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Michael Ignatieff, the new leader of Canada's Liberal Party has been described as a political chameleon . Writes Michael Valpy : But who is Michael Ignatieff really? Is he the pinkish liberal who champions human rights and carries Pierre Trudeau's torch for social justice? Or is he the conservative realist who embraced George W. Bush's attack on Iraq and flirted with the notion that torture could be acceptable? I wonder if Ignatieff's 2004 book, The Lesser Evil , should instead have been titled Maybe Torture's Like, Ok? But one thing's for sure—as a reviewer on Amazon.com put it—Ignatieff is "fuzzy on the whole 'good-bad' thing." For a commentary on torture minus the fuzziness, see this 2003 editorial from the British Medical Journal. The subtitle puts things in focus: Torture is a form of terrorism: there are no justifications for it

The other day, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee and the topic of Maher Arar (shown at left, with his daughter) came up. In case you haven't heard his story, here's a quick summary courtesy of Wikipedia : Maher Arar is a Syrian-born Canadian software engineer. On 26 September 2002, during a stopover in New York en route from Tunis to Montreal, Arar was detained by the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service who may have been acting upon false and misleading information supplied by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Despite carrying a Canadian passport, he was deported to Syria in accordance with a U.S. policy known as "extraordinary rendition." Arar was held in solitary confinement in a Syrian prison where he was regularly tortured for almost a year, until his eventual release and return to Canada in October 2003. Appearing before the Committee, Gonzales wouldn't explain why the U.S. detained Arar a...