Apologize to Arar, but Don’t Give Terrorists Due Process (Rep. Dana Rohrabacher)

I thought the subcommittee hearing on rendition to torture, which focused on the Maher Arar’s case, was very fascinating and certainly justifiable. It was clear that Mr. Arar was victimized unjustily because the United States government had received false information from Canada. Canada has owned up to its mistake, and, as I expressed at the hearing along with the chairman, the U.S. government needs to own up to it when it makes a mistake like this — it needs to apologize and offer compensation.

Number one, I apologized that Mr. Arar had to go through that, but I think that the U.S. government also needs to apologize.

Number two, however, the underlying issues of the hearing only represented that it was a mistake. That does not mean the program itself is not successful just because it has had several mistakes. In a wartime situation, you can have mistakes and you can have friendly fire, but that does not mean what you are trying to do is not for the safety of the country.

There are about 100,000 deaths a year in Medicare that are preventable and based on mistakes; that does not mean that we should scrap the Medicare program. Friendly fire examples of every military operation do not mean that those military operations did not make everybody safer, but that mistakes were made and people were killed. This case shows that mistakes in Canada are being made and we need to admit to them so that the program can be more effective and not have so many mistakes.

The second issue concerns how you deal with someone you have arrested. I made it very clear that the Democrats think every terrorist suspect captured deserves due process rights, just like the American criminal. I pointed out that criminal justice is mainly aimed at determining innocence or guilt after a crime has been committed. What we are trying to do is stop the terrorist act beforehand. In my opinion, the terrorists don’t deserve due process rights. That was the big difference at the hearing. The Democrats believe in due process for terrorists and I do not.

Does anyone believe that innocent people should go through this? The answer is no, but when you make a mistake you should admit it and apologize.

The last issue was whether or not physical pressure, which they call torture, should never be used or has it ever been successful. Certainly physical pressure should never be applied to anyone when there’s any question about whether that person is engaged in terrorist activity. But if there is clear evidence that a person is engaged in something that may well result in the death of thousands of people, then applying physical pressure is not something we should say is immoral. Saving the lives of thousands of innocent people and our families is more important than that one terrorist — if that person is the terrorist.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was known to be the mastermind behind 9/11, was captured and it was waterboarding that got him to admit to a number of other terrorist plots that were in process. After waterboarding, he sang like a canary — at least that’s what was reported. So we can’t say it never works. Was it worth it, say, for those people who would have been killed in terrorist attacks, to waterboard this guy? I would think so.

If we are going to discuss whether there should be due process rights in the war against terrorism, we should not have a guy there who was innocent, who represents one or two that we pick up, because very few people are innocent. We should have a guilty terrorist come here and say, “No, I deserve due process even though I was going to blow up a building that would have murdered a thousand people.” That’s who we are supposed to talk to on this issue, not an innocent person — no one wants to do bad things to an innocent person.