On "The
New Greater Zionist-Controlled Middle East", as
designed by America and Israel Mehlis: covering up
US and Israeli espionage,Whitewashing the Hariri
assassination
[...... As early as 1996, before
their current government posts, David Wurmser, Vice
President Dick Cheneys Middle East adviser; Douglas
Feith, Undersecretary of Defence for Policy; and Richard
Perle, former Defence Policy Board Chairman, co-authored
a report for then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu calling for a plan to contain,
destabilize, and roll-back Israels rivals.
Among its recommendations were removing Saddam
Hussein from power in Iraq along with
striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and
should that prove insufficient, striking at select
targets in Syria proper.
In
2000, Wurmser, Feith and Perle joined up with Paula
Dobriansky, Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs;
Elliot Abrams, National Security Council Senior Director
for the Middle East; and Michael Rubin, Pentagon adviser
on Iraq; to sign a report by the Middle East Forum
advocating the use of force against Syria to
disarm its weapons of mass destruction and withdraw its
troops from Lebanon. If there is to be decisive
action, it will have to be sooner rather than
later.
Such
grand designs are very much alive in current
administration policy. In her testimony before the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee on 19th October, Condoleeza
Rice confirmed that the administrations strategy
after 9/11 had always been to redesign the Middle East.
Iraq was merely the first step in that broader strategy.
According
to Syria expert Joshua Landis, an assistant professor in
Middle East Studies at Oklahoma University currently on a
Fulbright Scholarship in Damascus, informed sources
confirmed that Steven Hadley, the director of the
US National Security Council, called the President of the
Italian senate to ask if he had a candidate to replace
Bashar al-Asad as President of Syria. Regime
change, the end-goal of US policy in Syria, has been lent
a new lease of life by the politics of the Hariri
assassination. ]
Nafeez Mosaddeq
Ahmed is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy
Research & Development, London, United
Kingdom. He teaches courses in political theory,
international relations and contemporary history at the
School of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies,
University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom. He is the
author of "The
War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked,
September 11, 2001" and "Behind
the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the
Struggle for Iraq". His latest book is "The
War On Truth: 9/11, Disinformation And The Anatomy Of
Terrorism". He is a regular contributor to Media Monitors Network
(MMN)
and his articles are archived at nafeez.mediamonitors.net.Send feedback
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/22038
UN's Mehlis report
discredited ::
International espionage over Syria? :: by Nafeez Mosaddeq
Ahmed (Friday October 28 2005)
"Detlev
Mehlis role in the investigation into the La Belle
bombing raises disturbing questions about his role in the
investigation of the assassination of Hariri. As Berlin
public prosecutor, Mehlis inadvertently but consistently
covered up the dubious involvement of US, Israeli and
German intelligence interests in the 1986 terrorist
attack; actively built a selective politically-motivated
case against suspects without objective material proof;
while ignoring and protecting a group of suspects with
documented connections to western secret services. This
background fundamentally challenges the credibility of
his investigation of the Hariri assassination."
The Bush and
Blair governments have rallied together on the back of
the new UN report, released last Friday, into the
assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik
Hariri, drumming up international pressure on Syria.
President Bush and Secretary of State Rice, along with
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, called for urgent Security
Council action in response to the reports findings
that Syrian military intelligence officials were behind
the plot.
Man behind the
report
But the
background of the UN reports author, Detlev Mehlis
- Commissioner of the UN International Independent
Investigation Commission into the Hariri assassination
raises disturbing questions about the integrity of
the UN investigation, and indeed about the wider role and
motives of the US and British governments.
Mehlis is
currently Senior Public Prosecutor in the Office of the
Attorney General in Berlin, and has prosecuted numerous
terrorism and organized crime cases including most
prominently the 1982 bombing of the La Belle Discotheque
in West Berlin. That terrorist attack was promptly blamed
by the Reagan administration on Libya, justifying the US
bombing of the Libyan cities of Tripoli and Benghazi,
killing at least 30 civilians including children.
Concocting
evidence
The immediate
evidence used to blame Libya consisted of alleged
National Security Agency intercepts of coded exchanges
between Tripoli and the East Berlin Libyan Peoples Bureau
saying We have something that will make you
happy, and another after the bombing: An
event occurred. You will be pleased with the
result. But according to former Israeli
intelligence colonel Victor Ostrovsky in his sworn
testimony for the Lockerbie trial, Mossad commandos had
set up the transmitter in Tripoli generating false telex
signals about the success of the Berlin bomb.
