I’m just passing this along without comment–what is there to say, really?–except to note that the U.S. doesn’t seem to have been involved this time:
Yesterday, another Canadian citizen — this one of Iraqi descent — met reporters to tell his story of torture at the hands of the Syrians.
And here, too, the information used to justify the detention and torture of Muayyed Nureddin appears to have come from Canadian intelligence…
In total, he had about $20,000, all of which he declared before boarding his flight last September at Pearson airport.
Pearson was where the first curious incident happened. As he lined up for his boarding pass, Nureddin was approached by two security agents (he doesn’t remember if they were RCMP or CSIS) and interrogated for 45 minutes.
They asked him about the money he had with him. They also asked about the Salaheddin Centre and whether he knew three men — one of whom was allegedly connected to the radical Islamic Iraqi group Ansar Al-Islam.
Then they allowed him to board the flight.
Getting in and out of Iraq these days is not easy. Nureddin flew to Germany, met one of his brothers and drove overland through Turkey — which is where the second curious incident happened.
At the border, Turkish officials interrogated Nureddin for more than three hours. Their questions were almost identical to those Canadian security officials had asked back at Pearson.
Again, he was allowed to proceed. He spent the next three months with his family. He got engaged.
His car export scheme, however, was a bit of a bust. On Dec. 11, he set out by car for Damascus to fly home.
This was when the third curious incident occurred.
At the Syrian border, Nureddin was arrested, handcuffed and eventually transferred to military intelligence headquarters in Damascus.
He was held in a 30-square-metre underground cell with between 30 and 40 other prisoners.
He was told he’d never see the sun again.
Syrian interrogators asked him the same questions he had been asked at Pearson airport. In some cases, they even knew the answers. They told him, for instance, the exact amount of money he’d left Canada with.
This being Syria, he was tortured as a matter of course. His captors made him strip and lie on the ground with his legs raised while they beat the soles of his feet with a steel cable.
Katherine, just wanted to say that I very much appreciate your keeping us informed. This piece of news had gone right under my radar.
Now… get back to work!
I understand the Canadian Prime Minister has threated to deploy troops to Syria to “keep the peace” if the Syrians don’t stop these outrages.
Canadian MPs then laid the blame for the tortures at the feet of their arrogant neighbors to the south. They also opposed deployment of peacekeepers as “counterproductive” and “likely to only provoke more torture”. In a final fit of anger, they demanded that Canada be given an oportunity to bid on any American funded reconstruction contracts in Syria that resulted from the torture.
The MPs from Quebec, throwing down their own gauntlet, threatened to secede from Canada if the American contracts weren’t immediately forthcoming.
Koffi Anan and the EU then roundly condemmed the US for formenting “instability” in Canada.