Never Apologize, Never Explain

Maher Arar, 36, is a Canadian software engineer. He immigrated with his family from Syria to Canada in 1988, when he was 17. He earned his Bachelor's degree (computer engineering) from McGill University, perhaps the most prestigious university in Canada, and his Master's degree (telecommunications) from a branch of the University of Québec. While at McGill, he met his future wife, who went on to obtain her Ph.D. in finance from McGill. They have two young children. Mr. Arar ran his own consulting firm for some time, and then was employed as a telecommunications engineer by a firm in Ottawa.

In 2002, he and his family vacationed in Tunisia. On the way home to Ottawa, he flew through JFK in New York. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police mistakenly identified Mr. Arar as no longer a Canadian, although he was traveling on a Canadian passport. Also, the RCMP had been conducting a terrorist investigation in Ottawa, and had earlier observed a conversation between Arar and another engineer who happened to be a "person of interest" in the investigation. This engineer -- the one with whom he was seen speaking -- was not himself a suspect, nor, of course, was Mr. Arar.

Nevertheless, based on this information from the RCMP, the United States seized Mr. Arar as he was changing flights at JFK, interrogated him for two weeks in this country, refused him access to an attorney, and then flew him in a small jet to Syria. He was beaten upon arrival in Damascus.

He was imprisoned in a 6' x 3' cell without light, with rats as company, for ten months. He was tortured the entire time, beaten regularly by cables. Syrian authorities shared the results of his "interrogation" with the United States, and were given access to the results of his interrogation by American intelligence. He was released in October 2003, because the Syrians were unable to find any terrorist links. He was returned to Canada, where he has lived since with his family.

His capture and torture apparently was part of the Bush Administration's "rendition" program.

Arar's lawsuit against the United States is on appeal from its dismissal by a lower court, after the Administration invoked the "state secrets" privilege.

The Canadian government apologized for its part in the fiasco in January 2007, after a lengthy and thorough investigation, and paid Amar $10.5 million in compensation, plus his legal fees. Formal apologies were offered by both the RCMP and the Canadian government.

Former Attorney General Gonzales, on behalf of the Bush Administration, denied any evidence of torture, and asserted that Arar's rendition to Syria had been legal and fully within the Administration's rightful powers.

On October 18, 2007, Congressmen from both parties apologized to Mr. Arar and called on the Bush Administration to apologize on behalf of the nation. An Administration spokesman said there were no plans for an apology. Amar remains banned from entry into the United States.

Today, Secretary of State Rice did acknowledge that the matter had been "mishandled." Mistakes were made, apparently, although she did not use those words.

The Bush Administration still has not apologized.

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Information for this report was obtained from Wikipedia, and from two articles in MSNBC.

"Do you think Oz could give me courage?"

cow·ard·li·ness, noun
—Synonyms 1. craven, poltroon, dastardly, pusillanimous, fainthearted, white-livered, lily-livered, chicken-hearted, fearful, afraid, scared.

Forty-one Democratic members of the House, worried about voter perceptions and delay in their August recess, joined virtually all Republicans in voting 227-183 yesterday to chip another block off the Fourth Amendment. Prior Congressional capitulations to the Bush/Cheney Administration had already permitted the Justice Department to intercept and wire-tap -- without any warrant and without any court review --all telephone calls or e-mails in which either one of the parties lived outside the United States. The new statute now grants Attorney General Alberto Gonzales exclusive power to determine whether he "reasonably believes" that one of the parties does, in fact, reside outside the U.S.

Many Democrats argued that the bill was unconstitutional, interfered with supervision by the courts, and placed unfettered power in the hands of an attorney general whose trustworthiness has proved, to be gentle, questionable

Nevertheless, 41 Democrats voted to give Bush exactly what he wanted (although they did limit the authorization to six months). They feared that if they voted against the bill, the voters would think they were "soft on terrorism." They did not seem concerned by the widespread perception that they were "soft on unconstitutional abrogation of powers by the executive," and that they were essentially spineless and unable to fight for the principles they claimed to support. They were also concerned that continued delay in approving the measure was cutting into their much-valued August recess.

Unfortunately, the New York Times so far has not published the official roll call, enabling Democratic and Independent voters to determine the identities of the cowardly Democratic Congressmen who voted for the Bush scheme

John Hancock, upon signing the Declaration of Independence with a large flourish, reportedly joked: "There, I guess King George will be able to read that!" Hancock was not concerned that he would be "perceived" as a traitor to a different King George. He didn't fret about the fears his wealthy political supporters had of rabble-rousing separatists like Thomas Paine. He wasn't concerned about escaping the July heat of Philadelphia, so he could take his summer vacation.

But then, John Hancock had a backbone. He was not a coward.

