EDITOR REQUIRED

Journalist and author Antony Loewenstein's name would set off the "rewrite" alarm in the brain of any experienced editor. It's therefore hard to understand how such a poorly written book review (ironic ain't it?) made it past the Age's editors:

One prisoner was Maher Arar, a Canadian wireless technician who was returning home after a family holiday in Tunisia. During a brief stopover in New York, he was detained by immigration officials and suspected of having links to al-Qaeda. He was spirited out of the country by US officials to Syria, in a covert agreement between the two countries. Syria soon realised that he had no terrorist links, but not before he suffered unimaginable torture for nearly a year.

The US has refused to even acknowledge its deliberate policy of sending a suspect to a country it knows practises torture. In late January, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a formal apology to Arar and offered multimillion-dollar compensation. It was a rare moment of decency in a war that is light-years away from the “liberty agenda” espoused by George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard.

Now there's some IQ lowering crap if ever I've seen it. Arar was, by the way, detained and rendered at the behest of the Canadian government.