The Mea Culpa That Will Never Come

It would be simple if there existed justice in the United States and an awareness of just how much physical and moral suffering has been spread among those who the country considers “enemies,” and those whose human rights it violates.

But that does not seem to be the case, as the president of the White House won’t follow the example of the 60,000 Americans who have signed a petition apologizing to Maher Arar for the torture he suffered.

Dave Cole, legal affairs correspondent at The Nation and author of the book, “The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable,” published a work on Tuesday under the title, “Can Obama Say He’s Sorry?”

At the moment, there still hasn’t been any reaction from the government to the public’s petition imploring their fellow countrymen to sign and beginning with the words, “I apologize to Maher Arar for the torture he suffered as caused by the actions of U.S. officials and I urge you to do the same.”

The petition was brought to the White House by three non-governmental organizations – Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Religious Coalition against Torture – who agree that the least that the White House could do, ten years after the fact, is announce an admission of guilt in the case of Canadian citizen Maher Arar.

In 2002, as Maher Arar was changing planes in New York from Europe on his way to his home in Canada, FBI agents detained him, put him in solitary confinement and interrogated him until he was deported to Syria where, according to Cole, he was incarcerated for a year and ten months in an underground cell the size of a grave until Syrian authorities concluded he wasn’t a threat, finally setting him free.

Syria was the country of birth of this telecommunications engineer, but his family had migrated to Canada when he was an adolescent and he adopted that nationality.

According to The Nation, a Canadian government committee that investigated the facts of the case, couldn’t find those officials responsible for alerting the FBI about Arar and sending false information about him as a person “of interest” in an investigation of supposed terrorism.

But the Canadian Parliament unanimously took responsibility for the error and compensated Arar with 10 million Canadian dollars for the wounds he suffered in the almost two years he was incarcerated. However, that error falls completely on the administration of the White House, which in that time was occupied by George W. Bush and his shady team of government officials, from which never came a mea culpa.

There’s much more against Maher Arar in the actions of a regime that invented a selective and infinite “war on terror,” using torture as a habitual method of interrogation and introducing secret prisons and “special detainments”: the Canadian is still on the list of those prohibited entry to the United States, and the authorities of the empire warn that there can be no investigation of the incident because it would reveal secrets that could weaken its national security. These “secrets of the state” were privileged in 2009, when the current Attorney General Eric Holder allowed for the classification of reports so that they could never be revealed. Additionally, key officials refused to participate in the investigation.

And just like that, those responsible escape the justice of a court that could very well have emulated the Nuremberg trials in the case of these current crimes the United States has accumulated in their war on terror. In the U.S., torture and impunity tilt the balance in favor of evil and injustice.