War Handwavium

In 2002, a Canadian named Maher Arar was detained by US officials while traveling through JFK airport, accused of being a terrorist, held for two weeks without access to a lawyer or anyone on the outside, then shipped off to Syria where he was tortured for 10 months.

Arar was completely innocent and had no connections to terrorism.

The Canadian government did a full investigation, realized Arar was innocent, publicly disclosd a report of what happened and what went wrong, publicly apologized to Arar, and paid Arer a $9 million dollar settlement.

In contrast, the US government has never admitted doing anything wrong, has never publicly acknowledged what it did, and has repeatedly taken steps to muzzle any attempts to get the US Courts to look at what happened to Arar.

Yesterday the US Courts dismissed Arar’s case entirely, saying that even if the government did violate Arar’s constitutional rights, Arar had no right to sue.

It’s all handwavium, pure and simple. Bury the truth so long as any of the wrongdoers are still alive.

This year, 2009, Obama publicly acknowledged and apologized for the US involvement in Operation Ajax, the 1953 CIA operation to overthrow the democratic government of Iran and install a puppet dictator in the form of the Shah. From 1953 until 2008, the US government had never publicly acknowledged its role in the overthrow of a democratic Iran. For 56 years, the US went about its business in denial.

Obama’s apology to the world was a victory for truth, but it didn’t cost Obama or the administration very much. None of them had been involved in the 1953 operation. None of them were guilty. None of them were culpable. Obama was admitting the guilt of people who were dead, not of something he had done himself.

Apologizing for someone else is only slightly less cowardly than not apologizing at all. True courage, true integrity, would come from a person apologizing for something they themselves had done wrong.

But it seems that 56 years isn’t all that unusual for Americans to come to terms with its actions.

In the 1940’s, America put Americans of Japanese decent into internment camps, a massive failing of justice and liberty. It wasn’t until the mid 1980’s when the US government acknoweldged the wrongness and injustice of its actions, long after the wrongdoers themselves were dead, long after many of the people who had suffered the injustice were dead too. It took 40 years for the US government to apologize and recompense the remaining survivors and the heirs of those who had been imprisoned for the misdeeds of the previous administrations.

Reparations for slavery have never been made, a century after slavery was abolished in America.

So, it seems that 50 years isn’t too unusual of a waiting period for the US government to acknowledge the truth of its actions, apologize to its victims (or the heirs of its victims) for its misdeeds, and compensate its victims (or the heirs of its victims) in some way.

In Maher Arar’s case, Arar was tortured in 2002. That would mean that whatever form of the US government is around in 2052 might finally apologize for what it did to Arar. Arar was born in 1970, so he would be 82 years old if he’s still alive at that point. But the people who tortured him, who ordered his torture, who approved the programs that allowed his torture, they’ll most likely all have died of old age by then. The US Court that ruled that Arar cannot sue, they will all by dead by 2052.

Arar will likely be dead by then too, and whoever is president in 2052 may not even be born yet.

But what sort of “justice” is it if the heirs of the guilty are the only ones who can apologize to the heirs of the victims?

Can there be no justice now? Can Obama not fight for justice today? Or must we wait until all the wrong-doers are dead before the truth can be spoken about what they did?

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/11/03/arar/index.html