Remember that the sensational formulations beloved by headline writers like me (”Dubai hit”) will be translated into the more neutral language of Washington.

What I accurately describe as the Dubai hit can also be described as  a counterterrorism operation against an organization designated as “terrorist.” If there was a U.S. role in the assasssination of Mabhouh–and it would not be surprising if there was given the collaboration of American and U.S. military intelligence organizations in the Middle East–then the Obama administration may have a problem.

With police investigations already underway in Australia, Ireland, and Germany, the Obama administration is going to deal with this. WashPost and NYT are still playing the story inside, appropriate  in light of the fact that there has been no official U.S. reaction, but that’s not going to last long.

For the Obama administration, this is where the rhetoric of the president’s Cairo address meets the realities of Middle East decisionmaking. Of course, Israel has the right to defend itself, and of course the U.S. assassinates al-Qaeda leaders every day. But the leaders and the publics of Arab countries (like the United Arab Emirates, where the hit took place) that are open to peace with Israel (and some of whom want U.S. help to deter Iran) are not going to be satisfied by the talking points that go over well in Washington and on cable TV.

The pro-American autocracies in the Middle East (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan) are especially helped by Israeli tactics. Vulnerable to accusations of being soft on Israel, they will posture about not allowing Israeli intelligence to operate on Arab soil with impunity. Democratic forces in the Arab world are undermined by Israeli’s assertion of its right to attack its foes anywhere. By enabling undemocratic Arab regimes to pander to public opinion without actually sharing power, Israeli actions actually force Obama to subordinate his goal of reaching out to the Muslim world to his consistent defense of Israel.

That’s fine with Israeli public opinion and it will probably go over well in the United States where cultural sympathies for the Jewish state run deep. But Jewish Israelis comprise less than 3 percent of the public in the Middle East. To the vast majority of the democratically inclined people in the Middle East, Obama will be seen as indulging the lawlessness that he denounces when Arabs engage in it.

Jose Pertierra, a Washington lawyer who represents the Venezuelan government in the case (and full disclosure: a personal friend), describes the latest twists and turns in this long-running saga in Machetera.

But Electronic Intifada and Angry Arab beg to differ, saying Bronner’s coverage tilts toward the Jewish state.

There’s a measure of truth in that charge, if only because Bronner’s reporting inevitably embodies some of the cultural assumptions of his workplace. At the New York Times,  those assumptions include secular liberalism, moral relativism,  empiricism, cynicism, feminism, Zionism,  and a few other -isms too scandalous to mention here. Calling for his reassignment is a way of calling attention to those assumptions.

It is also true that Bronner,  like many a journalist in the region who tries to adhere to professional standards, is vulnerable to being  smeared as “pro-Palestinian,” (in this case by my old friend Steve Emerson. I met Steve when we both worked for Marty Peretz at TNR. Steve had the more agreeable personality; Marty, the more capacious mind, relatively speaking.)

Proceed to Thought Experiment #1: Imagine Anthony Shadid, former Washington Post and current  NYT  Lebanese-American correspondent in the Middle East, has a son or daughter who is active in the boycott and divestiture movement targetting Israel on the American college campuses? (Full disclosure alert: I’ve shaken Shadid’s paw a couple of times. I don’t know if he has kids or if they are pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian; both, I hope.) Would/should such a filial political commitment   disqualify Shadid from covering Israel for a newspaper of record?

Quite apart from what I think (no), I suspect that Israel’s supporters would be able to make it enough of an issue that the Post/Time senior editors would discretely choose not assign him to Jerusalem. Does anybody with elite media newsroom experience disagree?

The matter at hand is Bronner. The probable difference in the treatment of a Jewish journalist and an Arab-American colleague is the issue.

Its a hurry up and wait type of deal. Judge Richard Leon, a Bush II appointee in the U.S. Circuit Court of the District of Columbia, will rule sometime this year on which, if any, of the JFK files of the deceased CIA officer George Joannides, must be made public. If you want regular updates, friend me on Facebook.

If you’re wondering, Who the hell was George Joannides and what is this story about, here’s how to find out.

I broke the story of Joannides’ curious role in the JFK story in the weekly Miami New Times back in 2001. I  sued the CIA for his records in 2003. Many, if not most, of the serious JFK scholars agree with me that the CIA should comply.

If you want more detail about the Joannides investigation has evolved since, check out this video interview I did for the MaryFerrell.org, the most useful site on the Web for JFK scholars because it is more devoted to data than theories.

If you want diverse political perspectives on the Joannides story,  Jacob Hornberger has applied the  libertarian scapel.  Blogger Machetera comes at the story from the perspective of the Latin left.

And if you are daunted by the mere idea of JFK details and polemics, you are not alone.  For the K.I.S.S.  version of the story, you only need to read my piece last spring in Talking Points Memo. It has an exclusive photo of Joannides getting a medal for his espionage.

One final point: If you Google “George Joannides” you will see a number of stories and blog posts linking him to the assassination of Robert Kennedy. I won’t comment on or link to these stories because they are based on a weak 2007 BBC report that proved to have no foundation in fact.

Some conspiracy theories are obvious b.s. and there’s no harm in saying so.