The intercepts had been concocted by Mossad, he said.
German TV
reveals all
An
investigation by German public televisions Zweites
Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) broadcast on 25th August 1998
reported that several leading suspects in the Berlin
disco bombing were being protected from prosecution by
western intelligence services. These included a group of
terrorists led by Mahmoud Abu Jaber, a man
particularly involved in the preparation of the La
Belle attack. The group lived in East Berlin and
met almost daily with the official suspects who were
defendants in the court proceedings. According to Russian
and East German intelligence services, the group worked
for western intelligence.
KGB and Stassi
files
KGB files
reviewed by reporter John Goetz in the Spring 1996
edition of Covert Action Quarterly revealed that Abu
Jaber was a CIA informer. Indeed, one KGB report
documented a meeting between Abu Jaber and his CIA
handler two days before the La Belle bombing. Abu Jaber
apparently told his handler that the price of the bombing
would be $30,000. Colonel Frank Weigand, who defected
from the Stassi (East German police), recounted a
conversation between a Berlin official involved in the La
Belle investigation and a high-ranking West German
intelligence officer. The Berlin investigator told his
West German colleague: Well, when I add it all up,
I think the Yanks did this thing themselves. Even
the German role is questionable. According to the German
Law Journal, two of the defendants charged as
conspirators in the bombing, Ali Chanaa and Verene
Chanaa, were agents of the East German Ministry of State
Security since 1982, responsible for gathering
intelligence on Arabs in West Berlin.
Mehlis:
covering up US and Israeli espionage
One man in
particular, Mohammed Amairi - Abu Jabers right-hand
man - was according to his own laywer Odd Drevland an
agent for the Israeli Mossad, revealed the German TV
documentary. After fleeing to Norway, Amairi was
arrested and investigated. According to Drevland,
however, Mossad quickly got involved and everything
changed Amairi was granted asylum. Detlev
Mehlis as Berlin public prosecutor lifted the German
police warrant against him.
The ZDF
broadcast also found that the lead suspect in the 1986
Berlin disco bombing, Yasser Chraidi found guilty
by a German court in June 2004 was scapegoated by
American and German authorities. Former public prosecutor
Mounif Oueidat and his deputy Mrad Azoury independently
confirmed that German authorities had fabricated evidence
to secure Chraidis extradition from Lebanon in May
1996. On 9th September, a Berlin judge concluded the
prosecutions case was so weak that Chraidi ought to
be released in the absence of further evidence.
On the same
day, Berlin public prosecutor Detlev Mehlis teamed up
with Berlin police inspector Uwe Wilhelms and an official
from the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) in
Malta, where they met with another key terrorist suspect
Musbah Eter, who had worked for the Libyan embassy in
East Berlin at the time of the bombing. According to
German interrogation transcripts, Eter confessed to
having delivered the bombs operating instructions
to another defendant.
Eter, who was
already wanted by the Germans on a charge of murder,
reportedly ran
an international business as cover for regional CIA
intelligence collection operations. Mehlis and his
colleagues struck a deal for Eter at the meeting. If he
testified against Chraidi for the La Belle bombing, the
Germans would grant him immunity. On 10th September, Eter
testified to the German embassy in Malta and Mehlis
deleted his warrant, allowing him to travel to Germany.
Eventually, however, Mehlis went back on his word. Eter
was convicted for 12 years as an accomplice in the
bombing.
Whitewashing
the Hariri assassination?
Detlev
Mehlis role in the investigation into the La Belle
bombing raises disturbing questions about his role in the
investigation of the assassination of Hariri. As Berlin
public prosecutor, Mehlis inadvertently but consistently
covered up the dubious involvement of US, Israeli and
German intelligence interests in the 1986 terrorist
attack; actively built a selective politically-motivated
case against suspects without objective material proof;
while ignoring and protecting a group of suspects with
documented connections to western secret services. This
background fundamentally challenges the credibility of
his investigation of the Hariri assassination.
