Deportation/torture case tests civil rights, free press, US/Canada ties

I posted this yesterday in GD, where it disappeared in no time. I'm reposting it here because I think this is an important story that we need to be following, and this article has some interesting developments.

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/7830147.htm

Posted on Fri, Jan. 30, 2004
A tale of torture is testing rights in the post-9/11 era
The political drama roils Canada-U.S. diplomacy.
By Thomas Ginsberg
Inquirer Staff Writer

An immigrant is deported to Syria and tortured. A reporter who exposes it has her home raided. And officials in two countries face inquiries and lawsuits.

No fictional thriller, these are elements of a real U.S.-Canadian controversy in which civil rights and a free press are now colliding with secrecy and antiterrorism laws.

snip>

Last week, a U.S. civil rights group used the Arar case to file the first legal challenge to a U.S. deportation practice called "extraordinary rendition," under which low-level terrorist suspects purportedly are given to countries where torture methods barred in the United States can be used to elicit more information.

"United States officials removed Arar to Syria so that Syrian security officers could interrogate him under torture and thereby obtain information for United States counterterrorism operations," claims the federal lawsuit, the first over the practice, by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights.

snip>

On Nov. 8, in one of many reports on the flap, O'Neill, 50, a reporter and onetime foreign-affairs columnist for the Ottawa Citizen, wrote a 1,400-word story detailing his interrogations in New York and Syria and describing classified information about him gathered by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, known as the Mounties. She attributed her report only to "security sources" and "leaked documents." It was widely cited in Canadian media

Already under pressure about the case, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police then began following O'Neill and at 8:12 a.m. on Dec. 21 raided her home, seizing a career's worth of notes, contact lists and computer files. "It felt like... a slow-motion robbery," she said.

more>