Patrick Leahy, Congressman from Vermont, takes Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to task for the Maher Arar case in a Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing. It’s good to see someone in the US Government realizing that Canada (as well as the rest of the world) sometimes wonders what has happened to the USA that they thought they used to know. It’s certainly not the kind of country that now sends a Canadian citizen off to the Syria because they suspect that he might be a terrorist.
We knew damn well if he went to Canada, he wouldn’t be tortured! If he were held, he would be investigated. We also knew damn well if he went to Syria, he’d be tortured.
Here’s the whole exchange:
Someone here the other day told me that the US today (as it relates to Canada) was like ‘Someone had stolen away your big brother and replaced him with someone that you don’t recognize any more.’ With people like Gonzales running things, it’s no wonder that they don’t recognize the US. I certainly don’t.
BTW, for those outside Canada who don’t know of the case, Maher Arar was a Canadian citizen who was stopped at JFK airport, sent to Syria to be tortured and later was found to be completely innocent. He got a formal apology from the Canadian government, along with $10.5 million in damages. Say what you will about Harper, he’s no snake like Gonzales.
“Say what you will about harper, he’s no snake like gonzales.”
i’ve been thinking about these types of comparisons a lot lately. we can take this further: say what you will about bush, he’s not a vicious torturer like saddam hussein. when are these comparisons useful and when are they not? sometimes they seem like sell-outs (should saddam hussein really be used as a measuring stick?) and sometimes they seem to help gain perspective.
Hi Isabella,
I know what you mean about useless comparisons. I guess in this case, I was contrasting Canada’s (and Harper’s) apology to Arar with Gonzales’s slippery ‘I can’t tell you’ and ‘I can’t recall’ answers he was giving to the committee. Gonzales, like so many other Bush appointees, typifies the President’s preference of loyalty over competence or even morality.
Re. the Saddam comparison, that’s a strange one. I’ve seen the ‘If you’re against the war in Iraq, then I suppose you think that things would be better if we’d never gone and Saddam were still in power.’ line go from being a taunt, to a cliché, to almost a joke (‘where the punchline is ‘Ummm, yes?’)
When are these comparisons useful? Maybe when one of those in the comparison is not a known mass-murderer, I can’t say for sure.
At any rate, ‘Say what you will about x, he’s no y’ is just sloppy writing. I think I’ll give that clichéd construction a rest for a while.