Why we shouldn't: torture, withhold evidence, deny due process, .......

[motivez]

Canadian police errors led to man's torture -probe

OTTAWA, Sept 19 (Reuters) - Canadian police wrongly identified an Ottawa software engineer as an Islamic extremist, prompting U.S. agents to deport him to Syria, where he was tortured, an official inquiry concluded on Monday.

Maher Arar, who holds Canadian and Syrian nationality, was arrested in New York in September 2002 and accused of being an al-Qaeda member. In fact, said the judge who led the probe, all the signs point to the fact Arar was innocent.

Arar, 36, says he was repeatedly tortured in the year he spent in Damascus jails, and the inquiry agreed that he had been tortured. He was freed in 2003.

Judge Dennis O'Connor, who was asked by the Canadian government in 2004 to examine what had happened, found the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had wrongly told U.S. authorities that Arar was an Islamic extremist.

"The provision of this inaccurate information ... (was) totally unacceptable" and guaranteed the United States would treat Arar as a serious threat, O'Connor said.

"I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr Arar has committed any offense or that his activities constitute a threat to the security of Canada."

Civil rights advocates said the case of Arar and three other Canadians who ended up in Syrian jails raised suspicions that Canada might be outsourcing interrogation to nations where torture was commonplace.

O'Connor said the case of the other three men was troubling and warranted further investigation. But he found no evidence that the Canadian government had played any direct role in the U.S. decision to deport Arar to Syria.

Arar, calling on the government to hold accountable the officials he said were responsible for his ordeal, had tears in his eyes when asked by reporters for his reaction.

"Today Justice O'Connor has cleared my name and restored my reputation," said Arar, who has launched a lawsuit against Ottawa seeking compensation.

O'Connor's three-volume report castigated the Mounties for slipshod work in the wake of the 9/11 suicide attacks.

It said the Mounties exaggerated Arar's importance and later asked U.S. customs agents to put Arar and his wife on a special watch list, calling them "Islamic extremist individuals suspected of being linked to the Al Qaeda terrorist movement".

U.S. agencies declined to be questioned by O'Connor as to why they had deported Arar.

"I do conclude it is very likely that they relied on information received from the RCMP in making the decision to remove Mr Arar to Syria," the judge wrote.

Public Security Minister Stockwell Day, who has overall responsibility for the forces of law and order, said he was satisfied with the finding that Canadian officials had not played a direct role in the U.S. decision to deport Arar to Syria.

"What happened to Mr Arar is very regrettable. We hope ... never to see this happen again," he told reporters.

Arar first came to police attention in October 2001 when he was seen talking to another man already being investigated for possible al-Qaeda links.

O'Connor found that police made a number of serious mistakes in the Arar case.

The unit probing possible terror networks was poorly supervised and was comprised largely of financial fraud experts, who had little experience of national security cases.

Police gave all the files from their probe to the United States without screening the data for inaccuracies or following internal rules that limited what they could hand over.

"It was a breathtakingly incompetent investigation ... a disaster," said Marlys Edwardh, a lawyer for Arar.

O'Connor criticized unnamed Canadian officials, whom he said had leaked confidential and sometimes inaccurate information about Arar both before and after his release in a bid to demonstrate he really was a threat to national security.

Holy shit. If this isn't evidence to back up what I and many others have been saying, I honestly don't know what people who are for all of this shit would need to happen.

Our Government is surely no more competent than the Canadians judging by the massive failures and lack of diversity of opinion in the inner circle for key decision makers..

Honestly. We make mistakes. There is bad information. People are INNOCENT until PROVEN guilty.. and we should treat them as such until a court of law finds them guilty of a crime

I like how it says the Canadian government is outsourcing torture, sounds suprisingly like what we're doing with people.. it recently came out that we're holding what, 13,000 people in essentially a legal vacuum?

While this incident happened in Canada, it's almost certain that there are innocent people who we're holding simply because someone needed reward money to help get them by, or had a grudge against a certain family, or whatever in either Afghanistan or Iraq or who knows where else we've picked up people.

Colin Powell was right on, we're losing the moral highground in this fight.. to fucking terrorists, who blow up women and children, because we've abandoned the rule of law, and the principles on which this country was founded.

It's really sad.

[lew]

That's horrible.

[PetriW]

There was a quite large scandal in Sweden like two years ago after Sweden agreed to deport 2 arabs to egypt after american pressure under guarantee they would not be tortured. Egypt broke their promise and they were tortured.
It's illegal in Sweden to deport someone to a country where they may be tortured. (Granted, I've seen some sick shit, let's hope the new government cares more.)

(If you doubt the US involvement, American agents picked the guy up on and they flew him to Egypt, Sweden simply lay flat to US demands.)

[kinggovernor]

they need to take this up with syria

[Nonphixion]

The Jack Bauer method of torture; The Myth of The Ticking Time Bomb

Ask not for whom the bomb ticks, Mr. and Ms. America. Right now, across Los Angeles, timers on dozens of toxic nerve-gas canisters are set to detonate in just hours and send some two million Americans to their deaths in writhing agony.

But take hope. We have one chance, just one, to avert this atrocity and save the lives of millions. Agent Jack Bauer of the Counter Terrorist Unit has his hunting knife poised over the eye of a trembling traitor who may know the identity of those who set these bombs. As a clock ticks menacingly and the camera focuses on knife point poised to plunge into eyeball, the traitor breaks and identifies the Muslim terrorists, giving Agent Bauer the lead he needs to crack this case wide open.

