By Nic LaPonte
Imagine for a minute that you are getting off of a plane. The airport is busy and loud, you've had a long trip back to the North American continent and you just have a brief layover in an American airport before you fly back to your Canadian home and family.
While walking to the next gate for the departure, you notice two large men walking on either side of you. One of them whispers in your ear that you need to go with them, and grabbing you by the arms, the men steer you past a security door and into the bowels of the terminal.
You get no warning, no Miranda rights and defiantly no phone call to explain to your loved ones that you won't be making that flight back to them. All you get is a black hood over your eyes and a dose of sedative to keep you still as you are placed on a plane and spirited away to Syria. What awaits you there are months of brutal mistreatment in a country where torture is not only legal, it's a business fueled by U.S. outsourcing.
If you think this story sounds like something out of Hollywood, you'd be partially correct. What I just described took place in the film "Rendition," but it also happened to a Canadian citizen named Maher Arar in 2002.
Arar was detained for seemingly no reason in the JFK airport during a flight from Syria to his native Canada. Based on false information extracted by means of torture from two other associates of his both he and his wife were falsely named as Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qaida.
Brought to Syria because of a CIA program known as extraordinary rendition, his story raises excellent questions about the validity of extreme interrogation techniques. The program was created in order to expedite the interrogation of suspected terrorists by transporting them to countries with the ability to use torture without any political consequences.
Just being in there made Arar ready to confess to anything. This appears to destroy any validity that torture may have as a legitimate means of gathering intelligence.
After a certain point, even though he had none of the information that they wanted, Arar began to confess the information that they wanted to hear, telling his captors that he had been in Afghanistan when he had not.
A common argument for the justification of torture as a means of gathering intelligence is that it can coerce information from people who are unwilling to tell the truth. Think about this: The very reason that Arar was taken was based on supposedly accurate information extracted from another prisoner through torture.
Arar himself said that after being imprisoned for only a little while he was ready to tell his captors anything and give up any name that even sounded plausible just to get the torment to stop.
While one may be able to justify the use of torture to extract valuable or necessary information to safeguard the greater security of a large group of people, this utilitarian argument falls to pieces when you are just inflicting harm on people for worthless information.
While torture could be justified if the information that it returned were valuable, the vary nature of torture almost guarantees that information gained by means of it will be worthless.
People under the duress of torture will say anything to end the torment, leading to nothing but more misinformation and cases of mistreatment like Maher Arar's.
With the fact that there can be no logical justification for the use of torture or extreme interrogation in mind, I argue that no nation can call itself a just or free one while it still practices these methods or supports nations that do. With the announced plans to close our Guantanamo Bay facility I believe the U.S. is taking an important stance where we draw the line as an ethical nation.
