Obama Follows the Bush Illegal Path

Barak "Change You Can Believe In!" Obama, the supposed "new style" politician has continued in the old style, illegal, secretive, power-abusive tactics of the Bush administration. Here's a bit from Wired magazine about the Maher Arar case:

The U.S. Supreme Court declined Monday to review the dismissal of a lawsuit brought against the government by a Canadian citizen who, under suspicion of being connected to Al Qaeda, was sent by U.S. authorities to be tortured in Syria.

The rejection likely marks the end of Maher Arar’s chances of getting redress from the federal government for an egregious decision made by the Bush administration. The U.S. stonewalling of Arar’s search for justice has continued under the Obama administration, which argues that the doctrine of “State Secrets” precludes allowing any judge to review the materials that led John Ashcroft’s Justice Department to send Arar to Syria.

Arar was detained in the United States on a stopover at JFK on his way back to Canada from a family vacation in Tunis. After being held for 12 days, he was sent to Syria, the country of his birth, where he was imprisoned for almost a year. The Bush administration ignored his protests that he would be tortured there.

Arar was held in Syria for 10 and a half months in a cell measuring 3 feet by 6 feet by 7 feet, and was tortured with steel cables.


Upon his release, Arar sued Bush’s Justice Department, but his lawsuit was rejected by a succession of U.S. courts, in part out of deference to the executive branch’s claim that national security would be harmed by allowing a federal judge to review the relevant evidence. That’s a common legal maneuver that was used frequently by the Bush administration, and which Obama pledged to use less often. So far, those promises have been proven to be empty.

In contrast, Arar’s home country of Canada — which provided the United States with the bad intel that prompted the whole affair — investigated the case (.pdf), confirmed that Arar was tortured in Syria, took responsibility, apologized and paid Arar U.S. $10.2 million as recompense for his year of detention and torture at the hands of Syrian intelligence.

Arar and his family remain on a U.S. watch list, and the United States has never officially apologized or admitted it made a mistake.

Instead, Obama’s Justice Department told the Supreme Court that Arar’s case remained too secret for justice, and that the U.S. law offers no recourse for him.

So much for "we will close down Guantanamo in 12 months" Obama with all his promises of justice and accountable government. So much for the supposed "justice" delivered by the US. So much for honour, dignity, or the rights of man in the "land of the free" and "home of the brave".

The US has gone from a country that defeated evil and authoritarian regimes in WWII to being the evil empire of the 21st century. The refusal to render justice or even to recognize the evil done by the US government is disgusting. I'm willing to vote the US as an "exemplar" of the 21st century right up there with China, North Korea, and Myanmar. The people of the US are blind to how their country operates in the world. Go read about Maher Arar. Look at the long list of "interventions" the US has done around the world since WWII and tote up the good versus the bad. The famous state of Pogo applies: "we have met the enemy and he is us".

(Note: I've been reading a biography of Paul Dirac, one of the top physicists of the 20th century and had to read how the US refused him entry in 1955 for his "leftist sympathies". I know that David Bohm left the US because he refused to coperate with HUAC and the McCarthyism of the 1950s America. For a "land of the free" there are a lot of dark dungeons and bloody stories hiding in the dark in American history. Robert Oppenheimer, the lead for the development of the atomic bomb, was hounded by right wing nuts and had his security clearance removed... this from the guy who gave the US the greatest weapon it had!)