According to CCR, on May 12th of this year the Obama Administration "went on record for the first time in the case of Arar v. Ashcroft, CCR's ongoing fight to hold Bush officials accountable for the rendition and torture of Canadian citizen Maher Arar." The administration "did not need to get involved, but [chose] to come to the defense of Bush administration officials by opposing Mr. Arar's petition and arguing that even if these officials conspired to send him to torture, they should not be held accountable by the courts." http://ccrjustice.org/get-involved/action/demand-obama-stop-protecting-bush-officials
Arar was on his way back to Canada from a family vacation in Tunisia when he was detained in an airport in New York. US authorities detained Arar and interrogated him for ten days at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. Authorities refused to grant him the right to a lawyer. And, finally, on October 8, 2002, Arar was transported to Syria, where he was tortured.
Arar described his experience on Democracy Now!:
There, I was put in a dark underground cell that was more like a grave. It was three feet wide, six feet deep and seven feet high. Life in that cell was hell. I spent ten months and ten days in that grave.
During the early days of my detention, I was interrogated and physically tortured. I was beaten with an electrical cable and threatened with a metal chair, the tire and electric shocks. I was forced to falsely confess that I had been to Afghanistan. When I was not being beaten, I was put in a waiting room so that I could hear the screams of other prisoners. The cries of the women still haunt me the most.
After 374 days of torture and wrongful detention, I was finally released to Canadian embassy officials on October 5th, 2003.
In March 2009, the Obama Administration defended former Bush Administration official John Yoo author of the "Torture Memo," the memo that provided legal justification for interrogation policies that human rights groups have said "amount to torture." The administration defended Yoo because "the Department of Justice generally defends employees and former employees in lawsuits that are filed in connection to their official duties."
Prior to that, the Justice Department under Obama adopted a "'state secrets' argument" and asked "a court to dismiss a case against a flight data company that aided the CIA in performing alleged acts of extraordinary rendition."
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