Maher Arar is Vindicated

A Canadian government commission has declared that Maher Arar, the Syrian-born Canadian who was secretly and illegally taken to Syria by the United States in a process called “extraordinary rendition” to be tortured, is innocent.

This is all over the news but Democracy Now has a good, long bit on this, that includes a clip from a former interview with DN where Arar describes the terrible effects torture has had on him, causing serious psychological problems and “ruining [his] life”, as he puts it.

In related news, Bush said in a press conference that Common Article III of the Geneva Conventions, is over his head:

Common Article 3 says that ‘there will be no outrages upon human dignity. That’s very vague. What does that mean, ‘outrages upon human dignity’? That’s a statement that is wide open to interpretation.

You can find video of the press conference here, that bit is about 4/5 of the way through. Stephen Colbert also opens with it in this clip, if you want to spend less time waiting to see this portion (the rest of the Colbert video isn’t really worth watching).

I really do recommend watching this portion of the video because you get a revealing glimpse of a man so immersed in double-think that he seems scarcely capable of distinguishing between reality and fantasy. The text doesn’t do it justice.

[tags]torture, politics, terrorism[/tags]