Tortured

Remember Maher Arar? How was the information against this innocent and subsequently tortured man gotten?

Through torturing another man.

In 2004, a Syrian-Canadian named Maher Arar became an international symbol of war-on-terror excesses. U.S. officials, Arar told the press, detained him at Kennedy Airport in 2002 on suspicion of involvement in terrorism and whisked him to Syria for interrogation, where he was tortured for ten months before the Syrians released him. (Even they doubted that Arar was in league with al-Qaeda after his interrogation.) Allegations that Canadian authorities were involved in torture prompted an official inquiry, which last fall exonerated Arar of any link to terrorism.

That report also confirmed -- while excluding key details for diplomatic reasons -- that Arar's arrest was part of an awful feedback loop in which information extracted by torture from Syrian prisons implicating Arar reached both the American and Canadian security services, which then worked feverishly to detain him and send him to Syria for his own round of torture.

  TPM Muckraker

We can only wonder how many other innocents were tortured because of the tortured confession of someone else.

Remember when they used to scare us with stories just like this of the "godless Communists" and the Nazis who tortured innocent people by virtue of the tortured confessions of other people? And how that made us so much better than them?

If you don't, you're under 50 years old.