on a flight home from a family vacation in Tunisia. He was grabbed by immigration officers, questioned and locked up. He was held for more than a week without an arrest, without a hearing, and with one short visit with a lawyer.

Arar holds duel citizenship in Canada and Syria, and when U.S. officials said he'd be deported, he begged to be sent to Canada. His mother's cousin had been imprisoned in Syria, he said, and he knew they tortured their prisoners.

In the middle of the night, Arar was flown in shackles, first to Washington, where he was turned over to people he believes were with the CIA, then to Amman, Jordan. There, he was entrusted to the tender mercies of the Syrians.

The beatings began immediately, Arar says. For more than 10 months he was locked in a dark pit, listening to the screams of tortured prisoners.

"It was like a grave," he says. "It had no light. It was three feet wide. It was six feet deep."

The interrogations were constant. He was whipped with black electrical cables and threatened with harsher tortures. He was made to sign documents he could not read, including, apparently, a confession that he had traveled to Afghanistan and trained with al-Qaida.

Back in Canada, Arar's wife, friends and supporters kept up the pressure. Because of that - or maybe because the Syrians had given up on getting information from him - he was suddenly released last month, more than a year after his abduction. If it doesn't prove his innocence, the fact that he was never charged and is free today certainly indicates they couldn't make a case. Torture chamber confessions don't hold up in either U.S. or Canadian courts, at least not yet.

Canadians are still outraged, but their government has resisted calls for an investigation of how Canadian police contributed to Arar's nightmare. U.S. officials have been even less forthcoming. Off the record, they say "multiple intelligence sources" were suspicious of Arar.

Also off the record, officials told The Washington Post Arar's case fits the profile of a covert CIA "extraordinary rendition" - a new practice in which suspected terrorists are turned over to foreign intelligence services for interrogation. The practice, the Post says, has been authorized by a secret "finding" signed by President George W. Bush.

U.S. and Canadian officials say they only sent Arar to Syria after the Syrians promised he wouldn't be tortured. We don't torture people, the Syrians say.

Tell that to Human Rights Watch, which has documented Syrian torture chambers that match exactly Arar's description. Tell it to the State Department, which has cited Syria's human rights abuses for decades. Or tell it to President Bush, who has put Syria at the top of the waiting list for admission to the axis of evil.

In his much admired Nov. 6 speech on the need to champion democracy in the Middle East, Bush condemned the government of Syria for leaving its people "a legacy of torture, oppression, misery, and ruin."

We should be the champion of democracy in the world, and human rights can't be separated from democracy. But if Bush expects to be taken seriously on this issue, he'll have to address the contradictions in his own policies. Just months after Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf became Bush's new best friend, he won a new term in an election everyone knows was a fraud. To get a military foothold north of Afghanistan, Bush cozied up to Uzbekistan's longtime dictator, a Stalinist not much better than Saddam Hussein. And Bush still refuses to deal with Yasser Arafat, the democratically elected leader of the Palestinian Authority.

And if Bush wants to be taken seriously, he can't condemn Syrian torturers while at the same time his CIA outsources its interrogations to the same brutal thugs.

The Maher Arar story has had a tough time breaking into the newspapers, especially those south of the Canadian border, let alone TV. Maybe Al-Jazeera is interested.

Rick Holmes is opinion page editor for the MetroWest Daily News. E-mail him at rholmes@cnc.com.