Matthew Blake is starting a review of important stories from 2009 that are no longer garnering headlines, even though they reveal fundamental problems in American governance.  Many of these stories originated in the Bush Administration, whose legacy history is already struggling to judge because of that same administration’s penchant for secrecy and deception.  David Cole brings back to life just such a story — the exile and torture of Canadian citizen Maher Arar by American immigration and counterterrorism officials in 2002 — in the New York Review of Books.  In 2002, Arar was pulled from a line in JFK, put in detention for 12 days, and then — without having spoken to a lawyer — sent to Syria. In Syria he was

handed over to intelligence officials who imprisoned him in a cell the size of a grave, three feet by six feet by seven feet. Syrian security agents tortured him, including beating him with an electric cable, while asking the same questions that FBI interrogators had been asking at JFK—was he a terrorist, was he linked to al-Qaeda, did he know various other persons thought to be associated with al-Qaeda? (The Syrian security forces are widely known for their use of torture, as the US State Department reports every year in its annual Human Rights Country Reports.) After a year, the Syrians released Arar, concluding that he had done nothing wrong.

Whoops.

Arar is attempting to sue the U.S. government for damages, but courts are refusing to hear the case based on national security concerns.  At the level of the U.S. Court of Appeals, the majority found in November 2009 “that any adjudication would likely involve classified information, and could not proceed.”

Truly worrying is the fact that

[t]he court concluded, without actually reviewing any classified evidence, that Arar’s case was too sensitive to adjudicate, because it would require court review of national security policy and confidential diplomacy.

The question, then, is back in Congress’s hands, if the Obama administration doesn’t take steps to confront it directly.  And judicial review of such misdeeds moves further off the agenda.

At the root of this problem lies government incompetence and arbitrary decision-making by people hidden from public view and apparently, from congressional oversight as well.  American officials relied on Canadian evidence against Arar that turned out to be erroneous.  Arar was not actually the target of a terrorist investigation in Canada — he was simply listed as “someone who should be contacted to see if he had any information about the target” of an investigation.

So a few government officials in a room — from agencies then being grouped into DHS, though it’s likely officials from other agencies were present — decided to send a foreign citizen to another foreign country where his brutal treatment was practically assured.  And they did so based on false evidence, without any judicial review or congressional oversight.  Arar’s story needs to be more than just one that got away from the mainstream media in 2009.

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