What's a little torture between trading partners?
SLINGER
It's good to know that the U.S. would never have shipped Maher Arar to Syria if they'd known he was going to be tortured.But since he ended up getting tortured — Arar says he was tortured day in and day out for 10 months with electrical cords, among other things — we should keep in mind that it was good for business.As the ever-practical Wayne Easter, Canada's solicitor-general, pointed out, if we're not willing to co-operate with the Americans on "national security issues" we're going to mess up our economic relationship, and our livelihood is at stake.But leave our economic interests aside for a minute.Lorne Waldman, a Canadian lawyer working for Arar, said U.S. law forbids deporting people to countries that are known to torture prisoners.Steve Watt, a lawyer working in New York for Arar, expanded on that. "There is a convention in this country, an act of Congress, that you do not send people to countries where they are to be subjected to torture."Fortunately, a spokesman for the U.S. Justice Department stepped forward to assure everybody that Syria had promised not to torture him. If it hadn't, the U.S. wouldn't have been able to send him there legally. And no less than the U.S. attorney-general says everything his country did was perfectly legal.It must have been difficult for Syria to promise it wouldn't torture Arar, even though it was unable to keep its word. Torture is one of the things it's famous for. As recently as Nov. 7, George W. Bush, the U.S. President, described the Syrian government's legacy as "torture, oppression, misery and ruin."Bush's words sort of underscored a feeling some of us had that the only reason the U.S. sent Arar there was so he would get tortured. Otherwise, after scooping him at John F. Kennedy airport, where he was en route home to Ottawa, shipping him there made no sense.The very thought left Jean Chrétien shocked, shocked! After hearing where the Americans had sent one of his citizens he said, "It's awful what they've done."Evidently there was something the U.S. intelligence agents didn't like about Arar. Maybe it was something Canadian intelligence agencies passed on to them, as Wayne Easter has discovered they did.Some of us had the funny idea that the U.S. used Syria as a contract torturer. (Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard legal scholar, believes that in terrorized times the U.S. ought to be able to torture suspects itself. He is endlessly disappointed that they can't.)Some of us figured that since the U.S. couldn't get Arar to spill the beans they decided to let the Syrians see what they could learn. Not much, it turned out.Not much that was useful, anyway. Not much that wasn't the kind of stuff anybody (me for example) would confess — "Tell me what you want me to tell you, and I'll tell you!" — under torture. Finally they got bored and gave up torturing him and let him go. Why else would they have let him go?So it's good to know that this isn't what the U.S. had in mind. There's no way of knowing what they did have in mind, but it wasn't this.It was kind of the U.S. attorney-general to find time for a meeting with Wayne Easter in Washington, and to brief him on what's been going on in his ministry, and in the intelligence agencies such as CSIS he's responsible for, back in Ottawa.Although when somebody like John "Wack City Jack" Ashcroft refuses to be seen with you at a press conference after his meeting with you, it says something
about how high you rate in the great game of making the world safe for democracy as far as he's concerned.It was at that press conference that our solicitor-general revealed three things for which Canadians can be profoundly grateful.The first is that from here on he wants to "look ahead." In other words, when it comes to the dreadful things that happened to Maher Arar, he's got closure.The second is that Ashcroft told him shipping Arar to Syria had been in "the interests of their law and their national security policy." While their law might not be our law, their national security policy is definitely our national security policy.The third is that if we keep our mouth shut and our nose clean they won't close the border.
Slinger's column usually appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.Additional articles by Slinger
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