An electronic
version of Mehlis report for the UN commission sent
to various media outlets identifies Maher Assad, brother
of the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and their
brother-in-law Asef Shawkat, the chief of military
intelligence, along with three others, as the key alleged
conspirators behind the plot. Yet Mehlis cites as his
source for these officials names the crux of
his reports allegations - a single anonymous Syrian
living in Lebanon purportedly in contact with Syrian
officers posted there. Explaining why the names were
removed in the version transmitted to the Security
Council, Mehlis noted the importance of the
presumption of innocence, since the entire
accusation of Syrian government culpability boiled down
to only one anonymous source. It could give the
wrong impression that this was an established fact,
he cautioned.
Indeed, UN
sources cited by the respected German newsmagazine Der
Spiegel on 22nd October identified Mehlis central
source as Zuheir al-Siddiq, a criminal convicted of fraud
and embezzlement, who had clearly lied in his testimony,
contradicting himself several times. At first, sources
said, he claimed to have left Beirut in the month prior
to the assassination of Hariri. In late September,
however, he went so far as to admit involvement in the
assassination. According to his brother, al-Siddiq was
paid a substantial amount by an unidentified third party
for his testimony for the Mehlis report. Sources within
the UN Commission investigating the Hariri assassination
also said that Mehlis had made contact with al-Siddiq
through Syrian dissident Riffat al-Assad, an uncle of the
incumbent president opposed to the current regime.
Broader
strategy: regime-change
As early as
1996, before their current government posts, David
Wurmser, Vice President Dick Cheneys Middle East
adviser; Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defence for
Policy; and Richard Perle, former Defence Policy Board
Chairman, co-authored a report for then Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calling for a plan to
contain, destabilize, and roll-back
Israels rivals. Among its recommendations were
removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq
along with striking Syrian military targets in
Lebanon, and should that prove insufficient, striking at
select targets in Syria proper.
In 2000,
Wurmser, Feith and Perle joined up with Paula Dobriansky,
Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs; Elliot
Abrams, National Security Council Senior Director for the
Middle East; and Michael Rubin, Pentagon adviser on Iraq;
to sign a report by the Middle East Forum advocating
the use of force against Syria to disarm its
weapons of mass destruction and withdraw its troops from
Lebanon. If there is to be decisive action, it will
have to be sooner rather than later.
Such grand
designs are very much alive in current administration
policy. In her testimony before the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee on 19th October, Condoleeza Rice
confirmed that the administrations strategy after
9/11 had always been to redesign the Middle East. Iraq
was merely the first step in that broader strategy.
According to
Syria expert Joshua Landis, an assistant professor in
Middle East Studies at Oklahoma University currently on a
Fulbright Scholarship in Damascus, informed sources
confirmed that Steven Hadley, the director of the
US National Security Council, called the President of the
Italian senate to ask if he had a candidate to replace
Bashar al-Asad as President of Syria. Regime
change, the end-goal of US policy in Syria, has been lent
a new lease of life by the politics of the Hariri
assassination.
In this
context, the Mehlis report provides the Bush and Sharon
administrations the ammunition needed to galvanise
support for the neoconservative plan for military action
against Syria. Given his role in the 1986 La Belle
bombing, the possibility remains that his investigation
has firstly concealed the role of US and Israeli
intelligence interests in relation to the Hariri
assassination, and secondly been politicized to support
US and Israeli grand regional designs.
Source:
by courtesy & © 2005 Nafeez
Mosaddeq Ahmed
MMN Recommended
Reading
Links referenced within this article
Institute
for Policy Research & Development
http://www.globalresearch.org
"The War on Freedom: How and Why America was
Attacked, September 11, 2001"
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0930852400/mmn-20
"Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy
and the Struggle for Iraq"
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0865715068/mmn-20
"The War On Truth: 9/11, Disinformation And The
Anatomy Of Terrorism"
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1566565960/mmn-20
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Requiem for a Nation
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/headlines/requiem_for_a_nation
Story of a Photojournalist in Conflict
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Who Murdered Arafat?
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/headlines/who_murdered_arafat
Australia threatened by US state terrorism
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/headlines/australia_threatened_by_us_state_terrorism
Mapping Out Catastrophe
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/headlines/mapping_out_catastrophe
Whitewashing the Protection of Terrorists on US Soil ::
The Truth about Able Danger ::
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/headlines/whitewashing_the_protection_of_terrorists
_on_us_soil_the_truth_about_able_danger
Caught red-handed :: British Undercover Operatives in
Iraq ::
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Pulling the court strings: The Saddam trial
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/headlines/pulling_the_court_strings_the_saddam_trial
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