“I’m just a crackpot lawyer that gets ferocious in the courtroom,” said Barbara Olshansky to a near-capacity crowd who had come to hear her speech “The War on Civil Liberties” on Friday, “but I believe the United States is setting a horrible example around the world. The most vicious authoritarian regimes are violating civil rights and they’re pointing to the United States and saying ‘see, the US does it.'”
Olshansky, speaking at the Bloor Street United Church, was giving the keynote address for the Law Union of Ontario, whose annual conference continued through the weekend. Olshansky has become a civil-rights celebrity for representing Maher Arar, the Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was deported to Syria while on a stopover at JFK Airport in New York in the autumn 2002. Arar has now launched a lawsuit against the US government over the incident.
“The lawsuit by Mr. Arar is unique in the United States,” Olshansky said, because the suit is being made under the Torture Victims Protection Act. “It is the first time such a charge is being made against officials of the United States.
“There are people who have said that [the case] is, quote, ‘a public relations nightmare’ for the United States,” Olshansky told the crowd, to nervous laughter. “Talk about understatement.”
The event brought out a number of VIPs in the audience-Ken Finkleman, the CBC personality, and Matthew Behrens, a prominent member of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) were both there. Also present was Jeremy Hinzman, the former paratrooper in the US military who earlier this month sought refugee status in Canada after refusing to fight in Iraq. Hinzman has been charged in the US with deserting and would be prosecuted if he returns. Barbara Jackman, a prominent immigration lawyer who was introducing Olshansky, pointed Hinzman out for a round of applause by the crowd.
Olshansky spoke about her work as assistant legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and of her time working at the Environmental Defense Fund, a group that works on environmental class-action suits.
Most of the speech was about what Olshansky sees as the erosion of civil rights in the US.
“On Sept. 10, 2001, we were already facing a very degraded civil rights structure in our country,” she said. The passage of the Patriot Act in 2001 is blamed by many for degradation, she said, but “when people say ‘how could this happen?’ I say that we were already moving in that direction. What came to congress less than six weeks after September 11th was a 1,500-page law [the Patriot Act] which is basically made up of every reactionary law that had ever been thrown out of congress in the last 20 years….To a person, almost no one had a chance to read it before they signed it.”
Olshansky also represents some families of men who were arrested and are now detained at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and other locations.
“Within a day of Sept. 11, we started getting calls from people who had had their doors broken down and their husbands, their brothers, taken by unidentified agents who left no identifying information,” she said. “They were kept in solitary confinement, in maximum-security conditions…interrogated without attorneys present…and were eventually released without being charged with any offence. They were detained this way for 22 months.
“No one has been charged, no one has any idea what they are being held for. They now know they are ‘enemy combatants’-I suppose they can try to guess what that means.
“It is an unbelievable arrogance,” she said. “It is clear to us now that not only is domestic law not going to be adhered to by the president and the executive branch, but neither will international law.”
After the speech, a questioner asked about the persistent rumours that continue to dog Olshansky’s client Maher Arar about ties to terrorist organizations.
“I have to say that’s the most nefarious kind of rumour-mongering,” responded Olshansky. “I think we really would have known about it a long time ago if there had been any evidence [of such ties]-the Department of Defense would have leaked it because they were taking such a black eye in the press.
“There is no pretence of process anymore where many of these cases are concerned.”
Olshansky said that Canada was having an impact, particularly by calling an official inquiry into the Arar case.
“The call in this country for some sort of transparency in government has been a prime source of embarrassment to our government,” she said.
Her only other advice closed the speech and got a big laugh: “What you can do is when you’re at the grocery store and you go up to someone and say ‘Do you know if this melon is ripe?’ instead say, ‘Do you know if this melon is ripe, and do you know what an asshole [US attorney-general] John Ashcroft is?'”
