Syria was a major US ally against Al Qaeda--until 2002, anyway.

[eridani]

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030728fa_fact

American intelligence and State Department officials have told me that by early 2002 Syria had emerged as one of the C.I.A.’s most effective intelligence allies in the fight against Al Qaeda, providing an outpouring of information that came to an end only with the invasion of Iraq.

“There is no security relationship now,” a Syrian foreign-ministry official told me. “It saddens us as much as it saddens you. We could give you information on organizations that we don’t think should exist. If we help you on Al Qaeda, we are helping ourselves.” He added, almost plaintively, that if Washington had agreed to discuss certain key issues in a back channel, “we’d have given you more. But when you publicly try to humiliate a country it’ll become stubborn.”

[eridani]

1. To the extent that they used to torture people for us as well

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/020905M.shtml

In the fall of 2002 Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, suddenly found himself caught up in the cruel mockery of justice that the Bush administration has substituted for the rule of law in the post-Sept. 11 world. While attempting to change planes at Kennedy Airport on his way home to Canada from a family vacation in Tunisia, he was seized by American authorities, interrogated and thrown into jail. He was not charged with anything, and he never would be charged with anything, but his life would be ruined.

Mr. Arar was surreptitiously flown out of the United States to Jordan and then driven to Syria, where he was kept like a nocturnal animal in an unlit, underground, rat-infested cell that was the size of a grave. From time to time he was tortured.

He wept. He begged not to be beaten anymore. He signed whatever confessions he was told to sign. He prayed.

The Justice Department has alleged, without disclosing any evidence whatsoever, that Mr. Arar is a member of, or somehow linked to, Al Qaeda. If that's so, how can the administration possibly allow him to roam free? The Syrians, who tortured him, have concluded that Mr. Arar is not linked in any way to terrorism.

Whatever may have happened in Canada, nothing can excuse the behavior of the United States in this episode. Mr. Arar was deliberately dispatched by U.S. officials to Syria, a country that - as they knew - practices torture. And if Canadian officials hadn't intervened, he most likely would not have been heard from again.

Mr. Arar is the most visible victim of the reprehensible U.S. policy known as extraordinary rendition, in which individuals are abducted by American authorities and transferred, without any legal rights whatever, to a regime skilled in the art of torture. The fact that some of the people swallowed up by this policy may in fact have been hard-core terrorists does not make it any less repugnant.

[Hubert Flottz]

2. Syria had some experts like the CIA had training their torture experts

Alois Brunner

SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Alois Brunner was born in Austria in 1912 and joined the Austrian Nazi Party in 1931 at the age of 19. His anti-Semitism was considered to be so extreme that he was swiftly tapped to be Adolf Eichmann’s private secretary. As head of the Nazi’s Jewish affairs office in prewar Vienna, he organized persecution that forced thousands of Jews to flee to other European countries and the United States.

When World War II started, he sent 47,000 Austrian Jews to concentration camps. After organizing mass roundups in Berlin, he transferred to Greece, where he was responsible for deporting all 43,000 Jews in Salonika within just two months.

In June 1943, he was sent to France to take over the Drancy transit camp near Paris from its French administrators. During 14 months in France, Brunner sent an estimated 25,000 men, women and children to their deaths.

SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Brunner transported the children of Izieu to Auschwitz. One of the most wanted of all war criminals, Brunner was responsible for the killing of thousands of Jews.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Brunner.html

Bushco/Reagan/Arnold's kind of guy!