FORMER Labor Secretary Ray Donovan, who held the job under President Ronald Reagan, was extensively investigated for mob links while he was in office.

He was cleared of all charges after a nasty public fight. When the announcement was made Donovan asked a simple question. ” Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?”

Sean O Muireagain, 42, the Belfast political activist arrested in Israel earlier this month and later released without charge, may well make the same plea following a spate of media reports worldwide that linked him to the Real IRA and a massive international terrorist conspiracy.

The story was utter baloney, but was still referred to as being a fact, even this past weekend. The old adage that a lie will go halfway around the world while the truth is just pulling on his boots is very true in this matter.

The New York Times, which appears to be apologizing for everything these days, issued no retraction of their inflammatory headline about an Irishman arrested on terrorism charges. 

Worse, in the middle of the story the International Herald Tribune, owned by the Times, recited a litany of “offenses” O Muireagain was alleged to have committed. The Tribune reporter, Tom O’Dwyer in Israel, went on a major media offensive trumpeting what an amazing coup his arrest was.

In fact is seemed like the whole thing was cooked up by British intelligence just before Ariel Sharon’s visit to Britain, a tip of the cap if you like, giving Sharon a coup on his arrival in London that his forces had captured a major international terrorist.

O Muireagain (John Morgan in English) instead turns out to be a journalist, Irish language devotee and peace activist whose only crime was to try to set up links between schools in Belfast and the West Bank, where schoolchildren have been horribly traumatized by the intifida and the Israeli response.

He had the misfortune to share the same name as a former leading IRA activist who has dropped from sight, according to authorities, and in recent times is suspected of joining a splinter IRA group.

British Intelligence – that is a term that is beginning to look like an oxymoron, both in Iraq and Northern Ireland – tipped off Israeli authorities that a major terrorist was on the way when O Muireagain decided to visit the West Bank.

What happened to him once he landed there was everyone’s worst nightmare. The Shin Beth, the Israeli FBI, pulled his car over on a highway between Bethlehem and Ramallah and stripped him of all his clothes in the middle of the road. They blindfolded and handcuffed him and marched him off to a nearby prison.

Once there they shackled his feet and placed a ski mask over his head and began an intensive interrogation. Anywhere from two to five people kept up a relentless questioning.

O Muireagain says he never knew where he was being kept, that his cell light was kept on 24 hours a day and that he was interrogated for hours at a time.

He was forced to sleep on a wafer-thin foam mattress, more or less lying on a hard concrete floor. If he nodded off asleep they woke him after less than an hour.

Totally disorientated, O Muireagain was asked to confess to a number of major terrorist offenses and to state that his real reason in coming to the Middle East was to train the Palestinians in bomb making.

He says the interrogators were able to reveal details about his family and friends which would only be known to very few people. Obviously, he thinks, British intelligence had been keeping tabs on him for years.

Finally, Shin Beth realized it was all a horrible mistake and they released him with apologies. They told him it was all the fault of the British who had given them misleading information. Israeli radio announced his innocence and shortly afterwards he was on his way home.

O Muireagain may well have been a casualty of an inter-agency war between MI5 and MI6 according to some media reports. In that scenario, MI5 had fingered the wrong man for years, and MI6, who knew the truth, never enlightened them. Because there is now a major scramble on between the two agencies for scarce resources, anything that embarrasses one side greatly helps the other.

O Muireagain now intends to sue all those newspapers that bandied around his name and linked him to international terrorism on a grand scale. The seriousness of such charges cannot be underestimated after September 11.

In fact he is a very lucky man. If he were an innocent Palestinian he might never have been freed. Now that he is home safe, let’s hope next time the international media is not so quick to brand someone else with such libels until they have definitive proof.