RCMP Watch

Editorial (Baylor University) - It’s amazing how our government lacks a grasp of basic playground etiquette. Hitting doesn’t help. You share the sandbox. You apologize for mistakes.

When members of Congress apologized Thursday to Canadian citizen Maher Arar, who was seized by U.S. officials and taken to prison in Syria, they voiced their hope that the U.S. government would apologize as well.

So far they have hoped in vain. The American government not only refuses to apologize for the particular case, but is also giving no comment on the program of extraordinary rendition, of which Arar is just the most visible participant.

Arar, a Canadian engineer of Syrian descent, was in New York City’s John F. Kennedy airport on a layover on his way home when U.S. officials seized him and put him on a private plane to Syria, where according to Canadian officials and Arar himself, he was tortured.

Arar was in Syria for 10 months, and now that he is back in Ottawa, the Canadian government is apologizing and paying him $10 million in compensation.

According to the Associated Press, the Canadian investigation that cleared Arar of ties to terrorism found that “the Royal Canadian Mounted Police wrongly labeled him an Islamic fundamentalist and passed misleading and inaccurate information to U.S. authorities.”

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., said the Arar case is “no excuse to end a program which has protected the lives of hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans.”

Since the government won’t speak about this program, we are presumably supposed to take Rohrabacher’s word on the matter and trust that the government really is conducting itself in the best interests of its citizens, those of Canada and those of who-knows-what other countries.

But its citizens are not the only ones listening to the stubborn silence.

The actions of our government are being watched around the world, and every time we assert our unfounded sense of superiority to international laws or any executive accountability, we alienate not only foreign governments, but also their citizens.

They read newspapers, too. They understand what our government is not saying.

What they are saying is that they “do not turn over suspects to other countries without diplomatic assurances that they will not be tortured.”

But are we really supposed to believe that the U.S. government now trusts the diplomatic assurances of Syria?

What did they think Arar would be subjected to in a Syrian jail — Seinfeld reruns?

More importantly, where does the power we concede to our government stop?

It basically kidnaps a Canadian citizen on faulty intelligence and feels under no obligation to say anything in defense of its mistake or the program that caused it.

But the U.S. government doesn’t just owe Arar an apology.

It owes its citizens an explanation of the practices it undertakes on their behalf. It also owes citizens explanations of what, if any, provisions are in place to limit the scope and power of these undertakings.