US blocks ‘Syria torture’ lawsuit
A US federal appeals court has ruled that a Canadian man cannot sue the US after he was held at a New York airport and then transferred to Syria, where he alleges he was tortured.
Maher Arar, a Syrian-born software engineer, was detained by US authorities during a stopover in New York while heading home to Canada in 2002, and then sent to Syria because he was suspected of having links to al-Qaeda.
Arar says he was held in a Syrian jail for almost a year and that he was beaten and whipped with electrical cables during his detention.
In a 7-4 vote on Monday, the US court of appeals for the Second Circuit agreed with a lower court that Arar could not sue US officials, saying that he did not have legal standing. [continued…]
