When Maher Arar arrived at New York’s JFK airport in 2002, he was only supposed to change planes and continue his journey from visiting relatives in Tunisia back to his home in Canada. But the routine layover was a fateful one: while briefly on U.S. soil, Arar was snatched by authorities, kept incommunicado and away from lawyers for two weeks, then shipped to Syria. Arar endured a year of captivity and alleged torture at the hands of the brutal Syrian regime. Now, after the Canadian government formally apologized to him five years ago, rights groups are demanding that the U.S. do the same.

Three American groups that oppose torture — the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, Amnesty International USA, and the Center For Constitutional Rights — delivered a petition with 60,000 signatures to the White House this week demanding an apology.

In 2007, the Canadian government admitted Arar had been mistakenly pinpointed as an Al Qaeda ally, apologized, and compensated him.

President Obama ended the “extraordinary rendition” program in 2009 and Politifact noted that the Obama administration “has announced new procedural safeguards concerning individuals who are sent to foreign countries” but some rights groups claim those safeguards aren’t adequate.

Citing the requirement for “remedy and redress” in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the U.N. Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment — which prohibits knowingly transferring detainees to countries, like Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, that engage in torture — the letter campaign (PDF) asked signees to themselves apologize and then demand the U.S. do the same. An Amnesty press release said:

“It was so painful,” Maher Arar said of the beatings he endured, “that I forgot every enjoyable moment in my life.”

Released without charge and allowed to return home to Canada, Maher Arar received an apology and compensation from the Canadian government for its role in his treatment. But the U.S. government has failed to apologize or offer Maher Arar any form of remedy – despite its obligation to do so under the UN Convention Against Torture and other human rights treaties.

The letter campaign emphasized that additional steps need to be taken for accountability in the Arar case, including more explicit prohibitions on transfer, not relying only on diplomatic assurances about the treatment of detainees before transfers, ending discrimination in “no fly lists” and investigating and prosecuting those who broke the law.

Amnesty also released an infographic — using a mock-up of Arar’s 3-foot-wide, 7-foot-high and 6-foot-deep Syrian cell — highlighting the numbers around his detention: 12 days of incommunicado detention in the U.S., 351 in Syria while enduring torture, and 0 charges filed against Arar. However, there is no figure for the “number of people like Maher Arar subjected to the U.S. government’s ‘extraordinary rendition’ program.” That number? The Amnesty infographic boldly states, “UNKNOWN.”

It’s now well known that after President Obama’s re-election campaign released a video wondering whether Mitt Romney would have ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden (given that Romney said in 2008 that he would not), Romney’s push back has been that it was a no-brainer. “Any thinking American would have ordered exactly the same thing,” he says.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who led the Pentagon at the time of the raid, and Vice President Biden said they advised Obama against the raid. And during a portion of an interview with Charlie Rose that aired on CBS This Morning yesterday, Gates said that “people don’t realize” how tough the decision was. PBS aired the full interview last night and Gates expounded on the consequences, saying a failed raid could have been “catastrophic” militarily and might have cost Obama re-election.

Rose then wondered if “any thinking American,” as Romney put it, would have made the same decision as Obama:

ROSE: Nobody can say “I would have made the same decision.” You don’t really know until you’re in the room and you listen to what the best people you know say to you and then you have to go as president and decide.

GATES: Right, absolutely.

Watch the clip:

Later in the interview, Gates, a Republican holdover from the Bush administration, also disagreed with Romney’s contention that Russia is American’s “number one geopolitical foe.”

“Do you agree with Governor Romney that Russia is our principal adversary or how he’s characterized the national security issue?,” Rose asked. “No, I don`t think so,” Gates replied.

Yesterday, a federal judge in Manhattan struck down a portion of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), ruling in favor of a group of activists, journalists and writers who say the act puts them in danger of indefinite military detention for activities including news reporting on terrorist organizations and political activism.

