That el-Masri was released (apparently dumped off on some street in Albania, oddly) and that Chancellor Merkel feels comfortable stating that Condoleeza Rice told her that el-Masri was innocent should indicate that the man was obviously not someone who deserved to be taken to Bagram and beaten the crap out of.
Now whether or not CIA agents should be subject to arrest for this is another story. Frankly I am amazed that there is not some kind of program to make amends and hush money to people we have snatched up in error (see also this guy). What happens instead is that these folks sue in righteous outrage and expose lots of things that the U.S. would rather not see come to light.
Gentlemen, It gets worse.
Jane Fonda's little party raiser in DC is storming the Baltic press.
She even managed to keep her banner with their website in plain view. Go figure. The bad part is on their site.
http://www.unitedforpeace.org/
Together with this paragraph is a link for the attached T-shirt. Yep, for 20.00 bucks you get this T from "Good Storm dot com"A solid majority of people in this country oppose the Iraq War. Imagine if, instead of sitting on the sidelines, all these millions joined the movement to bring the troops home. It's up to all of us to make the peace movement visible in our communities every day and to inspire others to get involved.
What a bunch of Bravo Sierra !
Regards, Stan
Last edited by Stan; 02-08-2007 at 10:02 AM.
This is a disturbing trend: European nations or their citizens suing or charging with crimes folks who make "mistakes" (or not) in the prosecution of the "War on Terror."
Innocents are killed, detained or otherwise in war. There needs to be a mechanism to deal with this.
Guilty folks are also detained and later released, and being detained and released shouldn't be financially lucrative, whatever the compensation scheme.
I served as an Interrogator for a few years, and nowhere in my training was it considered "okay" to torture a subject. Are we just throwing around the word "torture" liberally here, or are there really CIA guys with cattle prods out there torturing people? Either scenario is unacceptable, by my view.
In yesterday's press:
http://www.epl.ee/artikkel/314720
Here's a brief translation (Slapout's still studying his Estonian :
Pärnu is Estonia's Summer resort town, 170 clicks south of the capital.The Finnish media quoted a Human Rights Watch report, which indicated that somewhere in the beginning of 2003, aircraft N313P was destined for Pärnu, Estonia.
Estonia's Foreign Ministry Public Affairs Officer, referring to the US aircraft landing in Pärnu, replied "this was a USA/Estonian military and security police exercise, and the content of this cooperation is protected by the "State Secrets Act". The government has already reported that no kidnapped persons have been brought into Estonia by aircraft."
120mm, I think the main accusation in Maher Arar and Khaled el-Masri is that these men were kidnapped and then rendered to Syria and Afghanistan, respectively, where they both say they were tortured by foreign nationals for the CIA.
Not sure why you believe there should be no compensation. These men were innocent. They were summarily kidnapped, imprisoned for months at a time, and brutally tortured both mentally and physically, with no recourse to appeal or due process. Why should the government not compensate them for the government's error?
I'm sorry you misunderstood my post. I never wanted to even imply that there should be no compensation.
Note that I said there needs to be a mechanism for this. That mechanism would need to include compensation for real loss of income, inconvenience and may even be punitive in nature (accounting for pain/suffering).
On the other hand, when we pick up a bad guy and then return him/her into the wild for whatever reason, we need to avoid rewarding them for "not being prosecutable just yet."
I think the phrase "kidnapped" is being thrown around pretty loosely, here, as well.
I see --- so we are actually pretty much in total agreement about compensation, then.
I would not use the word "arrested" because these men were taken into a system that was explicitly extra-legal and were not accorded due process. Also, given the warrants issued in both Italy and Germany, it appears that the local and national authorities were not made aware (odd that this does not appear to have occurred in Canada, where the local authorities were complicit and have recently paid millions in compensation to Arar). "Detained" sounds, frankly, a bit too neutral given the ultimate fate of these and many other men. We did not take them to Syria for interrogation of the usual sort, for instance.
Hi 120mm,
I think that this lack of a streamlined mechanism is one of the problems; lawsuits just don't, to my mind, cut it. Every time we see a lawsuit, it just creates too many problems by re-interpreting the legal situation. In the Arar case, I think a lawsuit was justified since the RCMP certain appear to have acted in a manner that was, and is, illegal. I would honestly like to see a much more clearcut mechanism for detention / investigation.
Yupper. I think that clearer legal guidelines would help immeasurably as well in making the decision to pick them up.
In the Arar case and in the el-Masri case, it is the correct legal terminology. Under existing Canadian law, Arar could have been quite legally picked up and detained for questioning for an indefinite period. This would not have been "kidnapping". Instead, the RCMP contacted the CIA and gt them to do the dirty work. What always bothered me about the Arar case was that the RCMP didn't have the guts to arrest him themselves. If they believed he was guilty, they should have investigated and arrested him. If they thought there was an imminent danger, they could have held him indefinitely. They didn't.
I have to admit that a lot of my anger over these cases is based around the breach of law at the same time as we keep hearing rhetoric about the rule of law. Situations like this just serve to reduce overall social trust in government agencies. Sure, there are times when a government agent, LE, Intel, military, etc., will have to break the law in order to achieve their mission. This should end up as a situation where the law then comes under scrutiny as well as their actions; for example, arresting someone without proof and sweating them to stop a bomb plot. It's the legal concept of "immanent danger" that should be used to decide whether or not to breach the law, not convenience, and those breaches should be examined afterwards.
Marc
Sic Bisquitus Disintegrat...
Marc W.D. Tyrrell, Ph.D.
Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies,
Senior Research Fellow,
The Canadian Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, NPSIA
Carleton University
http://marctyrrell.com/
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