Amy Goodman: Up to Democrats to Investigate Torture

from CommonDreams:


Published on Thursday, January 25, 2007 by the Seattle Post-Ingelligencer
Up to Democrats to investigate Torture
by Amy Goodman

The new head of the Senate Judiciary Committee was angry. Sen. Patrick Leahy was questioning U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales about a man named Maher Arar.

Arar is a Canadian citizen the U.S. detained without charge then sent to Syria in 2002. Leahy fumed: "We knew damn well, if he went to Canada, he wouldn't be tortured. He'd be held. He'd be investigated. We also knew damn well, if he went to Syria, he'd be tortured."

Leahy was responding to Alberto Gonzales' comments that "there were assurances sought that he would not be tortured from Syria." Assurances? From the country that President Bush recently described as the "crossroads for terrorism"? From the country that Bush has vilified and threatened to attack? But before we point the finger at other countries, we have to look here at home.

Gonzales knows about torture. Arar was detained less than two months after Gonzales' office produced the notorious "Torture Memo," which has served as the legal basis for the Bush administration's brutal torture methods such as "waterboarding" (holding a victim's head underwater until unconscious) that are increasingly well-known and globally despised.

The U.S. government also engages in "extraordinary rendition." This Orwellian phrase describes how foreigners are grabbed off the street or from their home and secretly delivered to some other place, outside the U.S. (in Arar's case, Syria), where illegal and brutal interrogations can take place beyond the reach of Congress and the courts.

Arar's Kafaesque nightmare began Sept. 26, 2002. He was returning to Canada from a family vacation, with a plane change at New York's JFK Airport. There he was pulled aside, searched, questioned and imprisoned. Two weeks later, U.S. authorities sent Arar to Syria.

Arar spent the next 10 months enduring brutal beatings and psychological torture, kept in a cell the size of a grave. Arar was accused of being connected to al-Qaida, and of having been to a training camp in Afghanistan. Neither was true, but after weeks of beatings, he admitted to everything. Worse than the beatings, Arar said on "Democracy Now!," was how he suffered while isolated in the dank, windowless cell: .....(more)

The rest of the piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0125-30.htm

for over 5 years.

impeachment is the only salvage of our honor.

if they don't.