Remember when they at least pretended there was a presumption of innocence?
Remember when having gone through trial and proved not guilty you were in fact considered not guilty?
Did you ever think that two world governments would conspire against one man? And then compound all the wrong that had transpired by folding their arms stomping their feet and refusing to admit either their own guilt or any satisfaction with the declaration of innocence.
For Maher Arar, it never ends.
It wasn’t enough that the Canadian computer engineer was deported by the U.S. to Syria to be tortured.
Nor was it enough that, even after he got home, unknown Canadian government officials deliberately leaked false and damaging information to the media in an attempt to smear him.
Now, after a painstaking 34-month judicial inquiry finally cleared his name, the U.S. government has decided that it is its turn to smear Arar.
The smear was delivered by David Wilkins, U.S. ambassador to Canada. In a statement released yesterday, he said that Arar will stay on a U.S. watch list that denies him entry to that country “based on information from a variety of sources.”
Right wing governments are correct when they say they do not believe in big government. Big government being a code word for government responsible to and for the people.
Totalitarian government, however, seems to be something they can get behind.
Form of government that subordinates all aspects of its citizens’ lives to the authority of the state, with a single charismatic leader as the ultimate authority. The term was coined in the early 1920s by Benito Mussolini, but totalitarianism has existed throughout history throughout the world (e.g., Qin dynasty China). It is distinguished from dictatorship and authoritarianism by its supplanting of all political institutions and all old legal and social traditions with new ones to meet the state’s needs, which are usually highly focused. Large-scale, organized violence may be legitimized. The police operate without the constraint of laws and regulations. Where pursuit of the state’s goal is the only ideological foundation for such a government, achievement of the goal can never be acknowledged.
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