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The Brownshirts of The United States' "War On Terror"

By Sanjay Sharma, Section USB - United States Of Bush
Posted on Fri Feb 11, 2005 at 07:56:39 PM EST

At times during the trip, Mr. Arar heard the pilots and crew identify themselves in radio communications as members of "the Special Removal Unit." He was being taken, on the orders of the U.S. government, to Syria, where he would be tortured. Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was not charged with a crime. But, as Jane Mayer tells us in a compelling and deeply disturbing article in the current issue of The New Yorker, he "was placed in handcuffs and leg irons by plainclothes officials and transferred to an executive jet."

"Although he initially tried to assert his innocence, he eventually confessed to anything his tormentors wanted him to say," Ms. Mayer wrote.
As Ms. Mayer pointed out: "Terrorism suspects in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East have often been abducted by hooded or masked American agents, then forced onto a Gulfstream V jet, like the one described by Arar. ...
Upon arriving in foreign countries, rendered suspects often vanish.
Detainees are not provided with lawyers, and
many families are not informed of their whereabouts."

Mr. Arar was seized because his name had turned up on a watch list of terror suspects. Maher Arar is a 34-year-old native of Syria who emigrated to Canada as a teenager. He was

reported to have been
a co-worker
of a man in Canada
whose brother was
a suspected
terrorist.

On Sept. 26, 2002, as he was returning from a family vacation in Tunisia, he was seized by American authorities at Kennedy Airport in New York, where he was in the process of changing planes. In an instant, Mr. Arar was swept into an increasingly common nightmare, courtesy of the United States of America. The plane that took off with him from Kennedy "flew to Washington, continued to Portland, Maine, stopped in Rome, Italy, then landed in Amman, Jordan."

Any rights Mr. Arar might have thought he had, either as a Canadian citizen or a human being, had been left behind. There is a widespread but mistaken notion in the U.S. that everybody seized by the government in its so-called war on terror is in fact somehow connected to terrorist activity. That is just wildly wrong.

From The New York Times - February 11, 2005 - By Bob Herbert
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/11/opinion/11herbert.html?ex=1108270800&en=2ec104588dca2bcb&ei=5070

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The Brownshirts of The United States' "War On Terror"

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