McCain Apparently Allows Bush to Execute Innocent Maher Arar
Posted by
Kevin
It looks as if the three GOP “rebels” have caved and given Bush his blanket check to torture, use torture, and ensure that people can be executed without ever seeing the evidence against them:
Mr. McCain said the agreement means “that the integrity and letter and spirit of the Geneva Conventions have been preserved.” The senator said the agreement “gives the president the tools that he needs to continue to fight the war on terror and bring these evil people to justice.”
… Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, said the agreement had two key points. “Classified information will not be shared with the terrorists” tried before the tribunals, he said. And “the very important program of interrogation continues.”
Bush’s program is evil. It is un-American, contrary to all of our values, beliefs and practices of the last two hundred years. The GOP has sold its soul for temporary political gain, and it has destroyed the very best of America in the process. Tyrants torture people. Tyrants refuse to show the prisoners the evidence against them. Tyrants refuse to allow prisoners to demand that they be tried or released. Under the program that it appears McCain has agreed to, Maher Arar — an innocent Canadian — could have been executed.
First, he was tortured:
Arar, now 36, was detained by U.S. authorities as he changed planes in New York on Sept. 26, 2002. He was held for questioning for 12 days, then flown by jet to Jordan and driven to Syria. He was beaten, forced to confess to having trained in Afghanistan — where he never has been — and then kept in a coffin-size dungeon for 10 months before he was released, the Canadian inquiry commission found.
The CIA program that Frist mentions allowed torture, so torturing Arar would have been an acceptable way to get a confession:
The “enhanced interrogation techniques,” as the CIA calls them, include feigned drowning and refusal of pain medication for injuries. The tactics have been used to elicit intelligence from al Qaeda leaders such as Abu Zubaida and Khalid Sheik Mohammed.
Further more, the information that lead to Arar being tortured came from people who themselves had been tortured into false confessions. Since the evidence came form torture (oh, I am sorry, alternative interrogation methods. What cowards these Republicans are; they don’t have the courage to admit that they want to torture people and hide behind weak-kneed, poll-tested mush. What brave, strong men they are.), it could very be classified and Arar would never know that his accusers had been tortured into confessions:
Von notes below that Syrian intelligence forces beat Maher Arar into falsely confessing that he had received terrorist training in Afghanistan. It’s actually worse than that. Arar wasn’t just tortured into a false confession in a Syrian prison. He also seems to have been sent to be tortured in Palestine Branch partly because of false confessions that two other Canadian citizens made under torture in the same prison.
… El-Maati’s first interrogation:
During his first interrogation session, when the Syrian intelligence officers found El-Maati’s initial answers to their questions unsatisfactory, they threatened to imprison and rape his wife. El-Maati said he had told the truth and that he ‘could not invent a story.’ But, according to El-Maati,
[T]hey told him yes, he could invent a story.
They told him to strip naked except for his shorts and made him lie down, and hancuffed his hands behind his back to his legs. He was still blindfoled. They poured ice water all over him and brought in thick electrical cables and started beating him with them on his feet, legs, knees and back. They would occasionally stop and take him back to his cell. This continued for two days.
Ahmad broke down and agreed to say what they wanted him to say.
If McCain agreed to allow the CIA to Bush’s program, then he allowed torture to continue and allowed prisoners to be tried and executed based on information tortured from them and/or information that they never even see, much less contest. Such a brazen disregard for justice should be left to monsters like Pinochet and Saddam. McCain and Bush and the rest of the cowardly GOP appear to have agreed to make it the law of the United States of America. Ahh, but what does it matter if innocents are tortured, imprisoned, and executed as long as one terrorist is punished?
George Washington, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and John Adams would be so fscking proud.
[…] I know because I read it. Filed also under “hyperbole alert” (ya think?). I mean, come on, people…..easy on the BDS. It’s unbecoming. [link] […]
Pingback 9/21/2006
Kevin, I know you took an oath to always smear Republicans, but come on. The “three rebels” did not budge on the torture issue. The compromise is no classified info is shared with the detainees and the interrogations will continue. The possibility of Bush stopping the interrogations drew this response from you “He must have his torture or he will refuse to carry out his duties as President of the United States of America.” Now, McCain is caving because the interrogations are going to continue? You amaze me sometimes.
Disclaimer: none of us have complete knowledge as to what the compromise is yet, but your post is at odds with the information that is currently available.
