Al Jazeera’s panel highlights the unexpectedly good work by Dubai police.
Don’t believe the hype: Israel has survived such flaps “with very few repercussions” in the past.
Israel wants to know: What was Mabhouh doing in Dubai? Why not investigate that?
Australia provides ans answer: Because Hamas wasn’t systemically abusing the passport system on which the global security depends.
Meanwhile: Get your Mossad T-shirt now!
With assassination suspects possibly still on U.S. soil, the Dubai assassins have dragged America into row over fake passports, says Times Online in London.
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.
Times Online says a couple of the suspects in the January assassination of a senior Hamas official came to the United States after the hit. What U.S. intelligence knew about their movements is an interesting question that the liberal U.S. media isn’t much interested in, at least not yet.
By contrast, the conservative British news organizations, like the Telegraph. This, of course, will be chalked up to British anti-semitism but such tired charges cannot explain the continuing interest of the impeccably Zionist Jerusalem Post.
The Brits and the Israelis grasp the implications of a tough question that easygoing American liberals prefer to think about next week: Is drugging and suffocating a Hamas leader in a Dubai hotel a demonstration of effective counterterror policy, as a lot Israelis think? Or, as a lot of Arabs think it is, a species of gangsterism.
With President Obama’s ongoing escalation of the drone war in Pakistan, the question is which is hurt more by the aerial attacks: al-Qaeda’s leadership or the United States’ standing in Pakistan? As former ambassador Tayyab Siddiqui, a columnist for the News, one of Pakistan’s leading newspapers, notes the answer is obvious, at least in Pakistan.
….last year, there were 44 drone attacks, killing only five key Al Qaeda targets but the civilian casualties exceeded 700 Pakistanis. Passionate appeals have been made to all the visitors from the US – Congressmen, officials, military brass and others that these attacks must stop. Pakistan is absolutely critical for US strategy in the region and its war against terror is solely dependent on Pakistanis’ cooperation. Pakistan must spell out to the Obama Administration that any more cooperation with the US would be subject to US meeting Pakistanis’ concerns.
There’s no evidence that is going to happen. From the point of view of U.S. policymakers, this isn’t a dilemma. In Washington, the answer is equally obvious, though diametrically opposed, to Pakistan’s: the battlefield advantages outweigh the political costs. In the short run, that is surely true. In the long run, it depends on ignoring Pakistani democracy.
Rafik Hariri, Lebanese businessman and political leader, slain in 2005. (Wapedia)
The politics of assassination are a more decisive factor than ever in Middle East politics.
This week thousands commemorated the fifth anniversary of the death of Lebanese billionaire Rafik Hariri who was killed in a huge bomb blast in Beirut on February 13th, 2005. But the United Nations investigation of the crime has since stalled and the feeling that politics is trumping justice is hard to avoid. Hariri’s assassination gave rise to Lebanon’s so-called March 14th Cedar Revolution which brought Syria’s foes to power. Now the demographic and political realities of Lebanon have thwarted the movement and created a new status quo. Hariri’s son, Saad, who followed his father into politics, is calling for reconciliation with the government of Syria, the prime (but not the only) suspect in his father’s murder. As al Jazeera noted:
Re-emerging Syrian influence, the persistence of Hezbollah’s role and internal divisions have all dealt steady blows to the alliance that was brought together by opposition to Damascus.
Is justice possible? Continue reading »
The assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai was just one aspect of a wide ranging effort by the Zionist state to target its armed opponents, says The Times of London.
More details of the hit from Intelligence Online via Haaretz: ten agents participated including three women, all traveling on European passports.
As if in response to Frontline’s finding that nuclear scientist Massoud Ali Mohammadi, killed by a remote control bomb last month, was a victim of the Iranian governmet, The Economist, leans the other way–to the West.
“It is no secret that America, Israel and European countries are seeking to impede Iran’s nuclear plans, overtly and covertly. Yet the assassination theory was widely dismissed. The professor’s known works on particle and theoretical physics did not seem central to Iran’s nuclear programme. And his name had appeared on a list of Iranian academics favouring Iran’s protest movement. So, ran the prevailing theory, Israel or America had little reason to kill him, though Iranian hardliners may have wanted to do so.
But listen to the whispers of Western spies and diplomats, and the Iranian regime may turn out to be right. Well-placed sources in two Western countries now say the professor was “one of the most important people involved in the programme.”
This is lightly sourced but The Economist is veddy conservative and wouldn’t indict Western powers lightly. This remains a most puzzling case.
An Al Qaeda spin off has offered to train Muslims to fight perceived enemies here, says a leading local news site.
Nowhere doss Osama bin Laden enjoy more confidence than here.
Al Jazeera asks the growing question about Nigeria.
Al Jazeera asks the question.
Don’t forget the Pew poll finding I cited the other day that the only geopolitical entity (outside of the Palestinian territories) where Osama bin Laden is fairly popular is…..
Luis Posada Carriles, former CIA operative deeply implicated in the 1976 bombing of a Cubana airline jet that killed 73 people, is facing perjury charges in El Paso. Venezuela and Cuba want to try him for the crime. The United State is balking.
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.
