So they say they paid Maher Arar ten and a half million dollars for what he went through as a result of what officials in our federal government did to him and what they failed to do on his behalf. Don’t believe it say some sources which are incensed by the fact that the true figure is closer to the one million dollar mark than it is to ten million.
Maher Arar is the Syrian born software engineer who was detained by the Americans while on a stopover at a United States airport. He was accused of terrorism and sent to Syria where he was kept for ten months based on information relayed to the Syrians by Canada and the United States. In time, the man’s innocence was established and he was released and returned to Canada.
Those who are incensed that Arar received a million dollars are not incensed because he received too little or because he received too much for that matter, they are incensed at the double standard that this case has shown is being practiced in total darkness inside the system of justice in this country.
These sources have in mind a group of victims in the Maritime Provinces on whom the Canadian government allowed the American military to conduct experiments with Agent Orange, a poisonous chemical that was used in Vietnam to defoliate the jungles there. The victims suffered permanent injuries and many have died either as a direct result of their injuries or because of complications that were aggravated by the injuries.
Apparently what happened on the legal front with regard to the Maritime victims is that after decades of negotiations, the Government of Canada agreed to compensate each victim with something like 20,000 dollars which would include the interest accumulated on the money for all those years. This comes to 2% what Maher Arar received for ten months of captivity and no permanent physical injury to show for it.
To understand why Canadians are hit in the face with bizarre distortions of this magnitude whenever an issue of compensation is raised, we must be exposed to one important fact about the workings of the legal system in this country.
There is no provision in Canadian Law allowing the Plaintiff or the Defendant to be present at the discussions before or during the trial between the presiding judge and the opposing lawyers. The result is that the conduct and the outcome of the trial are scripted in advance by the three parties then formalized in a mock trial that deviates little or none at all from the script.
This adherence to the script becomes all the more important if there is to be a jury in front of which the judge will not allow the minutest of surprises by one of the lawyers. It is understood by all that the jury is there to rubberstamp the scripted trial not to be in charge of dispensing justice. And if someone violates this "collegial" approach, they can kiss their career goodbye because they will be tripped and hounded off the bar one way or another.
But why this double standard between the Arar case and the Maritime victims? The reason, say the sources, is that the bad guys were made to be the Syrians whom it was repeatedly claimed were responsible for torturing Mr. Arar even though the man himself never described anything that amounted to a fraction of the torture that took place at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, for example.
But more important than that is the fact that the good guys were made to be those who handled the Arar case at the political level here in Canada. These were members of the Canadian Jewish Congress who were eager to use Arar as an excuse to give Syria a bad name, something that would benefit Israel whose idea of fun and games is to bomb Syrian targets in the Middle East and badmouth that country in North America.
The story up to here is asinine enough but wait till you hear the rest of it. According to the same sources, the lawyers and the help they employed to represent Mr. Arar received more than nine million dollars out of the ten and a half million awarded by the Canadian government in this file. This is hitting three birds with one stone. They get the big bucks, Syria gets the bad name and Israel gets an excuse to bomb Syria again and have fun.
And the people at the legal level are affiliated one way or the other with those who took up the case at the political level. In other words, the sources say, we have here a politico-legalistic protection racket that makes a big case out of small nothings to siphon off millions of taxpayer dollars from the Canadian Government and share it among themselves. In other words, they ate Maher Arar’s lunch and they ate ours to, the taxpayers of this country. And they will undoubtedly use this precedent to repeat the stunt and fleece the public some more.
Those who speak for the Maritime victims say never mind Saddam Hussein using chemicals against his own people, look at the Canadian habit of letting the American Military conduct experiments on our people. This includes the 1957 atomic radiation experiments in Nevada, the LSD experiments, the Cruise Missile experiments, the Agent Orange experiments and God knows what else remains hidden and may surface sometime in the future.
And each time, the victims of those experiments are ignored by the government for decades even when the Americans compensate their own people for the same experiment. This happens, say the sources, because the cases are not taken up by the Jews. Not necessarily Jewish lawyers, they hasten to add, this would not make much of a difference. What they mean is that there is no angle in the story which can be exploited to serve a Jewish or Israeli cause. That is, there are no Arabs to be implicated in the scandal and made to look bad whether or not the Arabs deserve to be so treated in the first place.
Consequently, the sources have a suggestion to make to the Government of Canada. They ask that every Canadian who has been the victim of an experiment conducted by the American Military be given a million dollars like Maher Arar. The Government of Canada can then go ahead and hand ten million dollars to the Canadian Jewish Congress for every case so treated if this is what turns them on in Ottawa.
But wait a minute folks, we are the taxpayers of Canada and we should have a say in this matter because it is our money they are dolling out. We have two simple questions to ask: Why is it that when ordinary people are involved, the thing drags for decades and the amounts discussed are in the peanut league but when the Jewish causes are involved, the amounts balloon into the millions of dollars? And why is it that the time frame during which all works out shortens from decades to a few months?
Until we are given honest answers, we remind the Parliament of Canada that it exists at all to look at this sort of matters because these matters go to the heart of governance. Parliament has the power to roll back anything that is outrageously unfair and the Parliament of Canada is now on notice that it shall remain in dereliction of its duties until it acts decisively in this case and fixes the outrage.