LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

And while we are getting apologies by folks who accused Mahar Arar of being a terrorist how about Ezra Le Rant and his Western Standard publishing a front page apology to the Arar family. These are just a few examples I am sure you can find more, and more, and more.....

Layton wants to negotiate with Taliban terrorists (is NDP star candidate, Monia Mazigh -- wife of Maher Arar -- Layton's terrorism advisor?)

Alghabra was stopped at the U.S. border and searched and fingerprinted -- whether that was by reason of demographic profiling, or because he was on a watch list is uncertain. What is certain is that Alghabra turned it into an opportunity to gain media face time, Maher Arar-style, as an anti-American, anti-security mouthpiece.

Looking for a good read? Western Standard publisher Ezra Levant reviews and recommends the latest books. Buy them today!

Confessions of An Innocent Man: Torture and Survival in a Saudi Prison
by William Sampson
McClelland and Stewart, 432 pages

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Ontario Superior Court Judge Lynn Ratushny said an Ottawa justice of the peace was wrong when he hastily agreed to an RCMP request to keep secret the reasons for Jan. 21, 2004, police raids on Ms. O'Neill's Ottawa home and the Citizen's downtown office to execute search warrants under the Security of Information Act.

March 9:2004

Ottawa police chief Vince Bevan admits involvement in investigating Maher Arar before he was deported to Syria.

However, Mr. Harper, who has been in office since January, previously led a party known as the Canadian Alliance, which had called Mr. Arar a dangerous terrorist and attacked efforts by the earlier Liberal government to secure his release.

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The only person who has actually been prosecuted under the Anti-Terrorism Act was Momin Khawaja and he was apprehended thanks to British police and U.S. intelligence, and not Canadian police work. Instead of vigorously pursuing radical Islamists, the former Liberal Government was more concerned with avoiding any perceptions that the rights of ultra-sensitive Muslim Canadians might possibly be violated. It also gave the Muslim community exactly the wrong signal by allowing the notorious Khadrs back into the country to sponge off Canada’s generous welfare and health systems when they should have had their Canadian citizenship revoked.

Following the return to Canada of Syrian-Canadian Maher Arar who was rendered to Syria by the United States for interrogation, the old Liberal Government set up the Arar Inquiry to look into RCMP and CSIS wrongdoing in providing information on Arar to the Americans. Against this backdrop, it also issued some ministerial directives that clamped down on RCMP national security probes. One required the RCMP to obtain prior ministerial approval before cooperating with or entering into a working arrangement with a foreign security or intelligence service and then only allowed this through CSIS. Another directive provided guidance on investigating "sensitive sectors" of society like religion. This was done to restrict the ability of the RCMP and CSIS to carry out U.S.-style investigations of mosques and Islamic centers, which have resulted in so many successful prosecutions south of the border. As far as I know, these three directives are still in effect, although when I asked the RCMP Commissioner about them in a public forum, he denied that they existed.

Among other things, O'Connor's report found:

• American officials "very likely" relied on the inaccurate information from the RCMP when they decided to send Arar to Syria, a country known to have aggressive techniques for interrogating suspects.
• There is no evidence that Arar committed any offence, nor is there anything to suggest he is a threat to Canadian security.
• Canadian agencies wrongly accepted information from Syrian sources about Arar after his detention, without determining whether it might have been extracted using torture.
• In order to protect themselves and portray Arar in an unflattering light, Canadian officials leaked inaccurate details about Arar to news media.
• Officials from the RCMP gave a sanitized summary of the Arar case to top government officials in order to cover up RCMP mistake.

Of course, Mr. Bush didn't come out and say he's lobbying for torture. Instead he refers to "an alternative set of procedures" for interrogation. But the administration no longer conceals what it wants. It wants authorization for the CIA to hide detainees in overseas prisons where even the International Committee of the Red Cross won't have access. It wants permission to interrogate those detainees with abusive practices that in the past have included induced hypothermia and "waterboarding," or simulated drowning. And it wants the right to try such detainees, and perhaps sentence them to death, on the basis of evidence that the defendants cannot see and that may have been extracted during those abusive interrogation sessions.

