Maybe justice won't be denied in torture case....

From International Herald Tribune:

Torture and accountability
Published: November 19, 2007

Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian, was stopped at Kennedy Airport in 2002 while returning from a family vacation. After being held in solitary confinement in a Brooklyn detention center and interrogated without proper access to a lawyer, he was spirited off to Syria. He was tortured there for months before officials decided that their suspicions that he was a member of Al Qaeda were mistaken and let him go.

Arar was a victim of extraordinary rendition, America's notorious program of outsourcing interrogations to governments known to use torture. He has sued the United States for denying him his civil rights. Now, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has to decide whether to compound the mistreatment, by agreeing to throw out Arar's lawsuit, as the Bush administration is asking.

The government won the last round. In February 2006, a lower court judge in Brooklyn, David Trager, blocked Arar's suit entirely, ruling that rendition cases like this one raise foreign policy questions inappropriate for court review. Trager also accepted groundless, and by now familiar, administration claims of secrecy and national security. Among its other defects, the ruling runs counter to a pair of 2004 Supreme Court decisions that made clear that the war on terror does not exempt government actions from court review.

At a court hearing this month, a Justice Department lawyer argued against reinstating Arar's lawsuit. The government contends that he should have appealed his order of removal to Syria, and claims that the Constitution does not apply to noncitizens who suffer injury abroad. This is a nervy tack, given the ample precedent to the contrary and the fact that the administration first denied Arar's access to a lawyer and then sent him to the country where he was tortured.

Canada's response to Arar's nightmare has been very different.

After conducting an extensive investigation, the government offered him millions of dollars and an apology for having told U.S. agents that Arar was suspected, wrongly, of being an extremist.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has conceded that the United States had mishandled the case but refused to apologize.

Arar deserves justice. Much more is at stake than fairness for one individual. By allowing Arar to pursue his claims, and rejecting the administration's attempt to put them beyond the reach of American law, the appeals court can provide a vital measure of justice and accountability for torture.

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