The methods used at Abu Graibh, Bagram and Guantanamo were/are less severe?

News to me.

Hypocrite

MOONOFA, I don't agree with your post.

Bagram, Gunatánamo and so on was a complete disaster but their existence doesn't mean at all that any american can not criticise then use of torture.

Besides, the people in Damasco would certainly love to have the right to choose their president, just as we do in western democracies. Remember that in 2004 the US people freely decided that Bush should have a second term.

Those degenerate beasts turned loose on the young trader as reported by Suleiman al-Khalidi of Reuters were doubtless manifesting skills developed and exercised for the American dollar on the body of the unfortunate Maher Arar in 2002-3. Those skills were a Bush administration treasure.

Here's how Wikipedia recounts his experience, edited for brevity:

"Maher Arar (Arabic: ???? ????) (born 1970) is a telecommunications engineer with dual Syrian and Canadian citizenship who resides in Canada ... [He] was detained during a layover at John F. Kennedy International Airport in September 2002 on his way home to Canada from a family vacation in Tunis. He was held without charges in solitary confinement in the United States for nearly two weeks, questioned, and denied meaningful access to a lawyer. The US government ... deported him, not to Canada, his current home, but to his native Syria, even though its government [was] known to use torture.

"He was detained in Syria for almost a year, during which time he was tortured, according to the findings of a commission of inquiry ordered by the Canadian government ... . That commission publicly cleared Arar of any links to terrorism, and the government of Canada later ... awarded him a C$10.5 million settlement. The Syrian government [in 2009] says that Arar is 'completely innocent ... .' "

No matter. In standard DoJ and FBI mode, no American prisoner, once tortured, is ever innocent. Back to Wikipedia 2009 again: "As of February ... Arar and his family remain on a watchlist. His US lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights are currently pursuing his case, Arar v. Ashcroft, which seeks compensatory damages on Arar’s behalf and also a declaration that the actions of the US government were illegal and violated his constitutional, civil, and international human rights."

In June last year, the Supreme Court followed its usual course of not dirtying its hands by looking at claimed official torture of American prisoners. It denied Arar’s petition for certiorari to review the Second Circuit Court of Appeals' en banc decision dismissing his case, ending his case in U.S. courts.

Today's Best Defense's new report from the flourishing torture hub of Syria suggests that a sewer runs through much of the US judicial system, and the Supreme Court is not outside it.

Nobody denies that Arar was sent to Syria to be tortured, but few think that this happened in direct defiance of a diplomatic treaty signed by the US government in 1785 -- yes, 1785 -- that "to prevent the destruction of prisoners of war by sending them into distant and inclement countries, or by crowing them into close or noxious places ... [the US pledged that] it will not adopt any such practice."

Syria is distant. I am ignorant of its climate. Arar's three-foot by six-foot cell could fairly be described as both noxious and close. But that diplomatic agreement was with Prussia -- a Christian nation.

While Arar was screaming and weeping and bleeding in Syria, Congress was pondering the Syria Accountability Act of 2002, designed to straighten out that non-Christian government for its alleged practices of supporting terrorism, selling military arms illegally, and -- a familiar phrase of the time -- developing weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons have been on display since, and the WMD matter, a casus belli in nearby Iraq, seems to have been dropped after the Assad government showed with the bleeding body of Meher Arrar that really, it was deep down, on the American side.

Doubtless Washington smoothies were aware of it all the time. Think for a moment: if you really think a man with joint Syrian and Canadian nationality is a terrorist, why would you send him to the supposedly terrorist-friendly Syria instead of, more easily and cheaply, to the nonterroristic Canada? Short ride over the, ah, Peace Bridge?

Nor do American main stream media personalities have any credibility discussing these matters. The world laughs at morality theater staged by the establishment media that belongs to the United States of Torture.

The world laughs at morality theater staged by the establishment media that belongs to the United States of Torture and to the Republic for which it does not stand.

Ich schwoere Dir
Adolf Hitler,
als Fuehrer und
Kanzler des Reiches
Treue und Tapferkeit.
Ich gelobe Dir
und den von Dir
bestimmten Vorgesetzien
gehorsam bis in
den Tod,
so wahr mir
Gott helfe.

Sieg Heil!

Unless you think that luring all the nutballs into one area improves the quality of the conversation elsewhere in the blog.
Best,
Tom

I am really puzzled by the comments so far. An account on terrible tortures on a journalist in syrian prisons unleashes accusations towards past US torture episodes and not a word on that regime itself or the way the Assad family rules that country.

The main point for me is that the use of torture in US operations has been cancelled after a public and free debate and a free change of administration. It´s been democracy itself which corrected the torture mistake. The main difference with the syrian regime might not be the use of torture at a certain point of its history, but that the exercise of democracy is able to move past that situation because of the free will of the people.

Another striking point for me is that because US practiced torture, no US citizen or media can be taken into account in the torture debate. It simply makes no sense at all. Each argument should be examined by itself and one of the points of exame should be the bias or the intention of the citizen or media. According to that argument I should never talk about feedom in South America or religious freedom or dialogue with Islam just because I come from the country that colonised America or invented Inquisition or expelled muslims from Spain.

So the question for us should be: What are we, western democracies, willing to do on behakf of the syrian people so they can move past the Assad regime?

There is no debate. Torture is against the law, and was against the law before the wars of the last 10 years. Debate is a non starter. Mr. Ricks is part of of the media establishment that covered up torture for the government.