Torture²

by: Daniel De Groot

Sat Jan 24, 2009 at 14:26

The decision to suspend all ongoing MCA terrorism trials at Guantanamo has one slight unfortunate side-effect; the trial of accused 15 year old Canadian grenade-thrower Omar Khadr was actually starting to reveal some very interesting and important things in testimony (though of course stopping the trials was the right thing to do).  

One surprising revelation was a purported link between Khadr and another Canadian who got mangled in the Bush Administration war on terrorism, the Syrian born Maher Arar.  Arar, on his way back to Canada in September 2002 was detained by US authorities at JFK airport while changing flights.  He was subsequently sent, not to Canada, his country of residence and citizenship, but to Syria, which was known to employ torture.  The Syrians, eager to cooperate with America, tortured and interrogated Arar for a year before returning him to Canada, having found no evidence he was a terrorist.  A subsequent Canadian inquiry would also clear Arar of any connection to terrorism and the Canadian government paid him $10M in compensation for Canada's role in Arar's illegal rendition to Syria.  The US government did not cooperate in this Inquiry and has refused to clear Arar to the end of the Bush Administration.

In prosecution testimony on Monday, FBI Special Agent Robert Fuller claimed that during interrogations of Khadr in Afghanistan back in October 2002, Khadr claimed to know Arar, identified him by name from a photograph and claimed he had seen him in Al Qaeda safe houses in Afghanistan during September-October of 2001.  This appeared to re-implicate Arar and vindicate at least his detention by US authorities.  Then came Tuesday, and the cross-examination of Fuller.

Khadr couldn't pick out Arar immediately, FBI agent admits

An FBI agent who previously testified Omar Khadr identified fellow Canadian Maher Arar as someone he saw at al-Qaeda safe houses and possibly training camps in Afghanistan acknowledged on Tuesday the teen's identification of the Ottawa software engineer did not happen as immediately as he first stated.
[...]
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations agent testified on Tuesday that during an interrogation session in Afghanistan in 2002, Khadr came around to saying that on several occasions he had seen Arar, who was cleared of any links to terrorism by a Canadian public inquiry in 2006.
[...]
Defence lawyer Walter Ruiz showed the commission a report written by Fuller right after his interrogation session with Khadr in Afghanistan, in which the agent wrote it took Khadr several minutes to identify the man in a photograph shown to him as Arar, the CBC's Bill Gillespie reported from Guantanamo Bay.

I believe this could be what Law Enforcement Officers privately call "testilying."  I don't know what else to call it when your testimony from the previous day is clearly contradicted by your own notes on the subject.  Did Fuller not reread his own notes before testifying?  I suppose that might keep him clear of perjury but certainly not gross incompetence.  It turns out Khadr did not know Arar's name either.  Fuller by the way has some disturbing history:

A Falls Church man who worked as a federal informant on terrorism set himself on fire in front of the White House yesterday, hours after announcing his suicide attempt and citing his growing despondency over how the FBI managed his case.
[...]
In the recent interviews, Alanssi expressed anguish over not being able to visit his family in Yemen. He said that he suffers from diabetes and heart problems and that his wife is seriously ill with stomach cancer. Alanssi said he could not travel to his native country because he has no money and because the FBI, which is expecting him to testify at a terrorism trial in New York, was keeping his Yemeni passport.

"I must travel to Yemen to see my sick wife (stomac cancer) and my family before I testify at the court or any other places," Alanssi wrote FBI agent Robert Fuller in New York, according to the copy he provided The Post yesterday. "Why you don't care about my life and my family's life? Once I testify my family will be killed in Yemen, me too I will be dead man."

As the article explains, Fuller was the FBI handler for this unfortunate guy, whose identity was leaked to the media in 2003 and his family in Yemen suffered for it.  Nice.  Guess we have to break some eggs to make a...well, just to make a mess.

The incident also highlights the vital importance of how trials are conducted and what materials the Defence has a right to examine.  If you read Khadr's wiki, he has narrowly avoided being hung by Bush's kangaroo court system a few times already.  At one point, they weren't even going to let him face his accusers (like Fuller) and presumably not get to cross-examine them either.

Much more, it turns out, the story cannot possibly be true, since for the period Khadr supposedly claimed to have seen Arar in Afghanistan palling around with terrorists, fall 2001, Arar himself was actively under surveillance by the RCMP for suspicion over an associate of Arar's, a fellow Ottawa area Syrian born engineer named Abdullah Almalki.  Almalki himself has never been charged with anything relating to terrorism, but himself was suspected of knowing people involved in Al Qaeda.  Arar had once listed Almalki as his "emergency contact" on a form, and so fell into the RCMP's net of suspicion.  Unless Arar is some kind of mastermind with a double convincing enough to fool the RCMP, he was most definitely in Canada for that period.

In any case, Khadr was evidently prompted to finger Arar, who had just been nabbed by INS and was being held sans Miranda rights in the US.  Canada had clearly shared its terrorism suspect files with the US, since Arar reports that the US interrogators had a copy of that emergency contact form.  However's Canada's files only named him a "person of interest" which was not enough to even arrest him in Canada, so the US authorities probably decided they needed a little more to go on.  

