By Joshua Daniel Hershfield, 9/21/06
Maher Arar, a 37 year old man, was recently cleared of
suspicion of involvement in the Al Qaeda movement. Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was detained by
American Authorities in October 2002 while changing planes in New York.
He was flown to Jordan
in an American government plane and taken over the boarder into Syria, where he
was born. There, he was repeatedly
beaten and tortured and forced to make a false confession.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, an enthusiastic torture
supporter, said, “We were not responsible for his removal to Syria.” How is it that the United
States government could not be responsible for Arar’s
removal to Syria
when it was under US orders to do so?
This is just another example of the Bush administration’s refusal to be
held accountable for the waves of injustice they are inflicting upon people.
Currently, an estimated 1,200 people in the United States,
and 14,000 people around the world, are being unlawfully held in detention and
interrogation centers. As Maher Arar
said, in regards to the Bush administration’s lack of explanation and apology,
“What does this do for the credibility of the US government when it talks about protecting
human rights?”
The Bush administration’s
policies are ruining people’s lives, not just with bullets and bombs, but by
holding them indefinitely as prisoners because of their last names or their
country of birth or their religion. Our
rights as human beings are being repeatedly violated, ruthlessly attacked by
this administration, on a massive scale.
We are faced with a choice: Do we continue to accept these injustices,
to submit to this tyrannical force, or do we gather our strength and our power
and drive this regime out? The choice is
ours.