Tortured Exceptionalism

"The torturer has become like the pirate and slave trader before him hostis humani generis, an enemy of all mankind." So proclaimed the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1980, in a landmark decision ruling that the prohibition on torture was so universally accepted that a US court could hold responsible a Paraguayan official charged with torturing a dissident in Paraguay. It is highly unusual to hold foreign officials responsible for wrongdoing committed within their own country, but the court declared that when officials violate such a fundamental norm as the prohibition on torture, they can be held accountable anywhere they are found. The Supreme Court reaffirmed that decision in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain less than three years ago.

Yet in a new twist on American exceptionalism, a federal district court in Brooklyn ruled February 16 that when US officials conspire with such "enemies of all mankind" to torture suspects in the "war on terror," our courts will not interfere. US courts can hold other nations' officials responsible for torture, but when it comes to American leaders, the overriding imperative is to keep our options open.

The decision dismissed a lawsuit brought by Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who, while changing planes at JFK Airport on his way home from Europe to Canada, was detained by US officials, interrogated at length, denied access to a lawyer, ordered expelled on secret evidence and then sent not on his connecting flight to Canada but on a specially chartered federal jet to Syria. Arar was born in Syria, so he had dual citizenship, but he had not lived there since he was a teenager. He spent the next ten months incarcerated in Syria without charges, much of it in solitary confinement in a three-by-six-foot cell that Arar describes as "a grave." He says he was beaten with cables, threatened with electric shocks and placed in "the tire," which immobilizes prisoners for beatings. The Syrians interrogated him with a dossier of virtually the same questions as those US officials had asked him while he was detained in New York. The Syrians finally released Arar, stating that they found no evidence that he had committed a crime, and he returned home to Canada, where he is a free man.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.