MAHER ARAR….Over at Obsidian Wings, Katherine has put together a 14-part series examing what happened in the case of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was seized while changing planes in New York and then sent to Syria to be tortured, a practice that goes by the charming euphemism of “extraordinary rendition.”
As Katherine puts it in her summary:
We don’t know all the details or explanations, but we know that something terrible happened. Our government took a man from an airport in New York City and handed him over to Syria, where he was tortured for 10 months. I think I’ve made a decent case that he was probably innocent; that this was done with the knowledge and approval of fairly important government officials; and that this was not some freak accident or isolated occurrence. This happened, and there is no reason to believe it will not happen again.
The war on terror should not make us into terrorists ourselves ? but that’s very close to what’s happened here. To learn the whole story, here’s a link to Katherine’s entire series. Read from the bottom up.
