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4 The core misconceptions in the 'war
on terror' By John Feffer
In September 2002, Maher Arar was passing
through JFK airport in New York. He was expecting
a simple transit. A Syrian-born Canadian citizen
and wireless technology consultant, Arar was
traveling home to Ottawa after a vacation with his
family in Tunis. The stopover in New York was the
best deal he could get with his frequent flyer
miles. He had no inkling of what would happen
next. He didn't know that he would spend the next
10 months being
tortured in a secret jail.
At the airport immigration line, officials
pulled Arar aside. They fingerprinted and
photographed him. They didn't let him make any
phone calls. They didn't let him contact a lawyer.
Interrogated about his connections to another
Syrian-born Canadian, a bewildered Arar did his
best to answer the questions. The authorities were
not satisfied. They transferred him to New York's
Metropolitan Detention Center where he spent more
than a week.
Then, based on evidence that
they would not share with him, US immigration
officials informed Arar that he would be deported
to Syria. He objected that he was a Canadian
citizen, that the United States couldn't just send
him to another country, particularly not Syria,
where they might well torture him. Heedless,
officials loaded him onto a private plane and flew
him to Jordan, where he was beaten before being
driven across the border into Syria.
In
Syria, Arar was imprisoned in a cell that was just
large enough for him to stand. He was repeatedly
tortured and forced to sign a false confession.
Only as a result of outside pressure - by his
wife, by human-rights organizations, by the
Canadian consulate - was he finally released and
returned home. Two years later, a Canadian
commission of inquiry cleared Arar of all charges
of terrorism. Yet the United States still bars him
from visiting the country. An innocent man caught
up in the machinery of fear created by the "global
war on terror", Arar will bear the scars of his
experience for the rest of his life. [1]
Arar's story illustrates the key problems
with the George W Bush administration's approach
to terrorism and how it has defied legal standards
at all levels. In the United States, the
administration suspended key civil liberties. It
imprisoned over 5,000 foreign nationals, subjected
80,000 Arab and Muslim immigrants to
fingerprinting and registration, sent 30,000
"national security letters "every year to US
businesses demanding information about their
customers, and justified the large-scale,
warrantless wiretapping of citizens. [2] It denied
the right of habeas corpus to both American and
non-American detainees and plans to continue to
restrict the legal rights of terrorism suspects by
trying them in military tribunals rather than
civilian courts.
At the international
level, the administration rationalized the use of
torture and rendition. It presided over gross
human rights violations in Abu Ghraib prison in
Iraq, Camp Delta at Guantanamo, Cuba, a series of
rendition sites in Europe, and elsewhere. At the
geopolitical level, it broke international law by
pursuing a preventive war against Iraq. It failed
to capitalize on the international goodwill
directed at Washington after September 11, 2001,
by brokering a broad, multilateral effort against
terrorism.
Instead, the United States
ignored promising overtures from longstanding
adversaries, rejected the advice of previously
close allies, and set dangerous precedents that
will haunt US foreign policy for decades. Through
it all, American policymakers either relied on or
hid behind the excuse of faulty intelligence,
which contributed to the failures to track the
September 11 perpetrators prior to the attacks and
continued to entrap innocent victims like Arar in
the post-September 11 era.
The "global war
on terror" has been going on now for over six
years. Its emphasis on military responses - in
Afghanistan and Iraq - has only swelled the ranks
of terrorist organizations. The erosion of civil
liberties has undermined democracy at home and
raised serious doubts abroad about US credibility.
The failure to put adequate funds into homeland
security - particularly port and border protection
- has put too great a burden on local governments.
The hostility to international mechanisms
such as the International Criminal Court has
weakened the very institutions that can properly
address terrorist organizations. And the refusal
to address the root causes of terrorism - economic
inequality, repressive regimes, foreign occupation
- has ensured that the conditions continue to
flourish that produce if not the terrorists
themselves then the communities of anger and
alienation that support terrorist organizations.
A just counter-terrorism policy would
shift the focus away from military solutions,
which have done so little to improve the security
of the United States and have sent Afghanistan,
Iraq, and Somalia into tailspins of insecurity. It
would focus on strengthening homeland security and
the international mechanisms that hold terrorists
accountable. And it would attack the enabling
conditions that are laid out in this document -
economic inequality, the international health
crisis, unjust dictatorships, and regional wars.
The Chinese have a saying: before you
embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.
The US pursuit of vengeance, rather than justice,
has been similarly self-defeating.
Core
misconceptions Fear disables rational
thinking. In his book Blink, Malcolm
Gladwell describes how rapid heartbeat and
adrenaline rush distort the immediate perceptions
of frightened people. They make mistakes. They see
guns where there are no guns. They misread facial
expressions. They come to the wrong conclusions.
[3]
Since September 11, the United States
has been kept in an artificially prolonged state
of fear. The Bush administration has used this
fear to advance a fundamentally irrational and
un-American agenda. As a result, America has
misidentified terrorists, seen weapons of mass
destruction where they don't exist, and supported
quick-draw military solutions when diplomacy would
have been more appropriate.
Such fear has
paralyzed the US system in the past - during the
McCarthy period of the Cold War, during the Red
Scare after World War I, in the era of Jim Crow
legislation in the South, in 1798 when Congress
passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. Today, by
contrast, the paranoia behind the Bush
administration's counter-terrorism campaign
threatens to sustain a global crusade of unlimited
scope and duration.
Even during the Cold
War, the United States negotiated with the object
of its worst fears. The current regime of fear is
more theological in nature. "We don't negotiate
with evil," Vice President Dick Cheney famously
remarked. "We defeat evil." [4] In such a struggle
against "evil", all means can be justified, as
they were during the Crusades and the Inquisition.
By putting the "fear of the Devil "into the
American public, the Bush
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