The Bush Era's Dark Legacy of Torture

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted October 27, 2007.

There's a scene in the political drama Rendition where Peter Sarsgaard -- playing a well-meaning but ultimately cowardly senior aid to a powerful senator -- unsuccessfully approaches the icy head of the CIA's counterterrorism unit (Meryl Streep) about the case of Anwar El-Ibrahimi, an Egyptian immigrant with an American wife and child who has been kidnapped by hooded CIA operatives at Chicago's O'Hare Airport on erroneous suspicions of terrorist ties and sent to be tortured in an unidentified North African country (presumably Egypt). Put off by her arrogance and frustrated by her rebuff, Sarsgaard's character says in a stern up-close whisper, "Perhaps I should have a copy of the Constitution delivered to your office."

Streep answers archly: "What are you taking issue with?" she hisses. "The disappearance of a particular man? Or a national security policy?"

To anyone opposed to the government practice of snatching people off the street, erasing any record of their whereabouts, flying them off to a black hole in some human rights-violating netherworld, and subjecting them to sadistic torture techniques in the name of a "war on terror," the answer is painfully obvious. But in our enduringly surreal political era, the question cuts to the heart of the actual debates that are currently playing out on Capitol Hill.

The day before the national premier of Rendition, amid no fanfare, a joint hearing was held by the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees on the case of Canadian citizen Maher Arar, the software engineer who was famously detained at JFK Airport in 2002 and covertly flown to his native Syria, where, for ten months, he was physically and mentally tortured -- in a U.S. operation inside a nation the administration labels "terrorist." Eventually, Arar was sent home to an apology and compensation from the Canadian -- not U.S. -- government. Despite the fact that it was the United States that sent him to face such a nightmare, four years later the Bush administration has yet to apologize to Mr. Arar -- or even acknowledge his ordeal. In fact, despite an independent Canadian investigation that last fall cleared him of anything remotely resembling criminal activity (In 2004, the same year President Bush was named "Person of the Year" by Time magazine, Arar was named Time Canada's "newsmaker of the year"), Arar remains on the United States terrorist watch list and was thus unable to travel to Washington to testify at the hearing on his own case. Instead, he delivered his words in front of a camera from Ottawa, his testimony delivered to the Congress courtesy of satellite hookup.

It was not the first time the Congress has discussed extraordinary rendition -- or Arar's case, for that matter. The case achieved notoriety years ago, and YouTube contains multiple clips of a very angry Sen. Patrick Leahy laying into former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales this past winter about the torture of Maher Arar.

"We knew damn well if he went to Canada he wouldn't be tortured," the Vermont senator boomed. "He'd be held and he'd be investigated. We also knew damn well if he went to Syria he'd be tortured. And it's beneath the dignity of this country ... to send somebody to another country to be tortured. You know and I know that this has happened a number of times the past five years by this country."

There was no such drama at this hearing; in part because there was no administration official to grill. But there were plenty of theatrics, mostly from the Republican side. Pausing only to offer their personal -- not official -- apologies to Mr. Arar for the "tragic mistake" that led to his kidnap and torture, defenders of extraordinary rendition did everything they could to spin and promote the program as an indispensable tool in the War on Terror.

Leading the charge was Dana Rohrabacher, the California Republican, who opened with a smirk and a nod at what must be his imagined collusion between Hollywood and Congress. "Let us note that this is an opportune moment to be having a hearing on the issue of rendition," he said, "because it just happens to be the subject of a movie that is about to come out. What a coincidence!" Casting extraordinary rendition as a government program like Medicare only less problematic -- "hundreds of thousands of people die because of human error in the Medicare system" -- Rohrabacher repeatedly invoked Sept. 11 to remind people that, in a time of war, "there's no such thing as perfection." "This was one year after the most brutal and bloody foreign attack on American soil in the history of our country," he said about Arar's ordeal, which took began on Sept. 26, 2002." More importantly, "rendition is used to fight our war against radicals who want to end our way of life." (Rohrabacher is uniquely poised to make such accusations, having traveled to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight alongside the Mujahadeen against the Soviets -- on the very same side as Bin Laden.)

See more stories tagged with: civil liberties, extraordinary rendition, rendition, maher arar

Liliana Segura is a freelance writer living in New York.

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