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PS -- Aug. 6 -- The New York Times still has not provided the names of the Cowardly Forty-One. However, here are the names, thanks to Speeple News, an on-line magazine:

Jason Altmire (4th Pennsylvania)

John Barrow (12th Georgia)

Melissa Bean (8th Illinois)

Dan Boren (2nd Oklahoma)

Leonard Boswell (3rd Iowa)

Allen Boyd (2nd Florida)

Christopher Carney (10th Pennsylvania)

Ben Chandler (6th Kentucky)

Jim Cooper (5th Tennessee)

Jim Costa (20th California)

Bud Cramer (5th Alabama)

Henry Cuellar (28th Texas)

Artur Davis (7th Alabama)

Lincoln Davis (4th Tennessee)

Joe Donnelly (2nd Indiana)

Chet Edwards (17th Texas)

Brad Ellsworth (8th Indiana)

Bob Etheridge (North Carolina)

Bart Gordon (6th Tennessee)

Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (South Dakota)

Brian Higgins (27th New York)

Baron Hill (9th Indiana)

Nick Lampson (23rd Texas)

Daniel Lipinski (3rd Illinois)

Jim Marshall (8th Georgia)

Jim Matheson (2nd Utah)

Mike McIntyre (7th North Carolina)

Charlie Melancon (3rd Louisiana)

Harry Mitchell (5th Arizona)

Colin Peterson (7th Minnesota)

Earl Pomeroy (North Dakota)

Ciro Rodriguez (23rd Texas)

Mike Ross (4th Arkansas)

John Salazar (3rd Colorado)

Heath Shuler (11th North Carolina)

Vic Snyder (2nd Arkansas)

Zachary Space (18th Ohio)

John Tanner (8th Tennessee)

Gene Taylor (4th Mississippi)

Timothy Walz (1st Minnesota)

Charles A. Wilson (6th Ohio)

No one from Washington, thank God. But anyone living in Colorado's Third District, may want to write Mr. Salazar.

Like, 1984, or whatever

The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. … In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.

--George Orwell

The only critic to date of this, my new blog, has urged me to write something "profound." Immediate stage fright was the predictable result. Profundity on demand has never been my strong point. But then I began thinking, as I’m wont to do, about Bush, Cheney & Co., and their heroic efforts to create an Imperial Presidency. Perhaps, I thought, some startling epiphany from Orwell’s 1984 might be an appropriate starting point.

Well, I didn’t find the quotation I was looking for, but I did come up with the interesting insight quoted above.

George Orwell had the Soviet Union of Stalin’s day in mind when he wrote 1984, back in the 1940's, but his observations aren’t merely a criticism of that Communist regime, or of Communism in general. His book provides a handy dandy manual, in the form of parody, wide open to any person or group hoping to gain total control over a society. "Big Brother," and the leaders of the world’s other two, supposedly competing empires, realized fully that a nation mobilized to fight an enemy is a nation willing to sacrifice much to avoid defeat, just as a fox with his foot snared in a trap will, in desperation, bite off its foot to escape. They then concluded – correctly -- that continuous war would result in continuous sacrifice. The enemy might change from time to time, to prevent any slackening of interest among the citizenry, but war itself always went on. Sacrifices from the masses would always be required, and would always be given by their frightened subjects.

The war in Iraq serves the same function. Democrats, disturbed by the “business as usual” money-making on the home front, complain that the Bush administration demands no sacrifice in time of war from anyone other than our soldiers overseas. But Bush, in fact, has sought and won far greater sacrifices from us than food rationing or higher taxes. He has asked us to surrender our Constitution and our Bill of Rights. And out of fear and political timidity, we have handed them over.

From 9/11 to the present, Bush has used the war to justify one increase in executive power after another, at the expense of both Congress (simply ignoring Congress’s right to declare war and participate in war planning) and the Judiciary (depriving the federal courts of jurisdiction over claims from all persons designated by the Administration as “enemy combatants”; permitting surveillance of our mail and our phone conversations without court warrant).

“I am the decider,” President Bush reminds us.

Precedents do exist for significant increases in executive power in times of war. President Lincoln famously suspended habeas corpus (a suspension, it should be noted, that is explicitly permitted by the Constitution), and President Roosevelt ordered evacuation from the West Coast of all persons, citizen and non-citizen alike, of Japanese ancestry. These events did not represent our proudest moments as a nation, but they arguably could be justified as extraordinary actions at a time of extraordinary peril.

But, as President Bush fondly reminds us, we are now protagonists in a war that may never end. War is now continuous, to hearken back to Orwell, and extraordinary peril exists now and will continue to exist , tomorrow, and every day for the rest of our lives, and every day of our children’s lives. If we “win” in Afghanistan (which we certainly haven’t yet), we still confront massive bloodshed in Iraq. If we finally subjugate Iraq, we will face nuclear threats from Iran. If we nuke Iran into oblivion, we can only assume that China, India, other developing powers that we call allies today will be enemies, understandably, threatening us tomorrow.

When extraordinary peril exists every day, justifying extraordinary dictatorial measures as a matter of routine, then the extraordinary is no longer extraordinary. It is ordinary. And we then live under a government possessing attributes of dictatorship. Perhaps we can view it as a benign dictatorship today. President Bush himself, feckless frat boy that he is, probably enjoys a jolly weekend clearing brush on his Texas ranch more than he would signing orders for the torture of dissidents. But the power gained today by a bumbling fool can be used far more shrewdly by a “commander in chief” of a malign administration tomorrow, a President who will be neither bumbling nor a fool. And when that happens, we will no longer laugh at funny cartoons in the newspapers, or jokes on late night television, at the expense of those who control the executive branch of our government.

Because one does not laugh at Big Brother. As Orwell wrote, it is not enough that Big Brother's subjects consent to obey him. They must be compelled to love him. And we will not laugh at the leader who, finally, we have been taught to love and obey.