Abstract
Imagine the following scenario. An Egyptian-born American engineer traveling home to Chicago from a business trip in South Africa is detained by American officials on a stopover at Washington’s Dulles airport, assumed through flimsy evidence to be a terrorist, is whisked away to a North African country where he is imprisoned and tortured into signing a false confession while his wife, once she finds out what happened to him, takes on top-level government bureaucrats at home to secure his release. Or this scenario. A Syrian-born Canadian engineer traveling home from a vacation in Tunisia is detained by American officials on a stopover at New York’s JFK Airport, assumed through faulty evidence (supplied by Canadian officials) to be a terrorist, is whisked away to a Syrian prison where he is tortured into signing a false confession while his wife, once she finds out what happened to him, takes on top-level bureaucrats of three governments to secure his release.
“The rendition program has been the single most effective counter-terrorism operation ever conducted by the United States Government.”
Michael Scheur1
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Notes
Aida A. Hozic, Hollyworld: Space, Power, and Fantasy in the American Economy (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 140–141, 202.
Paul Virilio, War and Cinema (London and New York: Verso Press, 1989), p. 38.
Paul Virilio, Interview in Art and Philosophy (Milan: Giancarlo Politi Editore, 1991), p. 140,
quoted in James Der Derian, “The virtualization of violence and the disappearance of war,” Cultural Values 1, no. 2 (1997), p. 211.
Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 67.
Judith Butler, “Contingent foundations: Feminism and the question of ‘postmodernism’,” in Judith Butler and Joan Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), p. 11.
Simon Philpott, “Is anyone watching? War, cinema and bearing witness,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 23, no. 2 (June 2010), p. 338.
A. O. Scott, “When a single story has a thousand sides,” The New York Times, October 19, 2007, www.nytimes.com.
Maher Arar, “They put a bag over my head & flew me to Syria for torture and interrogation: This is what they did to me,” Counterpunch, November 6, 2003, http://www.counterpunch.org/arar11062003.html.
Ian Austen, “Canadians fault u.s. For its role in torture case,” The New York Times, September 19, 2006, www.nytimes.com.
Ibid. Also see Michelle Shephard, “Blame flies for RCMP’s ‘data dump’ after Sept. 11,” Toronto Star, July 20, 2005, www.thestar.com.
Robert Diab, Guantanamo North: Terrorism and the Administration of Justice in Canada (Halifax, UK and Winnipeg, MB: Fernwood Publishing, 2008), p. 88.
Mark B. Salter, “Introduction,” Mark B. Salter, ed., Mapping Transatlantic Security Relations: The EU, Canada and the War on Terror (London and New York: Routledge, 2010).
Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2008), p. 7.
Judith Butler, “Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence” (London and New York: Verso, 2004), p. 64.
Laura Barnett, “Extraordinary rendition: International law and the prohibition of torture,” Library of Parliament, PRB 07–48E, July 2008.
Stephen Legomsky, “The ethnic and religious profiling of noncitizens: National security and international human rights,” Boston College Third World Law Journal 25 (2005), p. 181; cited in ibid., p. 32.
Aggie Hirst, “The ethical implications of the practice of ‘extraodinary rendition’: The case of Maher Arar,” Paper presented at the International Studies Association, San Francisco, CA, 2008, p. 12.
Sheila L. Croucher, Globalization and Belonging: The Politics of Identity in a Changing World (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004), pp. 42, 50.
Monia Mazigh, Hope & Despair: My Struggle to Free My Husband, Maher Arar (Toronto, ON: McLelland and Stewart, 2008), p. 9.
Bonnie Honig, “Immigrant America? How foreignness ‘solves’ democracy’s problems,” Social Text 56 (Autumn 1993), p. 13; cited in Hirst, “The ethical implications of the practice of ‘extraodinary rendition’,” pp. 13–14.
Alan Fleur, “Court dismisses rendition suit,” New York Times, July 1, 2008, wwww.nytimes.com.
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© 2012 Patricia Molloy
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Molloy, P. (2012). Framing Canadians (II). In: Canada/US and Other Unfriendly Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137031457_6
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