I really hope the reasoning doesn't turn out to be a variant of the classic "they're both Canadian, they must know each other" thing Americans often do to Canucks, but I have a hard time seeing why else they would even ask Khadr about Arar.  Khadr's family lived in Toronto while in Canada, and Arar was in Ottawa.  The two cities are a 4-hour drive apart.  There's no reason to even guess they would know each other, never mind to coach a 15-year old boy into claiming so.

Khadr's claims about Arar become so much less credible and the whole Arar affair even more lamentable, when you take into account the abuse and torture Khadr endured while held at that base in Afghanistan, under the guard of US soldiers who believed he had killed a Special Forces soldier in the incident leading to his capture.  Wiki describes it:

The unconscious Khadr was airlifted to receive medical attention at Bagram, where interrogations began immediately after he gained consciousness approximately a week after his arrival, although he remained stretcher-bound for several weeks.[44] Col. Marjorie Mosier operated on his eyes after his arrival,[50] though fellow detainee Rhuhel Ahmed later stated that Khadr had been denied other forms of surgery to save his eyesight as punishment for not giving interrogators the answers they sought.[51] Later attempts to acquire darkened sunglasses to protect his failing eyesight were denied for "state security" reasons.[52]
[...]
Khadr states that he was refused pain medication for his wounds, that he had his hands tied above a door frame for hours, had cold water thrown on him, had a bag placed over his head and was threatened with military dogs, was flatulated upon, forced to carry 5-gallon pails of water to aggravate his shoulder wound. Unallowed to use washrooms, he was forced to urinate on himself.[44][54] His chief interrogator was Joshua Claus, who later pleaded guilty to abusing detainees to extract confessions following the in-custody death of wrongly accused Dilawar that same year.[57]

I know this boy was most definitely working with, and as part of the Taliban in fighting US forces, but he was still a 15 year old kid, and not exactly your "hardened" KSM type whom can somehow magically resist even Waterboarding using his powers of Evil.  

Khadr was tortured, and became eager to cooperate.  So eager he obviously became rather suggestible.  We don't know if Fuller knew anything about the abuse Khadr had endured when interrogating him, and I don't want to lay all this mess at the feet of one FBI agent, but it seems increasingly clear the decision to illegally send Maher Arar to Syria was made on the basis of a terrified and traumatized child being prompted to "know" someone in a photograph.

This is the kind of "useful information" people like Cheney talk about when extolling the virtues of torture.  It's why Salem never seemed to run out of Witches no matter how many women they killed, and even a little bit like how Joe McCarthy could keep finding Communists everywhere.  People put under varying forms of coercion to name others involved in order to prevent some bad thing happening to them, will name just about anyone.  Another example of the right never ever learning from their mistakes.  No doubt Cheney's memoirs will reflect on his regret in not reopening the McCarthy files to finish Joe's work purging Communists from State.  He had to settle with purging all the liberals from Justice.

You simply can't trust the veracity of information gleaned from torture, particularly for the purpose of trying and convicting someone of a crime.  Luckily for Arar, he is free and clear of Guantanamo, because if he was there, being tried under Bush's original Executive-authority extra-constitutional tribunal system, no doubt Khadr's testimony would have been given great weight in holding him there.  How many current detainees are being held on paper-thin "evidence" like this?  Who else was Arar coached into claiming he saw in Afghanistan?

One final coda here, during the Congressional investigations into what happened to Arar, the question of why the US chose to send Arar to Syria rather than to Canada, AG Mukasey admitted in testimony that:

sending [Mr. Arar] to Canada could have posed a danger to [the United States] and sending him to Syria was safer [...]

It turns out Canada would not arrest Arar (not having any actual evidence of a crime of any sort being a barrier to that sort of thing up here) so the Bush Administration couldn't tolerate the risk that Arar would...do something while free in Canada.  If Arar is so dangerous, why not hold him, or even send him to Guantanamo?  After all they had an "eyewitness" that Arar was a member of Al Qaeda.  I really would be interested to see how this decision was made.  Looking at it now, I partially wonder if they just felt like it would be an embarrassment to seize a guy changing flights to go back to Canada, hold him for weeks without due process, and then deport him where he was originally going voluntarily.  It would be an admission of failure.  

There are so many dangling threads to grab at in investigating the torture regime of the Bush Administration, but this is as good a place to start as any.  It says a lot about why the Administration has been so adamant about treating Arar as a suspect, and pursuing a conviction for war crimes on a minor, who, by rights of the US ratified UN Optional Protocol on the Rights of the Child cannot be held to account for his actions as a child-soldier.  Khadr's trial and incarceration is a violation of International Law.  I was hoping Khadr would take the stand in his own defence, as I'm sure his story will fill in many of the gaps here.  Naturally his trial was a blemish on the face of Justice, but for the moment it was shedding some light on a dark period.

Let's hope Obama is willing to open the books to Congress here about what happened in this case.  It's a textbook example of torture's futility.