We want to believe theories that contradict the idea that young, iconic people died senselessly. If a story takes away the accidental from their death, it gives them agency. After the JFK assassination, it was unbearable to many people that they could live in a country where a lone gunman could kill a president.

This familiar trope has a general psychological cogency–yes, we all turn to History for meaning–but, in the particular case of Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, it lacks a specific historical foundation. Aaronovitch is touting a book about conspiratorial thinking, with the appealing tag line “When smart people believe dumb things.” Yet his pitch neglects the disconcerting fact that there were plenty of smart people who concluded that Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy of his political enemies–and they did so rationally.

First Lady Jackie and First Brother Bobby Kennedy, JFK’s successor Lyndon Johnson, and his canny antagonist Fidel Castro hardly qualify as “dumb.” They all concluded that that JFK had been ambushed by opponents of his policies, as David Talbot noted in Brothers,  a 2008 revisionist portrait of the Kennedy administration. (Full disclosure: Talbot is a personal friend and my reporting is referenced favorably in the book.)  Jackie, Bobby & Co. were not deluded populists. They were not unacquainted with the real inner workings of American power or the CIA. And they didn’t believe the reassuring story of a “lone nut.”

They privately thought what a lot of knowledgeable people came to believe: that the Warren Commission report didn’t get  to the truth. (A “hoax,” the paranoid-realist Richard Nixon once called its report.)  Complacent historians and the Anglo-American pundits who rely on them don’t write much about it but the suspicions of a JFK conspiracy fairly permeated the upper levels of the U.S. government after the Dallas tragedy.

“Now we’ll never know,” cried Desmond Fitzgerald, a top CIA official, when chief suspect Oswald was killed in police custody.

Lt. Col. Fletcher Prouty, chief of Pentagon special operations in 1963, became an outspoken conspiracy advocate. Decades later, Prouty, a cranky political right-winger, advised combative left-leaning director Oliver Stone on crafting the dark cinematic mythology of  “JFK.”

Win Scott, the CIA’s ultraconservative Mexico City station chief (and subject of my 2008 biography “Our Man in Mexico,”) was more discrete. Scott knew the Warren Commission’s account of Oswald’s  visit to Mexico City before the assassination was false. He wrote a memoir, immediately suppressed, saying so. Scott too concluded JFK was the victim of a conspiracy. Aronovitch impugns the judgment of these power players at his own risk. He certainly must scant credible insider testimony in order to flog his bigger theme.

Which is his right. JFK’s assassination was a most enigmatic crime about which reasonable people can differ. In general, Aaronovitch’s case against the contemporary conspiratorial mindset is well taken. Yes, there was a 9/11 conspiracy and we know who organized it: Khalid Sheik Muhammed and Osama bin Laden. The estimable Van Jones notwithstanding, there is no reasonable doubt about that fact.I would merely note that we have no comparable clarity about Dallas.

The unpleasant fact, with which Aaronovitch is mercifully unacquainted, is that, four decades after the crime, we still don’t know the full story of pre-assassination CIA intelligence gathering operations around Oswald.  Indeed, as the New York Times reported last fall on my FOIA lawsuit against the Agency,  the Agency  has spent seven years erecting an increasingly dense and elaborate veil of official secrecy around a batch of at least 295 still-secret JFK assassination-related records. Unfortunately, the Obama Justice Department has ratified this legalized cover-up.

If the CIA, like Aaronovitch, wanted to dispel JFK conspiracy fantasies, it would comply with the JFK Records Act and release all of these records posthaste. It seems to have no such interest. Instead, the Agency still sends taxpayer-funded lawyers to federal court to make extreme claims of secrecy in the name of national security in order to keep its Oswald secrets. You can interpret the CIA’s ongoing defiance of the law  conspiratorially. Or you can interpret it innocently.

What you can’t do, 46 years after JFK’s violent demise, is look at all of the CIA’s records on the subject.

The pairing now known as FARQaeda would represent a disturbing alliance because of the unexamined but equally important backflow, or two-way flow, in this illegal embrace of smuggling junctions.

But how real is the threat? wonders COHA’s Leah Chavla.

no convincing evidence has demonstrated that all or even some of the African drug trafficking agents involved in this lucrative ring are actually members or affiliates of any terrorist organization.

That’s not how the transnational drug traffickers work (for the most part).

Non-simplistic discussion on the jump.

Chavla notes an alternative explanation of the nexus of Lebanese traffickers and armed guerrilla movements. Arab drug dealers use sympathiy with Hezbollah to drum up business.

“…. some of these agents who do claim an affiliation are doing so in order to gain credibility and to obtain other fringe benefits associated with membership in a terrorist organization like Al Qaeda. Such a link would boost their reputations and thus, the volume and revenue of drug trafficking activities.”

The problem, notes Chavla, a lack of direct evidence. As Chavla carefully notes:

“..Without having intercepted one such illicit drug flight, perhaps due to a lack of adequate resources and a paucity of cooperative measures taken by law enforcement or other government officials, it becomes next to impossible to certify any claims about the participants, the cargo, and the stakes involved in the drug trafficking industry.”

She’s not saying it didn’t happen. She’s saying we don’t have enough evidence to constitute proof.

Meanwhile, Douglas Farah at Counterrorism Blog says Al-Qaeda is protecting cocaine flights in West Africa. That’s a more credible story than FARQaeda.