Oh hey, remember when the CIA sent people to Assad's prisons?

In 2002, Maher Arar, a dual Canadian-Syrian citizen flew to John F. Kennedy airport after visiting family in Tunisia. He was on his way to Canada. He was detained, sent to Jordan, then Syria.

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After Al-Assad’s ouster Syrians rushed to the streets to celebrate and also rushed to the notorious Sednaya prison hoping to find their loved ones. Or, if not that, at least some sign of what may have happened to them. A woman desperately shoved a photo of her son at strangers begging to know if they had seen him, reports NYT. Men slammed at the floors with pickaxes, convinced there were cells holding people underneath.

The New York Times:

Tens of thousands of people were crammed into the overcrowded cells, tortured, beaten and deprived of food and water. More than 30,000 detainees were killed, many executed in mass hangings, according to rights groups. Amnesty International called Sednaya a “human slaughterhouse.”

Well, the United States of America sent not only Arar but multiple suspects to human slaughterhouses in the early aughts. Arar was beaten and tortured for a year. After he was released, the Canadian government said “sorry about that” but the U.S. government never admitted culpability.

I’ve wondered why more people aren’t talking about it in light of the gruesome discoveries in the Syrian prisons.

Then I figured, the CIA rendition program has been memory-holed, right? How would a 20-year-old know about it? And I can see a #resistance Boomer conveniently forgetting about it after W. shared a candy and a laugh with Michelle Obama and due to the fact that he’s not Donald Trump.

It’s elderly millenials, screaming into the void, after being politicized by the “War on Terror,” in our 20s, that Trump never did anything as bad as W. If an international rules-based order, instead of cynical impotence, existed, CIA officials who took part in renditions and DUBYA would be at the Hague. Oh well.