The despicable US president, George W. Bush, sends an INNOCENT suspect... TO SYRIA, to be TORTURED!

Like the helpless victims of the Jim Jones cult in Guyana in 1978, America is in the grip of an egomaniacal, dictatorial leader who CLAIMS that he is "DEFENDING OUR FREEDOMS" as he enslaves us with a cult of fear, ignorance, lies, and violence. Mr. Bush has put SYRIA just 1/2 step down from Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as his list of so-called "Axis of Evil" states - now that Iraq is occupied by the US military, SYRIA is surely even higher on the list of "TERRORIST SUPPORTING NATIONS."

SO... what do the maniacal Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney do with prisoners in American custody in their "war on terror"??

ans.- The obvious thing! SHIP THOSE HAPLESS PRISONERS OFF TO SYRIA... TO BE TORTURED!



<< Arar’s case is unusual because he was sent DIRECTLY FROM US SOIL _TO_ SYRIA. But intelligence sources tell 60 Minutes II that since 9/11, THE U.S. has quietly TRANSPORTED HUNDREDS OF hundreds of terror suspects ["suspects"] captured in different parts of the world TO MIDDLE EAST COUNTRIES for tough interrogations [TORTURE]. >>

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His Year In Hell
CBS news
July 15, 2005
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/07/11/60II/main708164.shtml

Is it possible the United States sent an innocent man out of the country to be tortured?

That's the disturbing question at the heart of a case that may reveal a secret side of the war on terrorism, one that the government does not want to talk about.

As Correspondent Vicki Mabrey first reported last year, it involves an accusation that the Justice Department sent a man from the U.S. to Syria to be interrogated and tortured.

The man making the claim is a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was taken into custody, under suspicion of being connected with al Qaeda, while changing planes in New York.

Maher Arar told Mabrey about what became his year in hell, which began when federal agents stopped him for questioning at JFK International Airport.
“I cooperated with them 100 percent. And they always kept telling me, ‘We'll let you go on the next plane,’" says Arar. “They did not.”

It would be more than a year before Arar would see his family again. In September 2002, he’d taken his wife and two children on a beach vacation in Tunisia. But he flew home alone early for his job as a software engineer.

What he didn’t know is that he’d been placed on the U.S. immigration watch list. So when the agents began questioning him, he told 60 Minutes II, he wasn’t concerned – at least not at first.

“The interrogation lasted about seven or eight hours, and then they came, and shackled me and chained me,” recalls Arar. “I said, ‘What's happening here?’ And they would not tell me. They said, ‘You are gonna know tomorrow.’”

He spent the night in a holding cell. The next day, he was shackled, driven to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn and locked in solitary confinement. Agents told him they had evidence that he’d been seen in the company of terrorist suspects in Canada.

“What they accused me of being is very serious. Being a member of al Qaeda,” says Arar, who denies any involvement with the organization.

Arar wasn’t allowed to make a phone call, so when his wife, Monia, didn’t hear from him, she called the Canadian embassy.

“Nobody knew at that time where he was. He vanished,” says Monia, who didn’t hear from him for six days. Then, American officials acknowledged they were holding Arar in Brooklyn. A Canadian consular official visited and assured Arar he’d be deported home to Canada.

But the Justice Department had a different plan. After two weeks in U.S. custody, Arar was taken from his cell by federal agents in the middle of the night.

“They read me the document. They say, ‘The INS director decided to deport you to Syria,’” recalls Arar. “And of course, the first thing I did was, I started crying, because everyone knows that Syria practices torture.”

Arar says he knows because he was born in Syria. He emigrated to Canada with his parents as a teenager. But, returning to Syria as an accused terrorist, he had good reason to be afraid.

Torture in Syrian prisons is well-documented. The State Department’s own report cites an array of gruesome tortures routinely used in Syrian jails. And in a speech, President Bush condemned Syria, alongside Iraq, for what he called the country’s “legacy of torture and oppression.”

Nevertheless, deportation agents flew Arar on a specially chartered jet to Jordan, and the Jordanians drove him to Syria.

“When I arrived there, I saw the photos of the Syrian president, and that’s why I realized I was indeed in Syria,” says Arar. “I wished I had a knife in my hand to kill myself.”

The next morning, Arar says a Syrian intelligence officer arrived carrying a black electrical cable, two inches thick and about two feet long.

“He said, ‘Do you know what this is?’ I said, I was crying, you know, ‘Yes, I know what it is. It's a cable.’ And he said, ‘Open your right hand.’ I opened my right hand … and he beat me very strongly,” says Arar. “He said, ‘Open your left hand.’ And I opened my left hand. And he beat me on my palm, on my left palm. And then he stopped, and he asked me questions. And I said to him, ‘I have nothing to hide.’”

Arar says the physical torture took place during the first two weeks, but he says he also went through psychological and mental torture: “They would take me back to a room, they call it the waiting room. And I hear people screaming. And they, I mean, people, they're being tortured. And I felt my heart was going to go out of my chest.”