Comment 9/21/2006
It seems to me that this, at least, is a good thing:
Unfortunately, even during the McCain-Bush standoff, the choice was essentially between a bad bill and a worse one. See Publius for more on that.
And according to Balkin, whom I respect, it doesn’t seem to be much of a compromise at all. So, unfortunately, the more I learn, the worse it looks.
Remember when America used to really be the good guys?
Comment 9/21/2006
Ted
I know you took an oath to reflexively defend Republicans from the consequences of their actual posiitons, but c’mon. Unless you have information you are not sharing with us, your [post is flat wrong. Frist said that the deal allows the torture to continue, so I am not sure where yu get the did not budge on the torture issue from. And how could my post be at odds with the information availabe if I am bloody well quoting the Senate Majority Leader? The interrogations, as you call them, and as the link I provided demonstrates, included torture. If the interrogatiosn are allowed to continue, so it the torture.
And the classified info not being shared with the prisoners means exactly what I said it means: someone like Arer can be executed becasue of information — such as the false confessions obtained by “classified” means — he could never challenge.
And I fail to see how they agreed to maintian the Geneva COnventions if they are going to allow torure to continue.
Comment 9/22/2006
I’m not going to lie… I thought you were overreacting. After I did some research, I found that McCain and the others explicitly gave the President the power to interpret Article Three of the Geneva Conventions. I’m incredibly disappointed that the “voice of reason” of the GOP would endorse such a measure, and all for the sake of poltical shrewdness.
Comment 9/22/2006
Kevin, it is comical for you to say I reflexively defend Republicans. I have consistently not defended Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and various members of the conservative blogosphere. I doubt you can point to a single Republican you have defended.
As for my post, I was unaware that McCain agreed to allow torture to continue. If that information comes out, then I will say he caved. I have not seen any reliable information that he did that . Perhaps you have. Had you linked to such information, I would have drawn different conclusions from your post.
Comment 9/22/2006
Ted
No more comical than your opening line. If you accuse me of acting in bad faith, then you should not expect me to be overly charitable in my response.
The information abot torture is linke din both my post and Tom’s comment. Frist says the program - -whihc is entriely about torture — will continue as is. I am not sur ehow much clearer it has to be.
Comment 9/22/2006
Kevin, at least my comment is based in truth. I did not accuse you of acting in bad faith. Surely you do not consider directing virtually all of your attacks at republicans an act of bad faith. We could do a statistical analysis of you last 100 posts if you wish. I’m guessing 97 are anti-republican and 3 are anti-democrat.
I have not seen the quote from Frist that says the program will continue as is. Can you provide a link? When Bush said he was going to suspend the program, you said he was refusing to carry out his duties as president. When Frist says the program will continue, you say torture is being condoned. Which is it?
As for classified information - McCain and Co got it excluded from prosecution. I think that’s a good thing.
Finally, if 97 senators do nothing about torture, and three guys step up and try to do something, to target those three (or in your case the one you like least) as being responsible for terror is unfair in my opinion.
Comment 9/22/2006
Ted
all right — deep breath time. Let’s cool this down a bit.
This:
“I did not accuse you of acting in bad faith. Surely you do not consider directing virtually all of your attacks at republicans an act of bad faith.”
is not, in my eye, the same thing as this:
“Kevin, I know you took an oath to always smear Republicans,”
Accusing me of smearing someone is to accuse me of delibertly saying somethign I know is false to make someone else look bad — i.e acting in bad faith. That is what I was referencing.
“I have not seen the quote from Frist that says the program will continue as is. Can you provide a link? When Bush said he was going to suspend the program, you said he was refusing to carry out his duties as president. When Frist says the program will continue, you say torture is being condoned. Which is it?”
I don’t follow your logic here. Bush was going to stop questioning people becasue he wasn’t going to be allowed to torture them. there are other methds, all mor efffective, for questioning people. Frist says the program is going to be allowed to continue. Since the program was entirely about torture and since the debate was over the abality to decide what was torture under the law, allowing the program to continue means allowing torture to continue. Publis has a nice look at the langauge, in addition to Prof. Balkin above in Tom’s comment.
“inally, if 97 senators do nothing about torture, and three guys step up and try to do something”
But they did not do something. They folded like wet wet oragami in a hurricane. And, jsutto be fair, they ahd support from almost the entire Dem caucus and a few other GOP members. it just wasn’t vocal and thus not terribly useful.
