On August 9, 2012, former minister and deputy Michel Samaha was arrested on charges of plotting a terrorist act in North Lebanon. Given the overwhelming evidence for his involvement Samaha confessed to transporting explosives in his car from Damascus to his home in Ashrafieh. From his home he delivered the explosives to double agent Milad Kfoury who in turn was supposed to plant the explosives in determined locations in Tripoli and the Akkar region in collaboration with a terrorist group.

During his interrogation the detainee admitted to having had committed his crime out of the “unease” he felt towards Major General Ali Mamluk (Head of Syrian National Security Bureau). General Mamluk asked him to plan the operation and transport the explosives personally. He also contended that he simply "went along" with double agent Kfoury, and that despite having embarked upon the terrorist operation, such an act was not “of his own thinking”.

Accordingly, with “The Unease of Michel Samaha: An Intervention In A Court Case”, we seek to question theoretically, not legally, the relationship between the crime and the discourse of its perpetrator which, in Samaha's case, draws a straight line between the terrorist act and the so called unease. As such we needed to adopt a method to articulate this relationship as it was conveyed in the detainee's testimony. We used narration, comparison, and debate in order to look into the problem of the crime's objective status. More precisely, we used these forms (narration comparison and debate) to present our ideas in order to examine the proposition that the criminal committed his act as if hijacked by circumstances that were beyond him. Should we accept this proposition, which is criminality negated, and thus conclude that Samaha is not guilty?

Does Samaha's unease negate his criminality? In other words, does embarrassment nullify the guilt of perpetrating evil, or is it in itself the crime? But first, how did Samaha narrate his unease? Is it not possible to deduce the latter from the minutes of his interrogation, and consequently to establish "embarrassment / unease" as a narrative of innocence?

Through these questions and others we seek an appropriate resolution to the problem at hand: that of the crime of “unease”. We aim to connect "unease" to the “going along with” and the “no thinking”, the words Samaha repeated throughout his interrogation.