Govn't's mudslinging apology to Arar
01.29.07 (11:32 pm) [edit]I heard Steven Harper apologizing to Maher Arar on the radio the other day. In the typical mudslinging style, popular with the Tories these days, they took the advantage to point out that the Liberals are to blame for Arar's ordeal, since this happened on their watch. To his credit, of what I heard, that was the only mention of something negative and uncontrite.
This reminds me of a comment made by Rex Murphy about Bill Clinton's apology from way back when Y2K was the 2nd biggest thing in the news. He compared it against Martin Luther King Jr's "dream" speech, or JRK's "do for your country" speech, wherein both had the nation's attention, and had the opportunity to rail against their opponents. This was a moment for either great healing or great hurting for the nation. MLK and JRK went for healing, but Rex felt Clinton wasted the moment on a relatively petty matter. I may have forgotten the finer points of his commentary, but at the time I didn't really agree that Clinton was all that opportunistic or scathing. I'd say that about Harper. For those of you who don't know, Maher Arar is a Syrian-born Canadian who was the victim of overzealous anti-terrorist intelligence gathering by the Americans and Canadians. CSIS informed the Americans that Arar was suspected of being an Al-Qaeda operative, so he was out-sourced to Syria where he was tortured. This decent, hard-working, family man's link to Al-Qaeda turned out to be completely vacuous, but none of that mattered to the Syrians, and in the end, Arar was awarded 10M$ in a settlement for his troubles. So, after all the work that appointed civil servants did (such as the Arar inquiry) our top elected official was placed in a situation where all eyes were on him for the moment, and I've already explained what he did about it.
One of my favourite mudslinging apologies was by Alexa McDonough, way back when Clinton was nothing more to us than a liberal disaster waiting to happen (i.e. the beginning of his presidency). She was called upon to apologize for the snide remarks someone in her party made in applying Nazi images to the Reform Party. She started off with an explicit appology, but then immediately went into the possible causes for the remarks, and just how Reform could have provoked it. The news piece was cut short before she finished. It was the depths of the recession, we needed any excuse to make outrageous accusations, like that of Nazism.