Outsourcing torture

CONGRESS WAS on the verge last night of jettisoning one of the nation's bedrock constitutional protections -- habeas corpus, the right of prisoners to challenge their detention.

The so-called terrorism detainee bill would also give the president far too much latitude in deciding what aggressive interrogation techniques fall short of torture. The legislation violates fundamental American principles, and could well endanger future American detainees.

It is not even clear if the bill would bar a repetition of the ugly case of Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen sent to Syria for torture in 2002. According to a recent Canadian report, Arar suffered nearly a year of beatings in jail after the United States outsourced his interrogation to Syria, a country with no compunctions about prisoner mistreatment. The United States has refused to disavow or even acknowledge its role in the case.

Arar's captors in Syria, a sometime ally against Al Qaeda, got no useful information from him because, as the report makes clear, he had nothing to do with terrorism. He initially became a suspect because of shoddy investigative work by Canadian police, who passed his name on to US authorities. On the way home to Canada from a visit to Tunisia in 2002, US agents in New York grabbed Arar and, the report said, questioned him for 12 days before sending him to Syria, his birthplace.

Details of US involvement are unclear, according to the report, because US officials refused to cooperate in the Canadians' investigation.

After Arar's release in 2003, he tried to sue in a US federal court, but a judge threw his case out because of supposed national security issues. He is trying to get compensation from Canada.

In Syria, the beatings and confinement in a coffin-size dungeon led Arar to confess he had trained in Afghanistan, a country he had in fact never been to. So much for the quality of intelligence produced by abusive techniques.

Another lesson of prisoner abuse, whether it is done through "extraordinary rendition," as in this case, or at the hands of the Central Intelligence Agency, is that it undermines America's ability to insist that other countries uphold human rights, including those spelled out in the Geneva Conventions. "If you just look at how we are perceived in the world and the kind of criticism we have taken over Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and renditions," Colin Powell told the Washington Post recently, "whether we believe it or not, people are starting to question whether we are following our own high standards."

If the United States would adhere to its "high standards" in dealing with Muslims, it might look to them for assistance against Islamic extremists. Instead, Congress and President Bush risk torturing detainees and embittering their communities, spurning Powell's sound advice.