Maher Arar Fights to Keep Torture Suit Against U.S. Government Alive

Attorneys for Syrian-born Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, made their first public appearance in a Brooklyn Federal Court yesterday in Arar's closely watched civil lawsuit against several U.S. officials. Among them: former Attorney General John Ashcroft and former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge. In his lawsuit, Arar accuses the U.S. government of violating the Torture Victim Protection Act and his Fifth Amendment right to due process. His attorneys appeared in court yesterday to argue against the Justice Department's motion to dismiss Arar's case.

In October 2002, Arar was detained at JFK airport by US officials while on a stopover in New York. He was then jailed and secretly deported to Syria. He was held for almost a year without charge in an underground cell not much larger than a grave, where he was tortured. The Center for Constitutional Rights launched Arar's lawsuit last January alleging that Ashcroft, Ridge and other officials in the Bush administration knew Arar would be tortured when he was deported. Arar alleges he was a victim of the US government's "extraordinary rendition" policy of sending people to countries that routinely use torture, instead of holding them in the US where they have certain rights under the constitution.

The US government is attempting to have Arar's lawsuit dismissed. Invoking the rarely used "state secrets privilege" the Justice Department claims that any release of information on Arar could jeopardize "intelligence, foreign policy and national security interests of the United States." Last year, Time Magazine in Canada named him the country's newsmaker of the year.

* David Cole, attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights. He is the lead lawyer in for Maher Arar.

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