|
UN's Mehlis report discredited: International espionage over Syria?
By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
10/28/05 "MMN"
-- --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 report’s findings
that Syrian military intelligence officials were behind the plot.
Man behind the report
But the background of the UN report’s 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 television’s 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 Jaber’s 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 Chraidi’s extradition from Lebanon in
May 1996. On 9th September, a Berlin judge concluded the
prosecution’s 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 bomb’s 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
report’s 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 Cheney’s 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” Israel’s 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
administration’s 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.
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".
© 2005 Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
Translate
this page
(In accordance with Title 17
U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to
those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational purposes.
Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the
originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.) |
