perfidy

Ross,
Since when does what is fair have any bearing on the law?

Frankly, I am astonished that this dude isn't lawyered up to the nuts. Or maybe he is, I dunno.

Btw, when you refer to "the Post", in this part of the world I assume the NY Post, and I was quite surprised you'd've been reading it; you never struck me as the Page 6 type!

So which category are you in, GL? Fuck'em 'cause they're foreigners, or fuck'em cause they're arabs? Just curious.

Canadian intelligence did tip off (erroneously) US intelligence about this guy. My understanding is that they had no idea that US agents were going to grab the guy, beat him up bag him, then send him off to Syria to be tortured for a year. Do you find that part of it acceptable too?

I don't see a single person in favor of torture offering compensation of any kind to the victims.

But hey -- as long as it's someone else getting tortured, who gives a fuck? Right?

Right! I sure don't!

I thought it was aliens that abducted and ass-probed me!

Watch me triangulate...

I agree with all threea you! It's a damn crime what was did to him, the system worked like it's sposedta, and torture is a shockingly limited means of gathering information.

Now that I have the backpatting out the way... the Canadians have been torturing us for years, with their Moxy Fruvous and John Candy (y'know, he's Canadian!). Haw!

Final thought... GL, that's the point, innit? The system worked like it was sposta, and it did't work so damn hot.

Well, we could let the Canadian Government torture Pat Buchanan and Michael Moore. That should even it out.

Putting moral issues aside for a moment, this proves once again that torture is not an effective means of interrogation. It isn't expedient. And expediency if the only justification for setting aside morals, if a weak one.

Being a rat bastard has a certain vicious charm, and it gets the job done. Being a stupid rat bastard is pathetic.

Of course, if Canada just applied for statehood, then you'd have the same protections that we Americans enjoy. Like Jose Padilla.

Ross,
What's interesting to me is that the whole situation was an example of allied cooperation. The Canadian was picked up in the first place because Canada said he was dangerous. The RCMP put him on the shitlist, not a nefarious Bu$HitLer electronic surveillance satellite. Somewhere along the line somebody recognized his name from a watch list, so when his flight terminated in NYC authorities- whoever those might have been- were waiting.

Everything worked the way it's supposed to- multilateral, international and interagency cooperation and intelligence sharing and all that good stuff.

Cryin' shame it was all for a guy who didn't do anything.

But going forward, is the US now supposed to do its own research into foreigners on watch lists or international fugitives so this doesn't happen again?

If we're apportioning blame, the first dollop goes to the Canadians for wrongly fingering the guy. A second helping to the Americans who nabbed him, and shipped him off to Syria. A larger helping to the Syrians, who did the actual torture and ten month imprisonment.

The Canadians exhibited incompetance, which is universal, and perhaps excusable. But they also showed a dangerous and contemptible willingness to pass on the responsibility for acting on the information they believed correct by handing the ball off to the Americans. This tragedy would have been cut short if they had had the balls to arrest the guy themselves. Pussies.

The Americans didn't exactly display incompetance. Instead they, perhaps gullibly, believed the Keystone Mounties. Investigating the matter themselves would again have avoided tragedy. They compounded this error by a greater version of the contemptible dodginess of the Canadians by shipping the guy off to a nation that, in a perverse irony, is on the State Department's list fo state sponsors of terror.

This action on the part of the Americans almost defies belief. If you're going to be ruthless, be ruthless. Get Americans to torture the guy. Pretending to be ruthless, and then shipping the victim to a state that is a) known to be, well, brutal, cruel and evil and b)would have every motive for "discovering" that this dude (and not, say, some Syrian agent) is responsible for terror activities and c) is actively working against American interests in Iraq and elsewhere is simply pathetic.

Of course he'd confess.

Hypocrisy doesn't even begin to describe it. Foolish, contemptible, weak... It's embarrassing.

The Syrians did exactly what you'd expect them to do. They tortured a false confession out of an innocent man. I am sure that that is old hat to the Syrian security services, along with any number of even worse things. Not a pass, but they did what comes natural to a vicious totalitarian dictatorship. And what anyone in the American government involved in this decision should have expected.

GL, 'cause you seem to be indicating that it (rendition and torture) had to be done, and that the US government did nothing wrong.

Ross,
I didn't say anything like that. But maybe what I meant, I said poorly. Here's a more direct version:

-It is good that police and other agencies can cooperate across international borders in an effective way.

-Before this case, I would've thought it was good that a single tip from a single foreign agency would start the ball rolling and result in capture here.

-It is bad that he was tagged and bagged for Syria.

-It is bad that the RCMP was so wrong about the guy. If they can't get it right, how are we supposed to believe tips, watch lists, etc from the Keystone praetorians that comprise most of the planet's police?

And regarding remunerative justice: if it were me, there would be no power on heaven or earth that would stop my trillion dollar lawsuits.

Lawsuits. Plural.

GL: So is anyone _responsible_ for what happened? The crimes of the anonymous are never punished. Somehow pinning the blame on the American taxpayer (via lawsuit) just doesn't seem like a fair thing to do.

The Post has an editorial on this today:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/19/AR20060…

Ross,
I'm not sure how you interpret my answer as "fuck 'em because they're foreign."

Avoiding comment on the entire "It's right/It's wrong" hullabaloo, I'm struck by one of your statements, Ross: "what we’ve shown is that someone being tortured will say whatever they can to get it to stop."

Actually, no - all we've shown conclusively is that if Maher Arar is being tortured, he'll say whatever he can to make it stop.

Which is still unfortunate, by the way.