Quick hit number four

This is a more than a week old now, but no matter how old it is, it ranks high on the outrage scale. On August 11, CBC reported that

[a] senior lawyer for the U.S. government has told a judge hearing a lawsuit over Maher Arar's deportation to Syria that foreign citizens passing through American airports have almost no rights.

Mary Mason told a hearing in Brooklyn, NY that international passengers who are merely waiting for connecting flights at US airports, who never attempt or intend to enter the US, still have to be able to prove that they could do so if they desired. If they can't, they can be seized and have no constitutional or legal rights.

Mason said the interpretation means travellers can be detained without charge, denied the right to consult a lawyer, and even refused necessities such as food and sleep.

What's more, she said, that remains true even if they are imprisoned in the US - because in the fantasy world of legalities they are still regarded as having not entered the country. The most they could expect, she maintained, was to be free of "gross physical abuse," whatever the hell that means. It can't mean torture because we don't do that, as everyone knows full well. But just in case, Department of Injustice

spokeswoman Cynthia Magnuson issued this short statement: "The United States does not practise torture, export torture or condone torture."

Of course not. Because if we do it, whatever it is, even denying people food and sleep, it's not torture.