Yesterday, the Commons voted unanimously to apologize to him — although the government warned that this doesn't mean it is admitting any legal liability.
And now conventional wisdom holds that the Mounties acted like a bunch of dopes. There are calls for RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli to be fired. In the Commons, opposition MPs say the government should move quickly to discipline those RCMP officers responsible.
Still others question the idea of allowing the RCMP any role in national security cases. The implication, never explicitly stated, is that the Mounties are just big, dumb cops — too unsophisticated to deal with tricky issues of terrorism and security. But does this focus on the RCMP's role in the Arar affair let everyone else off the hook?
Certainly, the Mounties did behave egregiously. Justice Dennis O'Connor's just-released report recounts in chilling detail how the RCMP set the stage for Arar's deportation to Syria, how its bureaucratic intransigence stymied Canadian efforts to get him freed and how, after he was released, it misled the government on its role in the affair.
However, a more careful reading of the three-volume report of O'Connor's judicial inquiry provides a picture that, at one level, is friendlier to the RCMP than the past two days of headlines suggest and yet, at another, is more chilling. For what the critics forget is that in the months following the terror attacks on New York and Washington, RCMP officers were operating in a context that they had not created. It was not the Mounties who passed, in record time, a sweeping anti-terrorism bill that turned upside down some of Canada's traditional liberties. It was the Parliament of Canada.
http://tinyurl.com/s4anm
[Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on September 22, 2006]
Note: http://tinyurl.com/s4anm
No One Off Hook In Arar Debacle
Posted on Friday, September 22 at 09:38 by 4CanadaContributed By
Article Rating
(0 votes)
Options
Stumble It!Comments
view comments in forum
Page 1
I don't think so.
What was done by our "new" government, was done intentionally with full knowledge of the consequences.
The "new" Canadian government is increasingly spying on Canadians illegally without warrants, and without even a semblance of reasonable justification. The people who are responsible for spying on us know full well that the result of their fishing expeditions will end up catching almost exclusively innocent victims. When you add torture on top of this, they've more than crossed the line.
The more a "New" Government pushes, the more the people will be forced to push back, so expect civil unrest to follow unless something reasonable is done to correct the situation.
The people who kidnapped Arar and were also accomplices in the crime, MUST be arrested and charged with kiddapping and endangerment of life, otherwise there is simply NO justice left in this counry.
The bogus laws that allow our government to spy on us MUST be repealed, and laws broadly defining "terrorism" as a crime over and above normal crimes MUST also be repealed.
If the government will not respect even its own laws, then the people have no reason to respect the government itself or its laws.
For example, the Canadian government tells us that it's OK to hate Muslims, even go off to war and kill Muslims for no valid reason, yet it will not arrest and charge itself for the "hate" crime which is one of its own laws.
We saw as another sad example, the "new" Canadian government officially supporting the war crimes recently commited by Israel in Lebanon. Israeli military officials even admitted to dropping hundreds of thousands of carpet bombs over civilian areas in Lebanon, yet not a word of condemnation came from our "new" government, thus placing it as an accomplice in the war crime.
If you ever wondered what it was like back in Germany just when fascism was beginning to take hold, just take a look around, because THIS is what it was probably like.
But I also wonder how things will be five years from now.
---
"Son, if you wanna get ahead in this world, never work for another man as long as you live."
With that in mind, yes, they have always been this way. Just look at the massacre of union activists during the depression for an example.
---
Expect little from life and get more from it.