TIME (Canada) - Person of the Year - (a victim of US torture)

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http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/11/1446246

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, in this new year, Time magazine for 2004 named President Bush as “Man of the Year,” but Time magazine Canada named Maher Arar, a name hardly known in this country.

MICHAEL RATNER: Maher Arar is our client at the Center, someone who was transiting Kennedy to go back to his Canadian home, Canadian citizen. They pick him up, interrogate him here for ten days, send him to Syria. He is put in an underground torture chamber, is tortured for a number of weeks. Finally released because the Canadian government or some part of the Canadian government that had not cooperated with the United States in this effort got him out. He's back in Canada. There's a public inquiry started. He was the first guy we surfaced ever in one of these outrageous, extraordinary rendition cases. Tortured very badly. As you and I speak, the numbers are probably in the hundreds of people in C.I.A. holes around the world being tortured right now.



http://www.timecanada.com/CNOY/story.adp?year=2004

Who is Maher Arar? We all know the basic contours of his story. In 2002, U.S. officials detained the Canadian software engineer at New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. They alleged that he was linked to al-Qaeda and secretly deported him to Syria, where he says he was tortured. When Arar was freed more than a year later and the public got a glimpse of him, he seemed to be a likable, hard-working family man caught up in a monstrous international screwup. Was there more? Simultaneously, officials, most of them anonymous, were leaking information and dropping hints suggesting that Arar was a security risk with something to hide.

Well, if Arar is a terrorist, he is unlike any other. In contrast to other suspects dispatched to harsh justice, Arar did not vanish into oblivion in his Middle East cell. Nor, after his release, did he recoil from public view. Instead, Arar, who has a modest home in Ottawa, has stepped into the spotlight as a vocal proponent of human rights in Canada, a symbol of how fear and injustice have permeated life in the West since 9/11. To this day, it has not been revealed why Arar was detained. And no one has pushed harder to shed light on his case than Arar. “I have nothing to hide,” he said in late 2003. “I want a public inquiry.”

[Inland]

1. This was an amazing story of the US purposely sending a man to be tortured

for no reason except maybe spite.

I guess Time Canada finds the entire episode illustrative, including the sanguine way the US treats Canadian citizens and the goverment of Canada, and the lack of any regrets or introspection after the fact.

[truebrit71]

2. I read this guy's story when it was on Buzzflash...

...it is sickening and scary what the Gestapo in this country will do...there are 4 Brits about to be released from Gitmo, and I am sure they will have some fun tales to tell as well..

We'll see just how "quaint" their stories are....

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3. One of the things that strikes me about this

is how diametrically opposite sorts of people the TIME US Person of the Year (Bush* ) is from the Canadian One.

Bush* the torture promoter vs. Arar the torture victim.

It is amazing they are the same publication - only different countries.

It's like CNN and CNNi where CNNi actually has objective news - and people around the world can't understand why people in the US don't know what is going on.


I wonder how many - even around here - are familiar with Arar and his story.

[sybylla]

4. Wow, I'm impressed

I can't believe they had the balls to name him person of the year. Of course I was shocked they named the chimp Person of the Year so maybe it doesn't mean what it used to but still - I think that's great. If Time isn't shying away from Arar's story, then perhaps there is hope for our US media yet.

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5. .