As happens with mind-numbing regularity every week on Fox Television’s hit show 24, torture has once again worked to save us all from the terror of a ticking bomb, affirming for millions of loyal viewers that torture is a necessary weapon in George Bush’s war on terror.

"Major success from limited, surgical torture is a fable, a fiction... As we slide down the slippery slope to torture in general, we should also realize that there is a chasm at the bottom called extrajudicial execution."

With torture now a key weapon in the war on terror, the time has come to interrogate the logic of the ticking time bomb with a six-point critique. For this scenario embodies our deepest fears and makes most of us quietly—unwittingly—complicit in the Bush Administration’s recourse to torture.

Number one: In the real world, the probability that a terrorist might be captured after concealing a ticking nuclear bomb in Times Square and that his captors would somehow recognize his significance is phenomenally slender. The scenario assumes a highly improbable array of variables that runs something like this:

—First, FBI or CIA agents apprehend a terrorist at the precise moment between timer’s first tick and bomb’s burst.

—Second, the interrogators somehow have sufficiently detailed foreknowledge of the plot to know they must interrogate this very person and do it right now.

—Third, these same officers, for some unexplained reason, are missing just a few critical details that only this captive can divulge.

—Fourth, the biggest leap of all, these officers with just one shot to get the information that only this captive can divulge are best advised to try torture, as if beating him is the way to assure his wholehearted cooperation.

Take the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, who sat in a Minneapolis cell in the weeks before 9/11 under desultory investigation as a possible “suicide hijacker” because the FBI did not have precise foreknowledge of Al Qaeda’s plot or his possible role. In pressing for a search warrant before 9/11, the bureau’s Minneapolis field supervisor even warned Washington he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center.” But FBI headquarters in Washington replied there was no evidence Moussaoui was a terrorist—providing us with yet another reminder of how difficult it is to grasp the significance of even such stunningly accurate insight or intelligence in the absence of foreknowledge.

“After the event,” Roberta Wohlstetter wrote in her classic study of that other great U.S. intelligence failure, Pearl Harbor, “a signal is always crystal clear; we can now see what disaster it was signaling since the disaster has occurred. But before the event, it is obscure and pregnant with conflicting meanings.”


Even if the terrorist begins to talk under torture, interrogators have a hard time figuring out whether he is telling the truth or not. Testing has found that professional interrogators perform within the 45 to 60 percent range in separating truth from lies—little better than flipping a coin. Thus, as intelligence data moves through three basic stages—acquisition, analysis, and action—the chances that good intelligence will be ignored are high.

It does not work.

[beez]

It works in letting people in middle america feel a sense of revenge against and power over the faceless enemies they're told about every day on the news.

[avsp]

'true face' arguements for the jihadist win

[SpicyMcVoodoo]

I'm curious about possible law suits from this guy.

[motivez]

Originally Posted by kinggovernor

they need to take this up with syria

Uh, no.. we're every bit as guilty as Syria is in this case. We shipped him there, knowing full well what was going to happen to him, without asking for evidence, without giving himself a chance to defend himself, and this is the result.

The Bush proposal is wrong on so many levels, and this proves the point rather nicely.

[thomez]

Originally Posted by Nonphixion

It does not work.

you would have loved to see the Fox News interview regarding torture last night, at about 4:30 or 5ish...

interviewing Republican O'Conner or whatever her name is, that is against the Bush bill

Fox dude "why are you against methods that save the lives of Americans?"

her "I'm fine with interrogation, but as McCain has said, torture doesn't work"

Fox dude "well we know that methods used on 4 terrorists helped foil plots and save American lives - if those methods worked, doesn't that mean they weren't torture?"

nice false choice dude, basically saying that if we believe torture doesn't work, then anything we do that does work must absolutely not be torture

this is the line of reasoning being used by those supporting Bush's bill, from what I can see - it is a totally ridiculous way of thinking and would basically allow a trial and error method of any method to determine what is torture, which would be defined as anything that didn't work... cause that must be torture... wtf circular logic

[kinggovernor]

Originally Posted by motivez

Uh, no.. we're every bit as guilty as Syria is in this case. We shipped him there, knowing full well what was going to happen to him, without asking for evidence, without giving himself a chance to defend himself, and this is the result.

The Bush proposal is wrong on so many levels, and this proves the point rather nicely.

people get roughed up in mexican jails, should we stop sending people there?

[motivez]

Originally Posted by kinggovernor

people get roughed up in mexican jails, should we stop sending people there?

If they allow torture, yes.

This is different than simply extraditing someone, though.. he wasn't wanted for crimes in Syria. We outsourced our interrogation of him to one of our 'secret facilities' there specifically because of their laws on 'interrogation'... and only because he was accused of something. We didn't bother to follow up on the proof, we didn't bother to let him have access to the evidence against him, we didn't give him a chance to refute the charges, etc, etc..

We picked him up. We held him. We transferred him.

This is our fault, and I hope he sues the fuck out of our government and wins..

Again though, this shows why Bush's policy goes against everything America was built on.

[Galactic Gigolo]

I think it's about time for tehking to bust out the old "He wasn't driving an ice cream truck" line in order to justify torture.

[tbone]

Originally Posted by kinggovernor

people get roughed up in mexican jails, should we stop sending people there?

Sending people to a country to knowingly be tortured into a confession or extract information is a hell of a lot different than people voluntarily going into a country and getting arrested for drug possession or drunkin fighting and then be roughed up in a jail.

That's about the flimsiest argument I have ever heard.