I am sure Mr. Arar wishes he’d never been put through the awful situation he was that has made Time decide to put him on their Top 100 most influential list (for the world), but he still considers it a great honour.
Personally, I didn’t think that the Arar case had reverberated down in the US public consciousness at all, so kudos to Time for recognizing Mr. Arar and his plight. On the other hand, it is of no surprise that Patrick Leahy, the Democrat who chairs the US Senate Judiciary Committee, is the one who penned the tribute to Arar. He has been very outspoken in how the US handled this. His main quote of the piece:
Maher Arar’s case stands as a sad example of how we have been too willing to sacrifice our core principles to overarching government power in the name of security, when doing so only undermines the principles we stand for and makes us less safe.
Hopefully, with the election of a new administration in the next year and a half, the US will reverse course on its slide away from the principles of the Constitution it has experienced under Bush.
Great post! I know it's been up here for a while already, but I came across it in a google blog search. Since writing '<a href="http://deadissue.com/archives/2007/01/23/the-murder-of-maher-arar/">The Murder of Maher Arar</a>' a number of months ago, I've felt compelled to check in on occasion to see whether his name continues to ring out on the blogs.
I'm really an admirer of this kind of work being done…I'm going to link to this site on <a href="http://deadissue.com">deadissue</a> and hope that you might do the same.
Peace, Love and Acceleration
Al