Rendition Case to Syria?

This one strikes me as quite odd. I would think that you'd need to be on good diplomatic terms with a country to have rendition be effective. In this case Syria is the country that the person was sent to, and I'm thinking that they are not on our list of helpful countries.

A government commission on Monday exonerated a Canadian computer engineer of any ties to terrorism and issued a scathing report that faulted Canada and the United States for his deportation four years ago to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured.

The report on the engineer, Maher Arar, said American officials had apparently acted on inaccurate information from Canadian investigators and then misled Canadian authorities about their plans for Mr. Arar before transporting him to Syria.

"I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offense or that his activities constituted a threat to the security of Canada," Justice Dennis R. O'Connor, head of the commission, said at a news conference.

The report's findings could reverberate heavily through the leadership of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which handled the initial intelligence on Mr. Arar that led security officials in both Canada and the United States to assume he was a suspected Al Qaeda terrorist.

And

But its conclusions about a case that had emerged as one of the most infamous examples of rendition - the transfer of terrorism suspects to other nations for interrogation - draw new attention to the Bush administration's handling of detainees. And it comes as the White House and Congress are contesting legislation that would set standards for the treatment and interrogation of prisoners.

"The American authorities who handled Mr. Arar's case treated Mr. Arar in a most regrettable fashion," Justice O'Connor wrote in a three-volume report, not all of which was made public. "They removed him to Syria against his wishes and in the face of his statements that he would be tortured if sent there. Moreover, they dealt with Canadian officials involved with Mr. Arar's case in a less than forthcoming manner."

This is a bit confusing. Canada places Arar on a terrorist watch list of some variety, which apparently is shared with the US. Arar, a Syrian citizen, lands in the US, and is deported to Syria via a stop in Jordan. On arrival in Syria he is arrested and beaten on a regular basis. This strikes me as being a bit thin on the logic side. Or not all of the relevant information is here. This line gives a bit more support to the contention though.

On Sept. 26, 2002, the F.B.I. called Project A-O and told the Canadian police that Mr. Arar was scheduled to arrive in about one hour from Zurich. The F.B.I. also said it planned to question Mr. Arar and then send him back to Switzerland. Responding to a fax from the F.B.I., the Mounted Police provided the American investigators with a list of questions for Mr. Arar. Like the other information, it included many false claims about Mr. Arar, the commission found.

I wonder how deportations usually work. Do you send them back to where they just came or do you send them back to their counrty of origin? I suppose there are variables in to what is done, but why would you send a terrorist suspect back to a country that probably will refuse him if they know what you suspect?

I suppose I'll have to make a statement on rendition, since not including a moral statement on torture when it is a side topic seems to get me criticized. I don't like rendition. If you can't do the job yourself, why do it at all. I understand it's a dodge around the legal system of the country, and that just makes it all the more deplorable. This case, if accurate, is especially sickening, considering that all evidence provided here has the appearances of being exceedingly thin.