<div>Nick wrote:</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid"><br>1) The man is a Canadian citizen and he was on his way to visit friends in Tunisia. He had no desire to visit his home country, nor did Syria submit any evidence about his alleged terrorist activities.
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<div>Not that this changes the fundamental legal and human rights issues involved, but Syrian-born Maher Arar was on his way back from Tunisia when he was detained by US authorities in New York, not "on his way to visit friends in Tunisia," according to the article I posed to Vision2020, from this web link:
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<div><a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://articles.news.aol.com/news/_a/innocent-man-sent-to-syria-and-tortured/20060918232609990016?ncid=NWS00010000000001" target="_blank"><font color="#800080">
http://articles.news.aol.com/news/_a/innocent-man-sent-to-syria-and-tortured/20060918232609990016?ncid=NWS00010000000001 </font></a><br> </div>
<div>Arar was traveling on a Canadian passport when he was detained at New York's<br>Kennedy Airport on Sept. 26, 2002, on his way home from vacation in Tunisia.</div>
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<div>The "evidence" that Arar was involved with terrorist activities came from the Canadian RCMP:</div>
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<div>The commission found the Royal Canadian Mounted Police shared information<br>about Arar with American anti-terrorist agencies both before and after he<br>was detained.<br><br>The RCMP asked the U.S. to put Arar on a watch list as an "Islamic extremist
<br>individual" suspected of links to the al-Qaida terrorist movement, the<br>report said.</div>
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<div>US authorities violated habeas corpus in sending Ahar to Syria and "hiding him" out of the reach of Canadian or US court monitoring of his confinement.</div>
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<div>However, some may argue that because Arar was not a US citizen, that the US was not bound to grant habeas corpus protections. But in fact, detainment violating habeas corpus has been utilized in the war on terror for a US citizen, in the Jose Padilla case. This legal "precedent," if enshrined in law, could mean that any US citizen if suspected of "terrorist" connections could be held indefinitely without charges, radically undermining the fundamental habeas corpus protections that are a cornerstone of citizen rights in the USA:
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<div><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/09/AR2005090900772.html">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/09/AR2005090900772.html</a></div>
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<div>By Jerry Markon</div>Washington Post Staff Writer<br>Saturday, September 10, 2005; Page A01<font size="2"> </font>
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<p>A federal appeals court yesterday backed the president's power to indefinitely detain a U.S. citizen captured on U.S. soil without any criminal charges, holding that such authority is vital during wartime to protect the nation from terrorist attacks.
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<p>The ruling, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, came in the case of Jose Padilla, a former gang member and U.S. citizen arrested in Chicago in 2002 and a month later designated an "enemy combatant" by President Bush. The government contends that Padilla trained at al Qaeda camps and was planning to blow up apartment buildings in the United States. Padilla has been held without trial in a
U.S. naval brig for more than three years, and his case has ignited a fierce battle over the balance between civil liberties and the government's power to fight terrorism since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. A host of civil liberties groups and former attorney general Janet Reno weighed in on Padilla's behalf, calling his detention illegal and arguing that the president does not have unchecked power to lock up
U.S. citizens indefinitely.</p>
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<p><a href="http://www.lectlaw.com/def/h001.htm">http://www.lectlaw.com/def/h001.htm</a></p>
<p>In Brown v. Vasquez, 952 F.2d 1164, 1166 (9th Cir. 1991), cert. denied, 112 S.Ct. 1778 (1992), the court observed that the Supreme Court has "recognized the fact that`[t]he writ of habeas corpus is the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action.' Harris v. Nelson, 394
U.S. 286, 290-91 (1969). " Therefore, the writ must be "administered with the initiative and flexibility essential to insure that miscarriages of justice within its reach are surfaced and corrected." Harris, 394
U.S. at 291. </p>
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<p>Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett<br> </p></div></p></div>
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