Transferred to Torture

By Margaret Satterthwaite, Amnesty International. Posted September 11, 2006.

When Maher Arar arrived at John F. Kennedy airport in New York City on Sept. 26, 2002, he had no idea his life was about to be radically changed. Arar, a 31-year-old computer consultant and Canadian citizen, was en route from Zurich to Montreal to attend to business following a family vacation in Tunisia, according to a lawsuit he filed against U.S. officials in 2004. He was standing in line waiting to pass immigration inspection when an immigration officer asked him to step aside to answer some questions.

As FBI agents, immigration officials and NYPD officers questioned Arar, he asked to consult an attorney. U.S. officials told Arar that only U.S. citizens had the right to a lawyer and locked him up in the Metropolitan Detention Center in New York City, where he endured more interrogation about his friends, the mosques he attended, his letters and e-mails. U.S. officials then demanded that he "voluntarily" agree to be sent to Syria, where he was born, instead of home to Canada (Arar holds dual citizenship). Arar refused, according to Amnesty International, explaining that he was afraid he would be tortured in Syria for not completing his military service. After more than a week in detention, U.S. authorities determined that Arar was "inadmissible" to the United States based on secret evidence and notified him that he would be deported to Syria.

They took him to New Jersey in the middle of the night and loaded him onto a small plane that stopped in Washington, D.C., and then Rome before proceeding to Jordan. Local authorities in Jordan chained and beat Arar, bundled him in a van and drove him across the border to Syria, where Arar was beaten with electrical cables, interrogated about his acquaintances and beliefs, and kept in a tiny cell for months at a time.

"I first thought they would keep me in that place, which I now call the grave, for a short period so that they could put pressure on me," Arar told AI. "But I was kept in that dark and filthy cell for about 10 months and 10 days. That was torture."

After three consecutive days of beating and interrogation, he said, "I could not take the pain any more and I falsely confessed of having been to Afghanistan." After the Canadian government intervened, Syrian authorities released him in October 2003 -- more than one year after his ill-fated attempt to change planes in New York City -- with an acknowledgment that there was no evidence that he was ever involved in terrorism.

What U.S. authorities did to Arar -- and the dozens of other men they have rounded up far from any battlefield and shipped abroad to countries that systematically use torture -- is known as "extraordinary rendition." The procedure violates both U.S. and international law. The United States never charged Arar with a crime. He did not get an opportunity to challenge or even learn of the "secret evidence" that U.S. authorities used to justify his apprehension, transfer and detention. The U.S. government does not even acknowledge the program of extraordinary rendition to which Arar lost a year of his life -- despite countless newspaper articles quoting "unnamed officials" familiar with the program. The Bush administration has vigorously fought efforts to challenge the program in court.

Extraordinary rendition is one of several tactics that belong to a new intelligence paradigm operating in the global war on terror. This paradigm is marked by a shift away from evidencebased proceedings and toward intelligence-gathering -- as both the goal of interrogation and detention, and as the justification for treatment outside the usual system of judicial oversight. In the name of security, the new tactics sidestep traditional due process and humane treatment guarantees. The Bush administration argues that, at this historical moment, it is too dangerous to respect the traditional laws of war that forbid torture and abuse, as well as the human rights rules of due process that safeguard against ill treatment.

The origins of extraordinary rendition lie in an earlier procedure known as "rendition to justice." Approved by President Reagan in the 1980s, this form of rendition was aimed at bringing suspects to the United States to stand trial for terrorist crimes. Rendition to justice was an irregular way to obtain custody over an individual for trial in countries where there was no functioning government (such as Lebanon during the civil war) or places where no government had custody over the suspect (such as on the high seas). Despite the obvious human rights concerns associated with any informal seizure, this kind of rendition was aimed at bringing suspects into the regular criminal justice system, where their due process rights were respected. Rendered defendants faced charges and stood trial in U.S. federal courts.

Margaret Satterthwaite is faculty director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University School of Law, where she co-teaches the international human rights clinic. She serves on AIUSA's Board of Directors.

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