House Editorial: Oops…
If we’re going to torture detainees, the least we can do is torture the right guys
Posted on September 21, 2006

Many a wise man — and a few not-so-wise men — have agreed in the 20th and now 21st centuries that torture is bad. The United Nations has gone through numerous years of debate and legislation to determine that cruel and unusual punishment is not something we as organized, civilized and intelligent humanity want to be a part of.

Apparently, the U.S. government is still on the fence.

Maher Arar, a 36-year-old Canadian citizen of Syrian descent and software engineer, was arrested in New York in September 2002 by U.S. police while returning from the Middle East where he was on holiday and sent to a prison in Damascus because he was suspected to be a member of al-Qaeda.

Arar claimed he was repeatedly tortured while being imprisoned for a year — a claim supported by Canadian Judge Dennis O’Connor, whose report on Arar’s situation was released Monday.

In the report, O’Connor found that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police incorrectly told U.S. police Arar was an Islamic extremist. Arar was arrested with three other men, and it has been speculated Canada may be outsourcing its interrogations to countries with less-than-rigid definitions of torture.

Aside from the fact that torturing prisoners of war not only violates popular sensibility and the Geneva Convention, Arar was innocent. He wasn’t a member of al-Qaeda. While being Muslim, he wasn’t extreme, and his day job as an Ottawan computer geek was his only job.

Oops. And remember that list of countries vaguely defining torture? Add the United States and Canada to that.

Torture is decently persuasive and probably useful within the incredibly dangerous world of which Americans are told they’re a part. But in the long term, it only hurts our eventual cause. In war, there is always time for retaliation, and it’s not the U.S. police who absorb its brunt. It’s the soldiers on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. When fighting a war against perceived “evildoers,” it’d be a good idea to not do evil ourselves, and if we do, at least do it to legitimate evildoers.

Canadian Public Security Minister Stockwell Day, who is essentially in charge of all law and order, said he was satisfied his countrymen had not played a direct role in Arar’s ordeal. He seems to have omitted the part where the Mounties gave U.S. police the bad information that led to Arar’s arrest and subsequent imprisonment.

In Day’s defense, he did acknowledge, “What happened to Mr. Arar is very regrettable” and he hoped it never happened again.

It seems, though, wrongly arresting, deporting, imprisoning and torturing an innocent man in a desert prison for a year may deserve more than mere regret.

Hopefully, someone higher-ranking than Day notices.