Michael Stickings of The Reaction pointed me to the lastest example of how our country is slipping away from us and into tyranny.
A federal trial judge in Brooklyn has refused to stand up to the executive branch, in a decision that is both chilling and ripe for prompt overturning.
Flew in from Miami Beach BOAC
Didn’t get to bed last night
On the way the paper bag was on my knee
Man, I had a dreadful flight
Mr. Arar, a 35-year-old software engineer whose case has been detailed in a pair of columns by Bob Herbert, was detained at Kennedy Airport in 2002 while on his way home from a family vacation. He was held in solitary confinement in a Brooklyn detention center and interrogated without proper access to legal counsel.
Been away so long I hardly knew the place
Gee, it’s good to be back home
Leave it till tomorrow to unpack my case
Honey disconnect the phone
Finally, he was shipped off to a Syrian prison. There, he was held for 10 months in an underground rat-infested dungeon and brutally tortured because officials suspected that he was a member of Al Qaeda.
All this was part of a morally and legally unsupportable United States practice known as “extraordinary rendition,” in which the federal government outsources interrogations to regimes known to use torture and lacking fundamental human rights protections.
The maltreatment of Mr. Arar would be reprehensible — and illegal under the United States Constitution and applicable treaties — even had the suspicions of terrorist involvement proven true.
Oh, show me round your snow peaked
mountain way down south
Take me to you daddy’s farm
Let me hear you balalaika’s ringing out
Come and keep your comrade warm
But no link to any terrorist organization or activity emerged, which is why the Syrians eventually released him. Mr. Arar then sued for damages.
Well the Ukraine girls really knock me out
They leave the west behind
And Moscow girls make me sing and shout
They Georgia’s always on my my my my my my my my my mind
The judge in the case, David Trager of Federal District Court in Brooklyn, did not dispute that United States officials had reason to know that Mr. Arar faced a likelihood of torture in Syria. But he took the rare step of blocking the lawsuit entirely, saying that the use of torture in rendition cases is a foreign policy question not appropriate for court review, and that going forward would mean disclosing state secrets.
I’m back in the USSR
Hey, You don’t know how lucky you are, boy
Back in the USSR
Oh, let me tell you honey
Yes, let me tell you honey…
…when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
That is what Thomas Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence. We are all militiamen now. This is the year that we find out whether we can elect a Congress that can throw off this government and provide new Guards for our security.