Bush fears war crimes prosecution, impeachment

Bush called on Congress to define these “vague and undefined” terms in Common Article 3 because “our military and intelligence personnel” involved in capture and interrogation “could now be at risk of prosecution under the War Crimes Act.”

Congress enacted the War Crimes Act in 1996. That act defines violations of Geneva’s Common Article 3 as war crimes. Those convicted face life imprisonment or even the death penalty if the victim dies.

The president is undoubtedly familiar with the doctrine of command responsibility, where commanders, all the way up the chain of command to the commander in chief, can be held liable for war crimes their inferiors commit if the commander knew or should have known they might be committed and did nothing to stop or prevent them.

Bush defensively denied that the United States engages in torture and foreswore authorizing it. But it has been well documented that policies set at the highest levels of our government have resulted in the torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of U.S. prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo.

Indeed, Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act in December, which codifies the prohibition in United States law against cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment of prisoners in U.S. custody. In his speech, Bush took credit for working with Sen. John McCain to pass the DTA.

In fact, Bush fought the McCain “anti-torture” amendment tooth and nail, at times threatening to veto the entire appropriations bill to which it was appended. At one point, Bush sent Dick Cheney to convince McCain to exempt the CIA from the prohibition on cruel treatment, but McCain refused.

Bush signed the bill, but attached a “signing statement” where he reserved the right to violate the DTA if, as commander in chief, he thought it necessary.

Throughout his speech, Bush carefully denied his administration had violated any laws during its “tough” interrogations of prisoners. Yet, the very same day, the Pentagon released a new interrogation manual that prohibits techniques including “waterboarding,” which amounts to torture.

Having got the information they needed Bush is closing the barn door after the horse has left. The CIA may no longer torture but it will still contract out such torture.....

Secret Prisons: Implications of the Administration's Maneuver Stratfor

Ultimately, the Bush administration's decision to rescind the use of "secret prisons" does nothing to prohibit this kind of work with foreign intelligence services, which was a mainstay of the CIA before the 9/11 attacks. Even in cases where Washington has serious differences with a host government over strategic or political issues, there can remain close cooperation between intelligence services on the interrogation of al Qaeda suspects. Consider the unlikely example involving the United States and Syria in 2002: The United States rendered a Syrian-born Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, back to Syria -- at the cost of a major strain in U.S.-Canadian relations.

The end of the CIA program, whether permanent or temporary, will not leave the United States with any blind spots in its war against al Qaeda. In fact, considering that only a few al Qaeda members were ever held by the CIA, most of the suspects interrogated in this war have been questioned by foreign proxies -- even since clandestine interrogation centers came into use. The flow of intelligence can be expected to continue -- and it perhaps could be argued that it might increase, as political attention in the United States concerning the treatment of prisoners turns elsewhere and foreign services continue their work without interference.

And we should not forget that it is not just the CIA that contracts out torture and prison operations....US: Pentagon Spends Billions to Outsource Torture

But did the torture really get America the information it needed or is this all misdirection to be able to maintain a program that in fact is of little real value?

The Myth of the Ticking Time Bomb

Of course, the President could not, he said with a knowing wink to his audience, describe “the specific methods used in these CIA interrogations” because “it would help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning.” Although these “procedures were tough,” they had proved vital, the President assured us, in extracting “information about terrorist plans we could not get anywhere else” and thus prevented Al Qaeda from “launching another attack against the American homeland.” If Congress and the Supreme Court would simply set aside their constitutional qualms about these “tough” methods, Bush concluded, then the “brave men and women” who work in this CIA program can continue “to obtain information that will save innocent lives.”

As in so many of these ticking-bomb tales, Bush’s supposed successes crumble on closer examination. Just four days later, The New York Times reported that the FBI claimed it got the key information from Abu Zubaydah with its noncoercive methods and that other agencies already had much of his supposedly “vital” intelligence

Time to Impeach Bush!


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