Tagged: CIA
NY Times denounces US court’s “brush-off” of Arar lawsuit
A scathing editorial in today’s New York Times denounces a US appeal court for having “brushed off” a lawsuit by Canadian Maher Arar. As the paper put it, Arar “was seized in an American airport by federal agents acting on bad information from Canadian officials,” and “held incommunicado and harshly interrogated before being sent to Syria, where he was tortured. He spent almost a year in a grave-size underground cell before the Syrians let him go.”
Two courts, one in Italy and one in the United States, ruled recently on the Bush administration’s practice of extraordinary rendition, which is the kidnapping of people and sending them to other countries for interrogation — and torture. The Italian court got it right. The American court got it miserably wrong.
The Italian court convicted a CIA station chief and 22 other Americans, and two Italian accomplices, in the 2003 abduction of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, a Muslim cleric who ended up in Egypt, where he said he was tortured. In a split decision, the US court said it had no authority to tell Congress “how to implement extraordinary rendition.”
The Times said:
The ruling distorts precedent and the Constitutional separation of powers to deny justice to Mr. Arar and give officials a pass for egregious misconduct. The overt disregard for the central role of judges in policing executive branch excesses has frightening implications for safeguarding civil liberties, as four judges suggested in dissenting opinions.
It is painful to recall that this is the same federal circuit court that declared in 1980 that even foreigners accused of torture in foreign countries can be called to account in American courts. The torturer is the “enemy of all mankind,” the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit declared back then. One of the dissenters [to the Arar ruling], Judge Guido Calabresi, said that “when the history of this distinguished court is written, today’s majority decision will be viewed with dismay.”
Annals of US torture
The British High Court has ruled that, pending appeal, it will finally publish seven paragraphs detailing the torture CIA agents inflicted on Binyam Mohamed. The court had earlier redacted the passage from a decision about Mohamed at the request of British officials, who said it would jeopardize US-UK cooperation on security matters.
The Telegraph, a British newspaper, quotes an anonymous official describing the explosive contents of the passage:
The 25 lines edited out of the court papers contained details of how Mr Mohamed’s genitals were sliced with a scalpel and other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding, the controversial technique of simulated drowning, “is very far down the list of things they did,” the official said.
If true, these allegations will be hard for major US media outlets to dismiss, as they have waterboarding.
Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones ruled there could be no conceivable security basis for withholding the information:
The suppression of reports of wrongdoing by officials in circumstances which cannot in any way affect national security is inimical to the rule of law. Championing the rule of law, not subordinating it, is the cornerstone of democracy.
What’s happened to America
Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald offers a blood-curdling precis of the just released (but still redacted) CIA Inspector General’s report (.pdf) on the agency’s torture techniques. He concludes:
The fact that we are not really bothered any more by taking helpless detainees in our custody and (a) threatening to blow their brains out, torture them with drills, rape their mothers, and murder their children; (b) choking them until they pass out; (c) pouring water down their throats to drown them; (d) hanging them by their arms until their shoulders are dislocated; (e) blowing smoke in their face until they vomit; (f) putting them in diapers, dousing them with cold water, and leaving them on a concrete floor to induce hypothermia; and (g) beating them with the butt of a rifle — all things that we have always condemend as “torture” and which our laws explicitly criminalize as felonies (“torture means. . . the threat of imminent death; or the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering . . .”) — reveals better than all the words in the world could how degraded, barbaric and depraved a society becomes when it lifts the taboo on torturing captives.