Comment 9/22/2006
Ted:
As for the Frist quote, from the Times article linked above:
While he doesn’t explicitly state that the program will continue completely unchanged, he certainly doesn’t say that the way in which the interrogation is being conducted will change, either. That, to me, seems to imply business as usual. Especially when you consider the context: Frist, a supporter of the Bush plan, considers this compromise to be a “win.”
I’m actually a bit surprised to see you on the fence on this one. We tend to agree nearly as often as we disagree, and this is one of the areas where I would have expected you to agree. I know that Kevin’s way of putting things is often a bit much for you and puts you on the defensive, but on the merits I would expect you to recognize that this bill is Very Very Bad.
Comment 9/22/2006
Guys, lest we lose perspective, Kevin chose to title his post “McCain Apparently Allows Bush to Execute Innocent Maher Arar”. If that is not a smear, then I don’t know what is.
McCain has been very vocal - more so than any democrat I can think of - about torture. The bill might not be good, I am still trying to sort that out. But to single McCain out as a proponent of torture is partisanship at its worst in my opinion. I am also disappointed at the common practice of adding or subtracting words from statements and then making sweeping pronouncements based on the modified language. Or statements like “Frist said the deal allows torture to continue”. It is difficult to have a debate on the merits when statements like that are made. We get off the important topic - should the bill be passed - and go down all these side roads.
Note that nowhere have I endorsed the bill. I am still trying to figure it out and form an opinion. I have stated on numerous occasions that I am strongly against torture. If this bill enables torture, I am against it. Sadly, the Bush administration has shown that they do not act based on the spirit of the law, so one has to weigh the meaning of “subject” against “conspire to commit”. It is difficult for the general public to get the true intent of the bill.
Comment 9/22/2006
Ted
“Guys, lest we lose perspective, Kevin chose to title his post “McCain Apparently Allows Bush to Execute Innocent Maher Arar”. If that is not a smear, then I don’t know what is.”
Back that up. Did I or did I not take you step by step through the reasoning in my title? And yet you call it a smear without having the courtesy to even attempt to suggest why I am wrong or to demonstrate that I was actually lying in order to make someone look bad.
“But to single McCain out as a proponent of torture is partisanship at its worst in my opinion. ”
Why? Did or did not McCain spend the last two weeks placing himself in the lead of the fight against this horrible practice? If the evidence says he willingly abandoned that principle, then who else am I to blame? Or am I to pretend that well, gee, some democrat over here is bad or that it just sorta happened by itself so that I avoid the sin of actually taking sides on an important issue?
“I am also disappointed at the common practice of adding or subtracting words from statements and then making sweeping pronouncements based on the modified language.”
Show me where I did that. That sounds very much like an accusation of lying, and you shouldn’t do that without evidence.
“Or statements like “Frist said the deal allows torture to continue”. It is difficult to have a debate on the merits when statements like that are made.”
Why? Seriously, why, when the context of his statement is made an examined, when why his statement meant that is explained, does that make anything difficult? Again, am I to pretend that he didn’t say what he said in the context in which he said it for the sake of appearing balanced and non-partisan? His statement is evidence of the merits of the bill.
“We get off the important topic - should the bill be passed - and go down all these side roads.”
I would have thought it self evident that a bill that does what I argue this one does should not be supported.
“It is difficult for the general public to get the true intent of the bill.”
Which is why it is essential to listen to and understand the statements of the people who crafted the compromise. Like Frist, just to pull an example out fo the air.
Comment 9/22/2006
Kevin, I cannot continue this discussion with you. We have different ideas about what constitutes truth, fact, and honesty. Neither of us is going to change, so there is nothing to be gained continuing this. I withdraw all my statements on this thread.
Comment 9/22/2006
Ted
You don’t have to withdraw anything. If you think I am wrong or haven’t been honest, then show me why. I presented what I thought was solid evidence and reasoning. If it is in error, then show me where. I am hardly above screwing up and I hope I am not above admiting when I have screwed up. I am sorry if I sound harsh and I will apologize right now for saying anything that offended or insulted you. If I did, then the fault is wholly mine and I really am sorry.
But this is an imprtant topic and I don’t think you’ve addressed the actual agruments that I made, or at least, not fully adressed them.
Comment 9/22/2006