see that this year’s Tipperary International Peace Award has posthumuously gone to former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. Condoleezza Rice will be pleased. Whether Maher Arar takes the same view, I wouldn’t know.
In previous years, the Tipp Peace Prize has variously gone to the good, the bad and the plug-ugly. John O’Shea of Goal took it one year. Also, the Tory businessman Sir Bob Geldof. And Bill Clinton, who once launched a no-warning bomb attack on a famine-stricken country to distract attention from a semen stain on a woman’s dress. Still, they gave it to Nelson Mandela one year, too.
What to make of Hariri, though? Hardly a name to conjure with in Tipperary, I’d have thought. Would he have made the grade if he hadn’t been assassinated?
Hariri was blown up in a car-bombing in Beirut in February last. Around 20 associates and passers-by also perished in the blast. During her recent trip to Europe, Secretary of State Rice spoke out against the killing. “Syria really has to be dealt with.” The murder could not be “left lying on the table.”
Rice wasn’t alone in fingering the Syrians. Hariri had been an ally of Syria when prime minister, but had more lately taken against the Syrian presence in his country. Most observers reckoned the Damascus regime of Bashir al-Assad had offed him as a warning to others. UN investigator Detlev Mehlis agreed, although he failed to come up with clear evidence. Or any evidence. Not that Rice would have required anything as mundane as evidence.
The Bush administration had long regarded Syria as a “rogue state” and accused it of facilitating the infiltration of Islamist terrorists into Iraq. US ambassador to the UN John Bolton had talked publicly about “taking out” Assad.
Syria has also been indicted by Amnesty International and other human rights NGOs - as well as by Rice’s State Department - for torturing political prisoners. Which is where Maher Arar comes in.
Arar is a 34-year-old Syrian-born Canadian engineer, who was arrested at JFK airport in New York in September 2002 when changing ‘planes with his family en route home from a holiday in Tunisia. He was held at the airport for 13 days and questioned about a suspected member of an Islamic group regarded by the US as terrorist. Arar says that he scarcely knew the man, but had worked for a time with his brother.
On the 14th day, Arar was put in handcuffs and leg irons by plainclothes US officials, driven in a van onto the tarmac and placed on board a private jet. The ‘plane flew to Washington, then to Portland, Maine, then to Rome, and finally landed in Amman in Jordan. He says he heard the crew identify themselves in radio conversations as members of “the Special Removal Unit.” From Amman, Arar was driven in chains on a 10-hour journey to Syria.
There, he says, “they just began beating on me.” He describes being whipped with two-inch-thick electrical cables, and kept for months in a windowless underground cell that he likened to a grave. “You forget the milk that you have been fed from the breast of your mother. You just give up. You become like an animal.”
In October 2003,13 months after his abduction, Arar was released, without charge and without explanation. The Canadian government had mounted a diplomatic offensive on his behalf.
Arar was lucky. He’s a white, middle-class, English-speaking citizen of a country with a government willing, on occasion, to stand up to the US on behalf of its citizens. Since his release, he has talked at length to journalists. He is now suing the US government.
If the case comes to court, we may hear how the US government explains handing over people it has kidnapped to a regime which its Secretary of State denounces as criminal and says will have to be “dealt with.”
Strangely enough, there is an explanation readily available. Its main author is a former deputy assistant US attorney general, John C. Yoo, who now teaches law at Berkeley. He argues that the US does not have to comply with the Geneva Conventions in handling prisoners captured in the course of the “war on terror,” since anyone indulging in terror is an “illegal combatant” and therefore not entitled to due process of law.
Yoo argued further, in an August 2002 memo to Bush, that pressure on a prisoner amounted to torture only if there was “conscious intent” to inflict suffering “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.”
“Conscious intent” was important: the fact that pain “equivalent in intensity etc.” might have been inflicted did not necessarily mean that a prisoner had been tortured. Perhaps the perpetrator had wrongly calibrated the degree of pain caused. So, if I were to stick a red hot poker up Professor Yoo’s arse, I would not necessarily be guilty of torture. Not according to Prof. Yoo.
Yoo told the New Yorker: “Why is it so hard for people to understand that there is a category of behaviour not covered by the legal system? What were pirates? They weren’t fighting on behalf of any nation. What were slave traders? Historically, there were people so bad that they were not given protection of the laws.”
Actually, there were and are laws against piracy and slave-trading, but we can let that pass. Yoo’s point was that if a particular category of people have no rights, then no law or principle can be breached in efforts to identify who fits into this category and in the treatment of such persons thereafter.
Thus, there is nothing at all that cannot be justified in the “war on terror.”
It is on this basis that the Bush administration can deny that the US uses or condones torture, and that Rice can justify handing people over to a regime which she simultaneously denounces as so murderous that it must be overthrown.
Like I say, I don’t know how the Tipperary Peace Prize Committee selected Rafik Hariri. By all accounts, he was no more or less corrupt than your average Lebanese political leader: to say which is not to diss the Lebanese people, but to refer to the nature of the conventional politics of the place. He had had no objection to the Ba’ath regime of the Assads when their interests coincided. In death, he became a symbol of opposition to Syria, at which point he became also a hero to pro-US elements in Lebanon.
The man was cruelly done to death. If the peace prize is intended as a statement against political killing, well and good. But I cannot help wondering whether it was the political identity of his presumed killers, rather than the fact of his killing, which earned him the accolade.
Is it too late for the committee to consider making Maher Arar joint winner?

Danny Cassidy’s book on the Irish-language roots of American slang will be published later this year. In the meantime...
Flunky. From: “Fulangaí, fulangaidhe (pron. Fulonkee)...A prop, a support, a long-suffering person; one who puts up with someone or something. (Dineen, p. 500; ODonaill, p. 594)”
Next: Wanker.b