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Record shows Harperites unconcerned about possible torture
Blog posts reflect the views of their authors.
"Terrorist" Maher Arar
As the controversy rages in Ottawa over the likely torture of Afghan prisoners that Canada handed over to Afghan authorities, it's worth recalling how Stephen Harper and his Canadian Alliance cronies reacted in November 2002 when the news broke that the U.S. had deported Maher Arar to Syria where he ended up in prison as a suspected terrorist. (It was well known then that Syria routinely tortures political prisoners.) Harper's first reaction was not that a Canadian citizen might be tortured, but that the Liberal government had failed to look into Arar's terrorist links. Harper, then leader of the opposition, added that the government had been lax on security ever since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
"We have a government that has hit the snooze button on security matters for 14 months," Harper told reporters. According to the Globe and Mail, he was "particularly incensed" that federal officials were insisting they did not know why Arar was arrested by the Americans and deported to Syria.
"The government's right hand does not know what its left hand is doing when it comes to national security," Harper told the House of Commons. "The Foreign Affairs Minister said for two months that the United States had offered no justification or information for the deportation of Maher Arar. Yet we now know the RCMP knew of Arar's activities. They questioned him nearly a year ago and they were notified weeks ago by the FBI of its information."
Less than five years later, Harper as prime minister, would hypocritically apologize to Arar after a commission of inquiry exonerated him of any terrorist activities. Yet, in 2002, Harper led the charge in painting Arar as a threat to national security. In the Commons, Harper's colleague, Diane Ablonczy followed his attack with one of her own.
"Mr. Speaker, it is time the Liberals told the truth: that their system of screening and security checks is pathetic. Arar was given dual Syrian and Canadian citizenship by the government. It did not pick up on his terrorist links and the U.S. had to clue it in. How is it that the U.S. could uncover this man's background so quickly when the government's screening system failed to find his al-Qaeda links?" Ablonczy shouted.
The next day in the Commons, Harper's colleague, Stockwell Day also suggested Arar was a terrorist adding, "There is lack of vigilance in the country on terrorism. Fourteen groups have been banned in the U.S. and in the U.K. but they have free passes here in Canada."
Harper and his party were obviously more concerned in the Arar case about allegations of terrorism than they were about the possibility an innocent Canadian citizen might be undergoing torture in a Syrian prison. The same can be said about Harper's steadfast refusal to ask for the return of Omar Khadr, the Canadian child-soldier still languishing in the notorious American torture camp at Guantanamo. The U.S. claims Khadr killied an American soldier during a battle in Afghanistan and is now planning to put him on trial before a kangaroo court.
Given Harper's track record, it's hard to believe that as prime minister he, or officials close to him, gave a damn about what might be happening to the Afghan prisoners Canada handed over back in 2006 - 2007 to the NDS, the notoriously brutal Afghan intelligence service.
In its 2009 report on Afghanistan, the human rights group Amnesty International says:
The NDS continued to arbitrarily arrest and detain suspects without allowing access to defence lawyers, families, courts or other outside bodies. Scores of detainees were subjected to torture and other ill-treatment, including being whipped, exposed to extreme cold and deprived of food.
610 words
Comments
Canadian government attitudes to Afghans taken prisoner
Submitted by Anonymous in Halifax on Sun, 12/20/2009 - 11:18.
Everyone is silent about what JTF-2 did in Afghanistan in late 2001-early 2002. They handed over Afghans to the US. Some of them were killed, others likely given a one-way ticket to Cuba, unfortunately not at a 4- or 5-star hostelry but rather Camp X-Ray. Art Eggleton lied brazenly to Parliament when he denied Canadian troops ever handed over captured Afghans to US forces, was caught in the lie later and never apologised to the House. There is in Canada something that has to be called what it is: the State. In Friedrich Engels' concise definition, the State comprises "special bodies of armed men, prisons, etc." who carry out orders regardless of the elected civilian authority, or the party leading it, that issues or approves those orders. This State is the instrument of the financial and industrial powers-that-be, some of whom are ensconced in a few provincial capitals and Ottawa, most probably in the U.S. Stephen Harper is no more nor less the agent of THIS State than Paul Martin and Jean Chrétien were, or than Michael Ignatieff and even Jack Layton would be.
It is positive to remind Canadians what happened to Maher Arar. But it seems to me also imperative to mention the role of THIS STATE in sealing his fate. For example: even Arar believes, at least publicly, that he was tortured in Syria. His sole meaningful first-hand evidence for this belief? His blindfold was removed in a room with a picture of Syrian president Bashir el-Assad on the wall and people in Syrian army uniforms speaking Syrian-accented Arabic. However, as it has long been known that the State of Israel has trained no small number of persons in its "intelligence" services to produce any Arab-world-accented Arabic they or those they serve happen to need, that they maintain and deploy a whole host of such agents, and that one of the operations the U.S. taxpayer has been financing in that country is a facility known as Camp 1391 into which unknown numbers of U.S. captives have been "renditioned" and where personnel have been identified whose Hebrew is Israeli-standard but whose Arabic accent has very carefully trained, the obvious question screams out for an answer. It took Justice Iacobucci more than two years to complete his investigation and report on the government's handling of the Arar file, yet I am certain his team did not and would not go anywhere near this spoor. Indeed, atheist that I have been all my adult life, I am confident the Messiah will come — or return — the day before the current government, or that of any other party that's jiggy with the arrangements of this State, looks into this aspect.
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