Imad Moustapha, Syria’s ambassador in Washington, says Arar was treated well. But he says Syrian intelligence had never heard of Arar before the U.S. government asked Syria to take him.

Did the U.S. give them any evidence to back up the claim that Arar was a suspected al Qaeda terrorist?

“No. But we did our investigations. We traced links. We traced relations. We tried to find anything. We couldn’t,” says Moustapha, who adds that they shared their reports with the U.S. “We always share information with anybody alleged to be in close contact with al Qaeda with the United States.”

The Syrians allowed Canadian officials six short visits with Arar. But Arar says he was warned not to tell them about the torture or how he was being held – in an underground cell 3 feet wide, 6 feet long and 7 feet high. It was his home for a full 10 months.

“It's a grave. It’s the same size of a grave. It’s a dark place. It’s underground,” says Arar.

He says the Syrians were pressing him to confess he’d been to an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan: “They just wanted to find something that the Americans did not find -- and that’s when they asked me about Afghanistan. They said, ‘You’ve been to Afghanistan,’ so they would hit me three, four times. And, if I hesitate, they would hit me again.”

Arar says he signed a confession because he was “ready to do anything to stop the torture.” But he claims that he had never been to Afghanistan, or trained at a terrorist camp. “Just one hit of this cable, it's like you just forget everything in your life. Everything,” he says. Back in Canada, Monia was fighting for her husband’s life. She marched in front of parliament, and protested in front of the U.S. embassy.

Eventually, she got the ear of then-Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien. On the floor of parliament, Chretien voiced mounting frustration with the U.S. The job eventually went to Gar Pardy, then one of Canada’s top diplomats, to get answers from the Americans.

“The American authorities acknowledged this was a Canadian citizen that they were dealing with. He was traveling on a Canadian passport. There was no ambiguity about any of these issues,” says Pardy, who believes he should have been sent to Canada, or dealt with under American law in the United States. But not sent to Syria.

But while Canadian diplomats were demanding answers from the U.S., it turns out that it was the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who had been passing U.S. intelligence the information about Arar’s alleged terrorist associations.

However, U.S. government officials we spoke to say they told Canadian intelligence that they were sending Arar to Syria – and the Canadians signed off on the decision.

Pardy says if that's true, it would have been wrong all around: "I would dispute that the people who were making any statements in this context were speaking for the Canadian government. A policeman talking to a policeman in this context is not necessarily speaking for the Canadian government.

And the Canadian government wanted Arar back. It took a year and a week from the time Arar was detained in New York for Arar to be released. He arrived home in Canada dazed and exhausted.

Why did Syrian officials let him go? “Why shouldn't we let -- leave him to go? We thought that would be a gesture of good will towards Canada, which is a friendly nation. For Syria, second, we could not substantiate any of the allegations against him,” says Moustapha.

He said the Syrian government now considers Arar completely innocent. But does he feel any remorse about taking a year out of Arar’s life?

“If this was the case, it's not our problem,” says Moustapha. “We did not create this problem.”

60 Minutes II learned that the decision to deport Arar was made at the highest levels of the U.S. Justice Department, with a special removal order signed by John Ashcroft’s former deputy, Larry Thompson.

At the time, Ashcroft said the United States deported Arar to protect Americans –- and had every right to do so: "In removing Mr. Arar from the U.S., we acted fully within the law and applicable international treaties and conventions that guide the activities of the United States in settings like that."

“I consider that really an utter fabrication and a lie,” says Michael Ratner, Arar’s attorney and head of the Center For Constitutional Rights.
Ratner says that it's illegal to deport someone to a country where he might be tortured.

Arar is now suing Ashcroft and several other American officials.

“They knew, when they were sending him to Syria, that Syria would use certain kinds of information-gathering techniques, including torture, on him. They knew it,” says Ratner. “That's why he was sent there. That's why he wasn't sent to Canada.”

Before deporting Arar to Syria, American officials involved in the case told 60 Minutes II they had obtained assurances from the Syrian government that Arar would not be tortured, that he would “be treated humanely.”

“I don't think there should have been any ambiguity in the minds of people that something nasty was going to happen here," says Pardy. "The fact that you went looking for assurances, which is reflected here, tells you that even in the minds of people who made this decision, I mean, there were some second thoughts."

No one at the Justice Department would talk to 60 Minutes II on camera about Arar, but they sent us this statement saying: “The facts underlying Arar’s case…[are]classified and cannot be released publicly.”

“We have information indicating that Mr. Arar is a member of al Qaeda and, therefore, remains a threat to U.S. national security.”

Despite the American accusations, Arar has never been charged with a crime and, today, he’s free in Canada. He’s afraid, though, that he might never be able to clear his name.

"To brand someone as a terrorist, especially after 9/11, is basically to destroy his life," says Arar.

Arar’s case is unusual because he was sent directly from U.S. soil to Syria. But intelligence sources tell 60 Minutes II that since 9/11, the U.S. has quietly transported hundreds of terror suspects captured in different parts of the world to Middle Eastern countries for tough interrogations.