U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest found that a section of the NDAA which gives the government powers to regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists could be used against journalists, scholars and activists to curtail their first amendment rights. The judge’s opinion [PDF] found:

The statute at issue places the public at undue risk of having their speech chilled for the purported protection from al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and ‘associated forces’ – i.e., ‘foreign terrorist organizations.’ The vagueness of Section 1021 does not allow the average citizen, or even the government itself, to understand with the type of definiteness to which our citizens are entitled, or what conduct comes within its scope.

Opponents of the law, which include Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times journalist Christopher Hedges, contend that the law permits the detention of U.S. citizens and permanent residents taken into custody in the U.S. who are suspected of providing “substantial support” to people or organizations engaged in violence against the U.S., such as al Qaeda. Journalists testified that they feared their associations with certain individuals overseas, as part of reporting assignments, could result in their arrest or even indefinite detention.

“An individual could run the risk of substantially supporting or directly supporting an associated force without even being aware that he or she was doing so,” the judge said. She also said the law gave the government the ability to detain individuals who engage in political speech that “may be extreme and unpopular” but “That, however, is precisely what the First Amendment protects.”

Hedges testified that while, in the past, he had interviewed al Qaeda members, spoken with members of the Taliban and reported on 17 groups named on the State Department’s list of known terrorist organizations, the law has forced him to consider altering speeches where a member of al Qaeda and the Taliban might attend.

Hedges celebrated the ruling, telling ABC News, “Ever since the law has come out, and because the law is so amorphous, the problem is you’re not sure what you can say, what you can do and what context you can have,” and called Forrest’s ruling “a tremendous step forward for the restoration of due process and the rule of law.”

Mitt Romney said during his 2008 presidential campaign that he would not act unilaterally to kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and the U.S. should not “move heaven and earth” to find him. But now, Romney says “of course” he would have done what President Obama did last year in ordering the raid that killed bin Laden at a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. “Any thinking American would have ordered exactly the same thing,” Romney said earlier this month. (Vice President Biden and then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a Republican holdover from the Bush administration, actually advised against the raid.)

Romney has assumed that Obama was assured of bin Laden’s presence at the compound and all he had to do was give the order to get him. But as Gates (and others) has noted, “There wasn’t any direct evidence that he was there. It was all circumstantial.” The former defense secretary expounded on the difficulty surrounding Obama’s decision this morning during an interview on CBS This Morning, particularly regarding the lack of information on bin Laden’s presence at the compound, and the ramifications if the raid failed or bin Laden wasn’t there:

ROSE: What were your concerns?

GATES: I had no doubts that the SEALs could perform the mission. My concern was whether or not he was there. People don’t realize that what made the decision tough for the president was we didn’t have once single piece of hard data that he was actually in that compound. Not one. The whole thing was a circumstantial case built by analysts at CIA.

ROSE: There was no single person who could tell you he was in that building. No single person had seen him in that building.

GATES: Right. The crux of the decision revolved less about the efficacy of the military piece of it than the consequences for us if he wasn’t there in terms of the relationship with Pakistan, in terms of the war in Afghanistan. … But I’ve always thought that it was a very courageous call. If this mission had failed, it could have put the war in Afghanistan at risk and that was one of my principle concerns.

Watch the clip:

Romney doesn’t really know much about the raid that killed bin Laden, at least that’s the sentiment he displays in public. But perhaps that’s because, as one of his foreign policy advisers has said, Romney “doesn’t want to really engage these issues until he is in office.”

The New York Times published two articles this weekend highlighting the disarray that is Mitt Romney’s foreign policy positions. Romney not only appears “out of touch,” for example, on his Russia policy and “all over the map” on the war in Afghanistan, but also, the former Massachusetts governor has demonstrated a “perplexing pattern,” the Times reported, of being at odds with many of his own foreign policy advisers.

Moreover, seeming to concede President Obama’s dominance of national security issues this campaign season, a Romney adviser told the Times that Romney isn’t interested in talking about foreign policy. “Romney doesn’t want to really engage these issues until he is in office,” the adviser said.

