Canada Is Getting Pushed Around Now

[SirRiff]

i remember when this broke it was like canada was a terrorist haven..

Canadian cleared of arms charges

A Canadian businessman charged with providing military training to foreign soldiers without a licence and stockpiling hundreds of missile warheads at his counterterrorism school in southern New Mexico was found not guilty Wednesday of all charges.

link

then we screw ourselves over a bit..

Canada supplied information used against Arar, says solicitor general

Canada's solicitor general acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that U.S. officials used Canadian-supplied information when they deported Maher Arar to Syria.

link

it almost feels like our presence is an inconvienent to this grand security plan now. maybe if we had gone into iraq we would get the benefit of the doubt, but i would have a huge problem deproting a US citizen of any kind to some middle east country to face torture. i also have enough faith in the US legal system to be able to prosecute its own citizens, and think its a diplomatic courtesy to send citizens back when there is no real proof of wrong doing.

what is going to happen to our so called 'special' relationship with teh US? britons dont even want the hassle of being best buds with the US. canada generally does want to be close but i dont think we are being treated like the caliber of nation we are. we gotta demand protection of our own interests too.

anybody else see the bad outcomes of this?

sirriff

[SirRiff]

this is more specifically what i am talking about..

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...-2003Nov19.html

Man Was Deported After Syrian Assurances

U.S. officials said yesterday that they decided to send a Syrian-born Canadian citizen to Syria last year only after the CIA received assurances from Syria that it would not torture the man.

Maher Arar, recently freed from prison, said he pleaded with U.S. authorities not to send him to Syria precisely because he believed he would be tortured. Arar has said he was tortured with cables and electrical cords during his 10-month imprisonment.

U.S. law strictly prohibits sending people -- even on national security grounds -- to a country where it is likely they will be tortured. Yesterday, a Justice Department spokesman confirmed that the Syrian assurances allowed them to legally send Arar to Syria.

Syrian has said it did not torture Arar. "We welcome statements by the Syrian Embassy, as it is fully consistent with the assurances the U.S. government received prior to his removal" from the United States, the Justice Department spokesman said.

In a Nov. 7 speech, President Bush said Syria has left its people "a legacy of torture, oppression, misery and ruin." Spokesmen at the Justice Department and the CIA declined to comment on why they believed the Syrian assurances to be credible.

Arar, who holds Canadian and Syrian citizenship, was en route to Canada, where he lives, from Tunisia when he was detained on Sept. 26, 2002, at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York because he was on a terrorism watch list. That Oct. 7, Larry D. Thompson, then acting attorney general, ordered his deportation to Syria on national security grounds.

talk about disrespect. and the RCMP seems to have been more concerned with helping the US rather then assuring the safety of its own citizen. amazing.

if this is how they treat us, nobody is safe

sirriff