[Brown:] It has to do with a Canadian citizen of Syrian extraction who found himself caught up in the American war on terrorism. From there for him the story quickly became a nightmare. Here's CNN's Susan Candiotti.
[Susan Candiotti, Cnn National Correspondent:] For ten months and ten days...
[Unidentified Male:] So for me that was a slow death process basically.
[Candiotti:] Syrian Canadian Mayer Irar maintains he was wrongfully held in a Syrian prison and tortured.
[Unidentified Male:] The cable is about one or two inches thick. It's that long and they say open your hands. I opened my right hand. He hit me very strongly and I was crying all the time.
[Candiotti:] Irar says the U.S. and Canada are to blame. The ordeal began a year ago September, 2002. Irar left a family vacation in Tunisia on his way home to Canada when U.S. immigration pulled him aside at JFK Airport.
[Unidentified Male:] They said it's a routine thing and they took my fingerprints, of course. They took some pictures and they kept telling me it's a routine thing until the FBI showed up.
[Candiotti:] Irar says the FBI showed him a six-year-old apartment lease that a brother of a coworker witnessed for him as a last minute favor.
[Unidentified Male:] For them that was an important document. For me it was something normal.
[Candiotti:] After hours of questioning Irar was shackled and taken to a federal detention center in Brooklyn.
[Unidentified Male:] They gave me two or three page document and in that they basically told me that they believe I'm a member of al Qaeda terrorist organization.
[Candiotti:] What did you think when you read it?
[Unidentified Male:] I was completely shocked because during the interrogations they did not tell me anything about that and I started crying and crying and crying and... We always had a sense that there was a terrible injustice at work here.
[Candiotti:] [Unintelligible] retired Canadian chief of consular affairs says the U.S. "stonewalled them for ten days about Irar's whereabouts." Party thought he would be sent home to Canada.
[Unidentified Male:] It was an American action to deport to Syria. I mean this is an action that was taken under American law and the legality or the legitimacy of that particular action now is under will be tested in the American courts which is quite appropriate.
[Candiotti:] From a small New Jersey airport, Irar shackled and chained was put on a private U.S. government jet bound for Syria.
[Unidentified Male:] It seems like Syria refused to take me directly. The reached a decision that I had to fly to Oman. They blindfolded me. They took me in what felt like a van and one or two minutes later just started beating me.
[Candiotti:] Then he was taken to Syria. [on camera]: They made you sign documents.
[Unidentified Male:] They forced me to make a false confession that I had been to a training camp in Afghanistan.
[Candiotti:] Why did you sign the documents?
[Unidentified Male:] I had no choice. I would be beaten again.
[Candiotti:] U.S. authorities tell CNN they did everything by the book and deported Irar based on information from Canada. Neither country will say exactly what that information was.
[Unidentified Male:] I reached a point where basically I was dying. I had nothing to lose.
[Candiotti:] The Canadians protested and Syria finally released him last month.
[Unidentified Male:] The Syrian government in its own statement subsequent to the release admitted that they had nothing.
[Candiotti:] Why did the U.S. put Mayer on a government jet to Syria via Jordan? So far neither Canada nor the U.S. can fully explain it. Until they do Mayer's lawyers say both countries will be held accountable for the torture he says he suffered. How has this changed you Mayer?
[Unidentified Male:] To brand someone with this word, to brand someone as a terrorist especially after 911 basically is to destroy this person's life.
[Candiotti:] Susan Candiotti, CNN, Ottawa.
[Brown:] A lot of difficult questions tonight, more now on the question of the prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay whether they do or don't fit in the criminal justice system. That's the question the Supreme Court decided to look at today. We're joined tonight by Dahlia Lithwick the court watcher for Slate.com, nice to see you again. Are you surprised the court took the case given that honestly courts really haven't given these guys down there the time of day to this point?
[Dahlia Lithwick, Slate.com:] I was a little bit surprised both because the Supreme Court has had other opportunities to review 911 cases and they have refused every time and also because the lower courts said the courts are going to stay out of it and that seems pretty consistent with what the Supreme Court would have liked. So, I would have thought they could have walked away from this and looked all right but, no, they want to get in the fray.
[Brown:] I want to talk about why they might want to get in the fray but tell me where the law is on this. What is the law the administration relies on here?
