Sonia Sotomayor: Court TV

by Mark Silva

This isn't exactly "Judge Sonia.''

But it is video of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, a member of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals nominated by President Barack Obama to serve on the Supreme Court, questioning a government lawyer in the case of a Canadian citizen who was detained in New York City, suffered rendition to Syria and was tortured there.

Maher Arar, a Syrian-born, Canadian citizen was seized during a layover at Kennedy International Airport in September 2002, changing planes on his way home to Canada. Suspected of ties to al Qaeda, he was held in solitary for two weeks and interrogated before the government sent him to Syria.

He was imprisoned for nearly a year in an underground cell and tortured before the Syrians released him.

Contending that his rights were violated when he was confined without access to an attorney, both domestically and in Syria, Arar is seeking civil damages from federal officials, including former Attorney General John Ashcroft.

In 2007, the Canadian government offered him a formal apology and compensation, but the Bush administration argued that, for reasons of national security, the case should never have been allowed to go to trial. The Canadian press reported in April that Arar, a computer engineer, remains on a U.S. watch list and still is barred from entry to the United States.

A three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 in June 2008 that the federal courts lacked jurisdiction to here Arar's case. All 12 judges of the court sat to hear an appeal of that ruling on Dec. 9, and Sotomayor took part by video conference.

The clip from C-SPAN's video library shows Sotomayor's questioning of the government's lawyer in December, with the judge pressing the attorney on the matter of torture and national security. Like everything else emerging in the first few days of the Sotomayor nomination, it's an excerpt from a much larger story.