January
16 ,
2004
Front-Page
News
Holiday Cheers A
number of books by the Mount Holyoke faculty were deemed the
books to buy this recent holiday season by the Boston
Globe and
New York Times. The Globe hailed both Martha Ackmann's
The Mercury 13: The Untold Story of Thirteen
American Women and the Dream of Space Flight and Chris Benfey's The
Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the
Opening of Old Japan. The New York
Times Book Review also selected Benfey's
book and Mary Jo Salter's
newest volume, Open Shutters. die
Professor Benfey also published a December 6 op-ed in the New
York Times, "Tom Cruise, Bob Dylan, Commodore Perry," discussing
cultural exchanges between East and West that have taken place
since Commodore Matthew Perry's fabled "opening" of
Japan a century and a half ago.
Greek Revival Vanessa James, associate professor and chair of
theatre arts, appeared on C-SPAN 2's Book TV program earlier
this month to discuss her acclaimed new book, The
Genealogy of Greek Mythology: An Illustrated Family Tree of Greek
Myth from the First Gods to the Founders of Rome. The program,
recorded at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., aired
Sunday, January 4.
The Genealogy of Greek Mythology is a beautifully illustrated
and annotated map tracing the genealogy of Greek gods and heroes.
The book, published in an accordion page design that expands
to 17 feet, has garnered much positive press since its publication
in September.
Over the River
The hiring of MHC public safety director Paul Ominsky as interim
director of Smith College's public safety department was
reported on in the Daily Hampshire Gazette. In "Two Colleges
Share Chief of Safety," staff writer Cheryl Wilson noted
that Ominsky will continue in his duties at Mount Holyoke while
succeeding the retired Sharon Rust at Smith. "We felt that
having someone with experience in the industry, but from the
outside, would have a different lens through which to look at
the department,'' William Brandt, director of Smith's
office of campus operations and facilities, told the Gazette. "We
will have Paul look at it, and we will bring in a peer group
to look at it. We want to use his experience to make our department
a better place."
Voice for Gay Marriage The
Village Voice spoke with the Rev.
Andrea Ayvazian, dean of religious life, for its article on straight
couples who refuse to marry until gay and lesbian couples are
allowed to share in the institution. Ayvazian made her choice "back
in 1985, when she began her relationship with her partner, Michael
Klare, a professor and a writer for The Nation," wrote
Erik Baard in "Standing on Ceremony." " ‘It's
important to step up. We don't want to be part of an institution
that's actively discriminatory,' says the United
Church of Christ minister, who's also a folksinger. ‘It's
like the days before the Civil Rights movement. If you got on
the bus, there were white people in the front and black people
in the back. This is just as clear—heterosexuals get married
and gays and lesbians don't.' "
This opinion piece ran in the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday,
January 4.
Torture by Proxy:
How Immigration Threw
a Traveler to the Wolves
By Christopher H. Pyle, professor of politics
On Sept. 26, 2002, U.S. immigration officials seized a Syrian-born
Canadian at Kennedy International Airport, because his name had
come up on an international watch list for possible terrorists.
What happened next is chilling.
Maher Arar was about to change planes on his way home to Canada after visiting
his wife's family in Tunisia when he was pulled aside for questioning.
He was not a terrorist. He had no terrorist connections, but his name was on
the list, so he was detained for questioning. Not ordinary, polite questioning,
but abusive, insulting, degrading questioning by the immigration service, the
FBI and the New York City Police Department.
He asked for a lawyer and was told he could not have one. He asked to call
his family, but phone calls were not permitted. Instead, he was clapped into
shackles and, for several days, made to "disappear." His family
was frantic.
Finally, he was allowed to make a call. His government expected that Arar's
right of safe passage under its passport would be respected. But it wasn't.
Arar denied any connection to terrorists. He was not accused of any crimes,
but U.S. agents wanted him questioned further by someone whose methods might
be more persuasive than theirs.
So, they put Arar on a private plane and flew him to Washington, D.C. There,
a new team, presumably from the CIA, took over and delivered him, by way of
Jordan, to Syrian interrogators. This covert operation was legal, our Justice
Department later claimed, because Arar is also a citizen of Syria by birth.
The fact that he was a Canadian traveling on a Canadian passport, with a wife,
two children and job in Canada, and had not lived in Syria for 16 years, was
ignored. The Justice Department wanted him to be questioned by Syrian military
intelligence, whose interrogation methods our government has repeatedly condemned.
The Syrians locked Arar in an underground cell the size of a grave: 3 feet
wide, 6 feet long, 7 feet high. Then they questioned him, under torture, repeatedly,
for 10 months. Finally, when it was obvious that their prisoner had no terrorist
ties, they let him go, 40 pounds lighter, with a pronounced limp and chronic
nightmares.
Why was Arar on our government's watch list? Because "multiple
international intelligence agencies" had linked him to terrorist groups.
How many agencies? Two. What had they reported? Not much.
The Syrians believed that Arar might be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Why? Because a cousin of his mother's had been, nine years earlier, long
after Arar moved to Canada. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police reported that
the lease on Arar's apartment had been witnessed by a Syrian- born Canadian
who was believed to know an Egyptian Canadian whose brother was allegedly mentioned
in an al Qaeda document.
That's it. That's all they had: guilt by the most remote of computer-generated
associations. But, according to Attorney General John Ashcroft, that was more
than enough to justify Arar's delivery to Syria's torturers. Besides,
Ashcroft added, the torturers had expressly promised that they would not torture
him.
Our intelligence agencies have a name for this torture-by-proxy. They call
it "extraordinary rendition." As one intelligence official explained: "We
don't kick the s— out of them. We send them to other countries
so they can kick the s— out of them."
This secret program for torturing suspects has been authorized, if that is
the right word for it, by a secret presidential finding. Where the president
gets the authority to have anyone tortured has never been explained.
It is time someone asked. What our government did to Maher Arar is worse than
anything the British did to our Colonial forefathers. It was worse than anything
J. Edgar Hoover did to alleged Communists, civil rights workers and anti-war
activists during his long program of dirty tricks.
According to the Bush administration, we are at "war" with al Qaeda.
If so, then delivering a suspect to torturers is a war crime and should be
prosecuted as such. But first, we need to know who was responsible, and that
will not be easy—unless there is a firestorm of protest.
Isn't it time to condemn torture by proxy and demand prosecution of the
persons responsible? Isn't it time to question how these watch lists
are assembled and used, before more of us fall victim to secret detentions
and brutal interrogations based on guilt by computerized associations.
The
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