Unqualified Offerings

Alleged to Have Assisted Our Nation, the Continuing Story

12 Responses to “Alleged to Have Assisted Our Nation, the Continuing Story”

1. Comment by Nell —
   August 10, 2007 @ 9:01 am

   Which includes the people who asked Syria to arrest and torture the other Canadians whose “confessions” were used to form the basis for kidnaping and torturing Arar.

   Here’s Katherine in a January 2004 post:

   It’s one thing to cooperate with foreign intelligence services, including those of very nasty regimes. That’s a necessarily evil. It’s another thing to tell them which Canadian citizens to arrest, and look the other way as they torture those people, and rely on the information “confessed” under torture to deport other Canadian citizens into their hands. I don’t know that that’s what happened, but it seems a real possibility. It needs to be investigated, on both sides of the border.

   It was, of course, investigated only on one side of the border, with no cooperation from the land of the free, but K’s educated guess is exactly what turned out to be the case.

2. Comment by the talking dog —
   August 10, 2007 @ 2:44 pm

   And lest we forget how nice the Canadians have been with some of their other guests of the United States, such as juvenile offender and permanent GTMO resident Omar Khadr (discussed in my interview with Rick Wilson, one of his lawyers).

   It seems that some Canadians might be less… Canadian… than other Canadians, at least in the view of its last couple of governments. Khadr… Arar… they’re grandparents weren’t from Manitoba, eh?

   The links cited are, of course, a remarkable development, insofar as we already thought that the abominable Repeal of all legal restrictions on torture (as long as it’s done in the name of fighting terrorism) Military Commissions Act of 2006 effectively already provided legal immunization from torture, as it was… so apparently, there were yet more abominable things done to us “to keep us safe,” besides the torture.

   I don’t know… maybe the movie title should be “How I stopped worrying and learned to love the National Security State.”

   The only thing we can count on, I suppose, is that whatever unconstitutional abomination in the name of protecting us the Bush Administration thinks of, it will have bi-partisan support.

3. Comment by Bill —
   August 10, 2007 @ 9:36 pm

   I get the feeling that a lot of Americans, not just conservatives, feel like if it isn’t American citizens being tortured rendered incarcerated without due process, its okay, the constitution protects only American citizens. So nobody gets too worked up about it.

   In Canada even the conservative newspapers are all outraged about Arar, but nobody cares about Khadr. He’s been pre-judged as a terrorist, and even though he was just a kid when the alleged incicdent happened it seems its a case of the sins of the fathers..etc.

4. Comment by the talking dog —
   August 10, 2007 @ 10:25 pm

   Bill nailed it; Guantanamo was up and running for some time before anyone stateside even noticed. When Bush went to give citizen Padilla the same treatment, however, and suddenly all but staunch own partisans realized that something was a little… off. Mind you, not off enough for even John Kerry (or any other Democrat of note) to have screamed bloody murder… but a lot of people felt that something was… off. To tell you the truth, I started my whole lawyer interview series with Padilla’s lawyer… Padilla’s case was… troubling.

   And yet… now half the Gitmo guys have been sent home by this point (and more are going every week or two)… Padilla still sits in jail and faces bogus charges (originally leveled against him because Abu Zubaydah shouted out Padilla’s name under the most brutal tortures ever devised by Mormons under contract to the CIA).

   And yeah… we won’t talk about Mr. Khadr’s family history. I will say that but for Khadr’s case, we might not know that the United States and Somalia are the only countries in the world that have refused to ratify the international convention on the treatment of children, the most widely ratified convention in the history of civilization… of course, we’d rather not be part of civilization, if it involves a convention that would not let us torture and abuse a suspect who was 15 at the time of his “crime” (and whose crime, btw, wasn’t even a crime… he had belligerent immunity, as he threw a grenade in a combat situation.)

5. Comment by Nell —
   August 11, 2007 @ 7:45 am

   Guantanamo was up and running for some time before anyone stateside even noticed.

   Mmmm… not quite true. Early 2002 was a period with not nearly as much left-wing blog presence as now — and left-wingers were pretty much the only people at that moment prepared to deny the administration the benefit of the doubt on torture, due process, etc. But there was objection from the get-go.

   Granted, immediate objections to Guantanamo were far louder and more public in Britain, a reflection of several factors including popular understanding that the government does torture and the fact that the U.K. govt was allowing the U.S. govt to do whatever it wanted to British citizens. And a very, very different attitude to the issue on the part of the press.

   Though I hesitate to mention it, our host took note of the opening of Guantanamo, but in a way more accepting of the catapulted propaganda than has been characteristic before or since.

6. Comment by Jim Henley —
   August 11, 2007 @ 8:16 am

   I have to look that post up! I’m so old in blog years now I don’t remember it any more.

7. Comment by the talking dog —
   August 11, 2007 @ 7:32 pm

   Oh;..this comes to mind… things seemed different then.

8. Comment by the talking dog —
   August 11, 2007 @ 7:32 pm

   By this, I meant this: http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2002/02/02/328

9. Comment by Nell —
   August 12, 2007 @ 8:55 am

   I was think of this one, related and a bit earlier.

10. Comment by Nell —
    August 12, 2007 @ 9:03 am

    I can remember exactly what I was thinking when I read that post, but didn’t write anywhere (no blog then, no UO comments, and I was in a period of quiet introspection). Which was:

    I’m fine with actual security procedures; it’s not as if no one in the world has ever dealt with prisoners who are dangerous in a group. But even from the glimpses we were given, there were clear indications that the treatment these prisoners were getting went beyond that.

    As does the treatment of prisoners in our own “high-security” facilities.

11. Comment by Nell —
    August 12, 2007 @ 9:05 am

    Skimming posts of that era is a helpful reminder of just how early the Iraq war drums started beating, and what an island of sanity UO was.

12. Comment by Jim Henley —
    August 12, 2007 @ 9:14 am

    Nell, that was the week Glenn Reynolds guestblogged here.

    No, that wasn’t it either.

    I haven’t reviewed that era of the blog in detail but clearly I was making a pretty basic error:

    1. Recognize an actual issue, in this case, security at the various in-theater GWOT prisons.

    2. Assume that *the only thing that could be going on* was attempts to address the actual issue.

    3. Conclude that people complaining about what really *was* going on must be saying the US had no right to address the actual issue.

    This is the basic template of every GWOT-era boo-boo, right up to Romney asking if Ron Paul has “forgotten 9/11″ in last week’s debate.

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