And there’s good reason. Romney’s inexperience on foreign policy and national security issues has dogged his campaign with confusion, ignorance and private and public disagreements among Romney’s campaign advisers and surrogates:

AFGHANISTAN

Romney has been “all over the map” on Afghanistan. As the Washington Post reported late last year, Romney “has not explained what he thinks the U.S. mission in Afghanistan is at this point and what would constitute success.” And keeping with his adviser’s above statement, Romney said in a major foreign policy speech that he’d wait until becomes president to “order a full review of our transition to the Afghan military.”

Romney also says that the U.S. should not be negotiating with the Taliban, a position that puts him at odds with his top national security campaign surrogate Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), his own advisers and even former top Bush administration officials. “Romney’s supporters and foreign policy advisers argue that after a decade at war, the only option is a political settlement,” the Times noted.

IRAN

Romney said that if Obama is re-elected, Iran will get a nuclear weapon. “If you elect me as president, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon,” he said. That line “caused some of his advisers to cringe” the Times reported this weekend. But overall, again, Romney has no real policy on Iran that differs much from the current administration’s approach. Romney has proposed much of what Obama is already doing. The Times noted that “when pressed on how, exactly, his strategy would differ from Mr. Obama’s, Mr. Romney had a hard time responding.”

But Romney does occasionally ramp up bellicose rhetoric on Iran which prompted a former Israeli Mossad director to say the former Massachusetts governor “is making the situation worse” with Iran. Romney has ignored what the IAEA, U.S. and Israeli intelligence think about Iran’s nuclear program and his campaign advisers even attacked the Obama administration for public discussion of the consequences of attacking Iran.

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Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney doesn’t seem to understand the myriad considerations that went into President Obama’s decision to carry out the special operations raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. An ad put out by the Obama re-election campaign highlighting the president’s decision to strike into Pakistani territory to kill Bin Laden sparked a furor by questioning whether Romney would have made the same call.

Since the ad appeared, Romney, his surrogates, and so-called independent groups like the nouvelle swift-boaters have all rehashed the same dubious line in Romney’s defense: That any American president (or “any thinking American“) would have ordered the bin Laden raid. Just last night on Sean Hannity’s Fox News Channel show, Romney yet again issued this defense:

ROMNEY: But if the president wants to remind people of his decision, well, that’s entirely appropriate. But I think it was a big mistake for the president to try to make in this a political event by suggesting that I would not have done the same thing. I mean, frankly, Sean, almost any American in the position of presidency hearing that Osama bin Laden could have been taken out would have certainly pressed the button and said: get rid of the guy.

HANNITY: Oh, absolutely.

ROMNEY: And of course I would have.

Watch the video:

However, Romney and his allies’ repeated responses to the ad that “any thinking American” would have ordered the raid don’t account for the actual events surrounding Obama’s call.

Romney assumes that Obama was 100 percent sure bin Laden was at the compound in Pakistan. However, the intelligence was far from certain:

“There wasn’t any direct evidence that he was there. It was all circumstantial.” — Robert Gates

“The circumstantial case of Iraq having WMD (weapons of mass destruction) was actually stronger than the circumstantial case that bin Laden is living in the Abbottabad compound.” — CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell

“Ultimately, it was a 50/50 proposition as to whether this was actually bin Laden.” — President Obama

Romney thinks that anyone would have ordered the raid based on his assumption that bin Laden’s whereabouts were known. In fact, Vice President Biden and Robert Gates opposed a special operations assault that the president ultimately decided on, particularly because of uncertainty as to whether bin Laden was at the compound.

Romney claimed that “we haven’t heard all the different military options there were” for the bin Laden raid. But various reports have outlined a number of courses of action Obama could have taken. “Most were variations of either a JSOC raid or an airstrike. Some versions included cooperating with the Pakistani military; some did not,” the New Yorker reported.

In an analogous choice in 2005, George W. Bush and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld decided not to strike at senior Al Qaeda commanders in Pakistan because of the potential risk to relations with the notoriously sensitive country. When Obama said in his first presidential campaign that he would strike in Pakistan to get bin Laden, McCain criticized him as irresponsible. Romney echoed this concern when he said in August 2007, “I do not concur in the words of Barack Obama in a plan to enter an ally of ours.”