The Silver Rule

The Silver Rule: Anything they can do to others, they can do to you!

~Alexander Strouss~

A United States judge, has ruled that the United States Judiciary, can not involve itself into the workings of another branch of Government, even to protect the Rights of human beings against the use of torture. This issue is settled law, having already been decided on by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2004 (Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain). The use of torture, anywhere in the world is illegal.

Here is another example of our Constitution being thrown away. There are checks and balances in the Constitution, which is there to force all other branches of Government to follow the laws and rules. If not the Federal Judges, who then will keep “the beast (power of Government) in the cage”? Why did the Founding Fathers set this up? Did they think it was important to a Constitutional Republic? Yes, because they were all about Human Rights over Government power, especially Kings and Emperors, or would be dictators.

Mr. Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, during a stopover at Kennedy Airport on the way home to Canada after vacation, was kidnapped by CIA agents. Mr. Arar was flown to Syria, where he was tortured for nearly a year in solitary confinement in a three-by-six-foot cell (”like a grave,” he said). He became, internationally, one of the best-known victims of the CIA’s extraordinary renditions—the sending of suspected terrorists to countries known for torturing their prisoners.

Released after his ordeal, Arar has not been charged with any involvement in terrorism, or anything else, by Syria or the United States. Stigmatized by his notoriety, still traumatized, unemployed, he is back in Canada, where the Canadian Parliament had opened an extensive and expensive public inquiry into his capture and torture. The United States refuses to cooperate in any way with this investigation.

Maher Arar sued for damages in federal court here (Maher Arar v. John Ashcroft, formerly Attorney General of the United States, et al.). Representing Arar for the New York–based Center for Constitutional Rights, David Cole predicts, and I agree, that if Judge Trager’s ruling is upheld in an appeal to the Supreme Court, the CIA and other American officials will be told “they have a green light to do to others what they did to Arar”—no matter what international or U.S. laws are violated in the name of national security.

In a startling, ominous decision—ignored by most of the press around the country—Federal District Judge David Trager, in the Eastern District of New York, has dismissed the lawsuit Following the dismissal of Arar’s case by Trager (former dean of Brooklyn Law School), Barbara Olshansky (deputy legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights) underscored the significance of what Trager has done to legitimize the Bush administration’s doctrine that in the war on terrorism, the commander in chief sets the rules. Said Olshansky: “There can be little doubt that every official of the United States government [involved in the torture of Maher Arar] knew that sending him to Syria was a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution, federal statutes, and international law . . . This is a dark day indeed.”

To fathom the darkness of Judge Trager’s decision that Maher Arar has no constitutional right to due process in an American court of law for what he suffered because of the CIA, it’s necessary to be aware of a decision directly on point by New York’s Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 1980.

In this landmark decision, Filártiga v. Peña-Irala, the appeals court decided that “the prohibition on torture was so universally accepted that a U.S. Court could hold responsible a Paraguayan official charged with torturing a dissident in Paraguay . . . The U.S. court declared that when officials violate such a fundamental norm as torture, they can be held accountable anywhere they are found.”

That 1980 Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision proclaimed: “The torturer has become the pirate and slave trader before him . . . an enemy of all mankind.”

This decision giving American courts jurisdiction over cases of official torture in other countries was reaffirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2004 (Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain).

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How many laws will this Cabal break? When will we and the world bring them before a court of law to answer for these crimes?

No man is above the law. Even Mr. Bush. The Supreme Court has ruled after almost every war, that the laws which a President and his Administration have broken, in the name of National Security and the power to do so, because we are at war, did not have the legal right to break those laws. Why do we keep allowing them to do so?

Stand up and say “No More!” “Never Again”! “No More Lies”!