Travelling ‘Torture Caravan’ Disturbing Sign of the Times

[babylonsister]

Travelling ‘Torture Caravan’ Disturbing Sign of the Times
While inquiry meets in private, tortured trio bring tales of terror to small-town Ontario
by Heba Aly


It is a bizarre feeling — eating, walking, laughing with men who have been hung from their wrists and beaten with electric cables. To see them behave so normally despite their experiences is a bit destabilizing.

But for five days, that is what I did, as three men — Abdullah Almalki, Muayyed Nureddin and Ahmad El Maati — travelled from small town to small town, telling Canadians their stories and pushing for a public inquiry into what happened to them.

All three men — Canadian citizens, but also Arab and Muslim — were detained and tortured in a Syrian prison on unproven suspicions of terrorism. They accuse the Canadian government of complicity in their torture. None has ever been charged with a crime.

Toronto-based Nureddin, for example, had fled his homeland of Iraq in 1991. As as a Turkman, he was discriminated against under Saddam Hussein’s regime. When the regime was toppled in 2003, Nureddin decided to go back to visit family he had not seen in nine years. On his way back to Canada, he was stopped on the Iraq-Syria border and thrown into jail. During questioning, he was asked the same questions by his Syrian torturers that he had been asked months before by a Canadian security intelligence official - a sign, he says, that the questions must have originated from Canada.

The stories of these men echo that of Canadian citizen Maher Arar, who was detained and tortured in the same infamous prison in Syria. He has since received an official apology from the Canadian government and $10 million in compensation after a public inquiry established that his torture was due in part to information the RCMP shared internationally, falsely identifying him as a terrorist.

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http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/09/9516/