[Lithwick:] You know one of the complexities of this case, Aaron, is that we're sort of thinking back to the last time we had a big war and so the cases that we're talking about are World War II cases and the predominant one is a case from 1950 called Eisentrager. That was a case that the Bush administration says is directly on point. What happened was 21 German spies were caught after World War II in China spying for Japan if you followed all that and they were sent off. After a hearing on the merits they were tried and sent off to jail in Germany. They sought habeas corpus relief which is what the detainees in Guantanamo are seeking, essentially saying to the U.S. courts explain to us why you're holding us. Let us out and tell us why we're here. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1950 in that case said we don't have jurisdiction to hear this. You're in Germany. It has nothing to do with us. You're not American citizens. Appeal to some other court. This is not a U.S. problem and the Bush administration says that's exactly analogous to the situation here.
[Brown:] And is it exactly analogous to the situation here?
[Lithwick:] Well, the detainees' attorneys say no, it's not analogous for three big reasons. The first is that they're not from countries that are our enemies. They're not from anything that's like Germany in World War II. They're from Australia and Britain and Kuwait. They're our allies. Second of all there's never been any sort of hearing on the merits and that's their principal objection. The Eisentrager detainees had trials. These guys have never been told the charges against them. Third and maybe most importantly the distinction comes down to this funny shell game that we had about Guantanamo. Germany is Germany. Guantanamo seems to be in the control of the United States. Now the Bush administration says oh, no, no, no. We don't own it. We just lease it but the problem really is that the detainees they can't appeal to the Cuban courts, Cuba owns it, so who can they appeal to? The camp they say is in control of the United States. If they can't appeal to American federal courts for habeas relief there is no court open to them.
[Brown:] The analogy I'm about to draw is admittedly imperfect but I want to draw it anyway. Do you think that a sense of history comes into play where the court is concerned here that history may look at what the government is doing today quite differently than we do and the evidence of that, and here's the imperfect part, is the way history looks at the decision to intern Japanese Americans during World War II?
[Lithwick:] Oh, absolutely and I think there are never any accidents. These appeals to the Supreme Court always are carefully choreographed and among the petitions that have been filed in support of the detainees one of the signatories is Fred Korematsu. You may remember his name because he was the main plaintiff in that case where the Supreme Court said that the detention of Japanese Americans in World War II was in fact constitutional and permissible so his name involved here is very, very much a rebuke to the court. It sort of says you guys got it wrong and admitted sort of later that you got it wrong. Don't get it wrong again just in the name of deferring to the presidency in a time of war.
[Brown:] Given the court's history and its thinking do you have a feel for how this will play out?
[Lithwick:] You know they're sort of the on the horns of a dilemma here, Aaron. On the one hand this is a court that loves to be in the middle of things. This is a court that has no hesitation to jump into a presidential election, the affirmative action debate. This is a court that really truly believes that it knows better than the rest of us what should go on in this land. On the other hand this is also a court that is very, very deferential to the Executive Branch and the military, particularly during times of war so they have to make a very stark decision which is, is there a role for them in this and this court loves to have a role in everything but, at the same time, I think they have historically been very, very much in favor of letting the Executive Branch have its way during wartime.
[Brown:] Dahlia, good to see you. Thanks for working through this with me tonight.
[Lithwick:] Always a pleasure.
[Brown:] Thank you. A few more items here from around the country starting with the two sniper trials, two of them. The prosecution rested today in its case against John Muhammad. In another courtroom not far away, Mr. Muhammad's protege entered a plea. Lee Malvo pleaded not guilty. His attorneys say they will try to persuade a jury that their young client was so indoctrinated by Mr. Muhammad that he had no control over his actions. The jury selection, very preliminary, began today. Florida next and the case of Terry Schiavo, Governor Jeb Bush today appealed a lower court's ruling on a lawsuit challenging the state law that is keeping her alive. The court last week rejected his motion to dismiss the lawsuit which was filed on behalf of Ms. Schiavo's husband who, as you know, wants to take her off life support, feeding tube. And John Kerry has fired his campaign manager, the presidential contender replacing Jim Jordan with Mary Beth Cahill. "I just wanted to change the dynamics" said the Democratic Senator from Massachusetts whose campaign has been a bit of a struggle. Coming up on NEWSNIGHT a solution for the Iraq problem? One suggestion is a little more stick and a lot less carrot. We'll talk with the man who made that suggestion in a moment, take a break first. On CNN, this is NEWSNIGHT.