Marty Lederman links to the DHS OIG report on Maher Arar’s transfer to and subsequent torture in Syria. It’s really really ugly reading, even though they’ve obviously redacted a lot of the paragraphs that ought to reveal the decision making process by which we decided sending Arar home to Canada or even to Switzerland so instead sent him to be tortured (many of the redacted paragraphs are marked with "U’s,"
signifying they’re unclassified).
Anyway, some more light reading to bring with me on my trip to Minneaplis this weekend for the Media Reform Conference.
In the meantime, I’m struck by this bit from Marty:
Interestingly, in his own testimony today, the Homeland Security IG states that "we have reopened our review into the Mr. Arar matter because, less than a month ago, we received additional information that contradicts one of the conclusions in our report. As such, we are in the process of conducting additional interviews to determine the validity of this information to the extent we can."
It’s not clear what the IG is treating as conclusions. But one of the big issues in the report–predictably–was how the hell it was that DOJ reviewed Syria’s human rights record and didn’t notice (right, yeah) that Arar was likely to be tortured. So I’m curious if the IG learned some new details about that decision-making process.