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How He Went Down: Mugniyah Assassination Plot Follow Up
As a tense south Beirut buried assassinated Hezbollah militant Imad Mugniyah Thursday and Israel and the region braced for feared retribution and an escalation of tensions, analysts continued to speculate on who killed the elusive terror suspect. (See this piece for a primer).
Former CIA officer Robert Baer, who served in Beirut and extensively researched Mugniyah, offered a model about how things might have gone down. "An old friend of mine," Baer emailed. "Friend may not be the word. Anyhow the Israelis persuaded him to set off a car bomb in a Damascus bus station. He used the Guardians of the Cedars, paid them something like $200,000. Bomb went off as requested."
"Point two is Syria these days is completely corrupt," Baer added. "You buy what you want."
Former Defense Department analyst and Levant expert David Schenker, now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, ruled highly unlikely the Syrians doing it themselves. "The Syrians feel perfectly comfortable to kill their own and they do," Schenker said in a telephone interview. "But they don't do it like that. They render them," as they did Kurdish Workers' Party leader Abdullah Ocalan, as Turkish troops amassed on the the Turkish-Syrian border threatening an invasion.
"This is not a case like Ghazi Kanaan, who was the Syrian viceroy in Lebanon," Schenker continued. "In Arabic, they say, 'He was suicided.' He 'killed himself' with two shots to the head. He knew too much about the Hariri assassination."
"They looked at this guy [Mugniyah] as an Iranian official of sorts," Schenker continued. "You think the Syrians are going to kill an Iranian official in their own capital?"
"Sometimes the simplest explanation is the best explanation," Schenker replied, when asked then about the Israelis. "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
(You can catch Schenker and other colleagues from various perches blogging on the issue and all things Middle East here).
Israel has denied it carried out the Mugniyah assassination. "Israel rejects the attempt by terrorist elements to ascribe to it any involvement whatsoever in this incident," the office of prime minister Ehud Olmert said in a statement.
"They consider him a terrorist," one mourner at Mugniyah's funeral, Zahra, told the Washington Post's Anthony Shadid. "For us, he is a hero who was fighting our enemy."
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What is utterly amazing to me is that almost all of these so-called experts in the U.S. are acting as if Imad Mougania had been found guilty as charged, where the allegations against him(and even Hezbollah) have been brought before a "neutral" court of justice and equally defended against.
For the sake of the rights of all involved, justice has never been served through the assassination of Imad Mougania. And I for one happen to believe that this was the primary purpose behind his assassination, to avoid the actual truth coming out concerning the verdict based on the allegations.
This post could be more correctly titled "How He Went Up."
-AF
Israel does have it problems. A civil rights group in Israel has released a report which claims racism is rife in Israel and highly damaging to those it touches.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel said Israel was seeing a new level of racism that was damaging privacy and freedom of expression.
The report pointed to a large percentage rise in the number of racist incidents against Arabs, sometimes brought about by Jewish youths who see Arabs as "unclean".
Social analysts reported only half of Israel's Jewish population believed that Jews and Arabs should have full equal rights.
Among Jewish respondents, 55 percent supported the idea that the state should encourage Arab emigration from Israel while 78 percent opposed the inclusion of Arab political parties in the government.
The report concluded the results were the consequence of a racist campaign and anti-Arab racist policies led by political and military leaders.
The CIA has many people who could pull off a hit like this (The CIA's SAD paramilitary branch, is considered one of the best in the world at these types of Ops). The questions isn't could the CIA have done it, but would the CIA's leaders have authorized it. The CIA has never lacked talent, they have lacked leaders who would authorize the use of said talent.
Mossad has both the talent and the neccessary leadership. But it may also have been a joint Mossad/CIA op. The CIA has proven quite capable of killing terrorist leaders in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Somalia...I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss them.
Israel has been criticized for "discrimination in personal and civil status matters against non-Orthodox Jews." Israel only recognizes Orthodox Rabbis for the purpose of marrying couples, not allowing Reform or Conservative Rabbis to perform the ceremony
In 2003, the Knesset made an amendment to the Nationality and Entry into Israel law which prohibited Palestinian married to Israelis from gaining Israeli citizenship or residency. Critics argue that the law is racist because it is targeted at Israeli Arabs who are far more likely to have Palestinian spouses than other Israelis. The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination unanimously approved a resolution saying that the Israeli law violated an international human rights treaty against racism. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel filed a petition to have the law struck down but it was upheld by a High Court decision in 2006. In June 2006, the United States Department of State issued a report which stated that "the Government of Israel does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and has failed to show efforts to address conditions of involuntary servitude allegedly facing thousands of foreign migrant workers. Israel has been criticized for its policies and enforcement of laws on sex trafficking. Women from the former Soviet Republics are brought into the country by criminal elements for forced labor in the sex industry. Amnesty International cites hardships placed on women in the Occupied Territories by the State of Israel .