Charles Pierce: The Syria Mess, Explained by a Man You've Never Heard Of [View all]

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http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Syria_Speech

The Syria Mess, Explained by a Man You've Never Heard Of
By Charles P. Pierce at 2:15pm


Listening to Secretary Of State John Kerry make a statement justifying whatever's about to happen in Syria, and looking back over the events of the day, I began to think about one person. I began to think about Maher Arar.

In September, 2002, while on a layover at JFK in New York, Arar, a telecommunications engineer from Canada, was detained by US authorities because they thought he was a member of al Qaeda. He was held incommunicado in this country for two weeks and then sent on rendition, not back to Canada, but to another one of our staunch allies in the War On Terror. Once there, Arar was beaten, and held in a rat-infested 3-by-6-foot cell from which he could listen to the screams of other people being tortured. He was held there in those conditions for 374 days. Eventually, the Canadian government settled a lawsuit brought by Mr. Arar. Facing a similar suit, the United States government invoked a "state secrets privilege" to kill Arar's efforts to get justice. Ultimately, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

The plucky ally that was so willing to cooperate with the United States in the torture of Maher Arar was Syria.

So I wondered what Maher Arar thought today when George W. Bush, under whose policies Arar was tortured by the regime of Bashar al-Assad crawled out from under the landfill of moral disgrace under which he and his presidency have been buried to say that, he "was not a fan" of Assad. You were quite the fan of Mr. Assad when he was doing your torturing for you. Just shut up, you sad little child. Just shut up and go away. Maher Arar should arrange to spit on you.

I wondered what Maher Arar thought today when Kerry made what appeared to be the most compelling case yet for regime change in Syria, and then said he wasn't talking about regime change at all. I mean, Jesus, if we've got all the proof Kerry says we have, and Assad's own brother directed the chemical attack that killed 1429 people, many more than the original estimates, then what in the hell are we fking around with a "limited response"? (To be fair, shortly after Kerry had finished, Andrea Mitchell defined a "limited response" as "100 or so cruise missiles," which is only "limited" if you don't happen live in Syria.) There was a lot of boilerplate there about credibility and what will history, Russia, China, Iran -- or North Korea (?) -- think of us if we don't act. But the case that Kerry put forth for the Assad regime's complicity in what can justifiably be called an atrocity gave us a million dollars worth of motive to justify a ten-cent response. What in hell are we doing here?
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Read more: John Kerry Syria Speech - It's On - Esquire