and Metafilter‘s got it. And, of course, I’m so out of touch I only found out because somebody linked to my blog in a post on Metafilter and I had to go see.

Note to ECNPA members; if you find the photographers responsible, I’m perfectly happy to credit them if that’s what they wish, or reduce them to thumbnail size in accordance with Fair Use legislation. I got these from Google Image Search, FYI.

Warning: I changed all their links to open in a new window. Normally I would just do that and not say anything, but there are a bajillion links here because it’s Metafilter after all and I don’t want you blaming me if your monitor suddenly looks like a weird 21st-century mosaic.

Yesterday, the Arar Commission released their report on the handling of the Maher Arar case, previously mentioned here or here. The findings are widely reported; Canada is self-flagellating for being complicit in the United States’ abduction and torture of a Canadian citizen. As President Bush goes to Congress to lobby for the legal authority to abduct and torture anyone without a trial, Arar should consider himself lucky: although Canada didn’t help him out for a year, the Canadian government and news media were aware of and interested in his confinement, which likely saved him from the worst tortures. As a famous legal scholar commented some 240 years ago, “To bereave a man of life, or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole nation; but confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government.”
posted by jellicle at 8:18 AM PST – 93 comments

Photocredits: John Lehmann (Arar alone) and Bill Grimshaw (Arar and family) as far as I can tell from this posting on ECNPA. Updates and corrections welcomed in the Comments section.