Syria and the US: Fellow Travelers at the Crossroads for Terrorism

By Amy Goodman and David Goodman

MotherJones

"At his address to United Nations this week, George W. Bush declared that Syria was “the crossroads for terrorism.” Maher Arar knows this first hand. He was kidnapped and sent to be tortured in Syria at the behest of the Bush administration.

Arar was arrested in September 2002 at JFK Airport in New York while changing planes on his way home to Toronto. Twelve days later he was placed on a private jet with CIA agents who were part of a “special removal unit,” flown to Jordan, and driven to Syria, where he was handed over to Syrian military intelligence for interrogation. In Syria, Arar was severely beaten with metal cables, and spent ten months confined to a grave-like cell before being released without charge.

Since September 11, 2001, the extraordinary rendition program has morphed into a global round-up. Suspects are being abducted around the world and dumped in places like Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and Bagram, Afghanistan. These two off-shore American prisons now hold over 1,000 people. Many of these prisoners have never been charged and they languish out of view and outside protection of the law. Others, like the German citizen Khaled el-Masri, have been kidnapped by the U.S. and tortured only to be found to have no ties whatsoever to terrorism.

The Bush administration is now ensnared in its own web of deceit. On September 19, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales responded to the Canadian findings by claiming that the U.S. acted lawfully in sending Arar to Syria. “Mr. Arar was deported under our immigration laws,” said Gonzales, who insisted that Arar was not the victim of a rendition. It was an absurd claim: why wouldn’t the U.S. deport Arar to Canada, where he is a citizen? The answer is obvious: the Bush administration wanted Arar to be tortured, and could be confident of this outcome if he were handed to the Syrians.

When President Bush made torture a centerpiece of his foreign policy, he bound himself intimately to the world’s worst human rights abusers. When it comes to torture, as Maher Arar learned, Syria and the U.S. are fellow travelers at the “crossroads for terrorism.”"