Another Prisoner of Chillon

 There is no shortage of things to celebrate about the fall of Bashar al-Assad's brutal regime in Syria a couple weeks ago. When it comes to things to praise about the end of a dictator's reign, you can take your pick. But surely, one of the best aspects was seeing Assad's underground dungeons at last thrown open. People who had been immured for years in these dismal caverns could finally emerge blinking into the sun and reunite with their families: a thousand real-life versions of Byron's "Prisoner of Chillon" freed from bondage. Whose heart would not swell at their long-overdue liberation? 

But our joy and relief at seeing these captives set free should be tempered with heartache: not least because our own government was in some ways complicit in their doom. On a recent episode of the podcast "Rational Security," the human rights lawyer Michel Paradis reminded us of the fate of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen whom U.S. authorities detained and deported to Syria—on false suspicions of Al-Qaeda ties—where agents of Assad's government imprisoned and tortured him for nearly a year. It was one of the worst of many gross human rights violations in the early post-9/11 era. 

Apparently, debate continues as to whether this was yet another case of "extraordinary rendition"—in which the U.S. government knowingly handed people over to authoritarian regimes to be tortured for information—or "merely" wrongful "deportation." Either way: the result was the same: Arar was confined to the horrifying fate that we saw so many only recently escape in Syria. That's the complicity we should remember: At least one of the people who had been "alive ensepuchlred" in Assad's dungeons (to borrow a phrase from Thomas Hardy) was there because our government put him there. 

Why did the U.S. government detain Arar in the first place? Here again is another disgraceful tale. In Paradis's telling, he was falsely identified during the interrogation of a 15-year-old child soldier at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. The teenaged suspect who pointed the finger at Arar later claimed that he had been tortured (or—according to some versions, at the very least strongly pressured) into naming a set of pre-identified suspects whose names and images were presented to him under duress. He said, understandably, he would have told his captors anything they wanted to hear to end the ordeal. 

The anecdote, if true, illustrates the incredible stupidity—as well as the brutality and cruelty—of the Bush administration's torture program. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of history—or merely of human psychology—could have told them from the start that torturing people is the least effective means ever devised for getting at the truth. Why? Because people will say or do anything to make the abuse stop. As a character in Shakespeare puts it, in banteringly accusing her admirer of merely telling her what she wants to hear: "I fear you speak upon the rack/ Where men enforcèd do speak anything."

The line may seem to be nothing more than a bit of romantic badinage, but Lytton Strachey suggests—in his book Elizabeth and Essex, about the Virgin Queen's court—that it may have been a disguised commentary on an actual case from the time. Strachey documents in detail the Elizabethan-era anti-Semitic persecution of a certain Dr. Lopez, who was arrested and tortured on false suspicions of being a Spanish double-agent. Lopez, of course, confessed to these "crimes" on the rack. But—to Portia's point—men under such pain will say anything. Maher Arar's case—alas—illustrates the same truth. 

Dr. Lopez confessed to invented crimes on the rack. Likewise, it was not hard for the U.S. government to pressure a 15-year-old captive into naming names under threat of torture (or at the very least, something close to it)—even if they were pre-selected names of whom the captive had no prior knowledge. "Men enforcèd" will say whatever they need to make the pain stop. We all would do the same in their position. And as a result, an innocent man was falsely detained and deported to the unimaginable horror of Assad's underground dungeons. To Paradis's point—that's a real, if disgraceful, part of our government's legacy in Syria. 

This sorry recollection of our government's complicity in Assad's crimes should haunt us always. It should never be forgotten. As Byron wrote—in his own poem about another innocent man wrongfully immured in a dark and sunless underground dungeon, and which I thought fitting to revisit as we behold so many prisoners' liberation in Syria from the same fate in recent weeks: "May none those marks efface!/ For they appeal from tyranny to God."