August 23, 2010
In his recent speech about the assassination of former Prime Minister, Rafiq Hariri, Hezbollah´s secretary-general showed some indices pointing to Israel´s involvement in the murder. According to Sayyed Nasrallah, Israel masterminded the assassination in order to get Syria to withdraw from Lebanon. He said he was prepared to hand over the evidence to an independent inquiry. Shortly after, Hezbollah gave these proofs to Lebanese authorities.
As Sayyed Nasrallah said, Israel had the capability and the desire to carry out the assassination. No one doubts that Israel has had vast espionage networks in Lebanon, some of them have already been dismantled. Israeli agents have entered Lebanon from the sea via the shore and some ports. The shore is a favorite site for those, such as Israelis, who want to escape quickly from a hostile area and who maintain a position of supremacy in the sea.
Furthermore, most of the 100 Israeli spies caught by the Lebanese internal security forces in the past years have confessed to a 15-year spying operation by Israel to monitor the moves of major Lebanese leaders, including the Lebanese president, the chief of the army, and heads of pro-Western political parties.
The Lebanese press has published admissions from a Lebanese agent, Philippos Hanna Sadir, who worked for Israel. He said that he had been told to provide information about the residence of Lebanese president Michel Suleiman, including its exact distance from the shore, as well as the location of the private yacht belonging to the commander of the Lebanese army, General Jean Qahwaji. This is entirely logical. Obviously, Israeli agents would prefer to kill a Lebanese leader on the shore better than in Bekaa because their flight would be easier.
Sayyed Nasrallah also showed a picture of Israeli drones for over a five-year period of Rafiq Hariri’s land routes across Lebanon - to and from his offices and residences in Beirut, his summer home in the mountains, and the coastal route to his brother’s residence in Sidon. Hariri was the target of the drones that were taking images from all angles, especially those close to the coastal areas, while pausing and zooming at the points of intersections.
Secondly, Nasrallah displayed other video clips which were filmed by Israeli drones and showed aerial views of the coastline off west Beirut on various days prior to the Hariri assassination. “Israeli drones carefully monitored the movements of Hariri's motorcade in Beirut and on the Farayya-Faqra road,” Sayyed Nasrallah pointed out. “Was that a coincidence?” his eminence wondered. “Such footage generally comes as the first leg of the execution of an operation.”
Thirdly, Sayyed Nasrallah said that he has documentation of Israeli air movements near the Lebanese coast on the day of Hariri's assassination. Nasrallah finally disclosed that an Israeli drone and a reconnaissance plane AWACS were flying over Beirut on the day of the murder for four hours from 10:30 am until 2:30 pm encompassing the 1 pm time of the assassination.
An Israeli agent, Ghassan al-Jidd, who was involved in another liquidation, was present at the scene of the assassination, Nasrallah claimed. It is noteworthy to point out that telephone data analyzed by investigators of the Lebanese Information Branch of the Internal Security Forces and the Military Intelligence has showed that Ghassan Al-Jidd was an executive agent. According to security officials concerned with counter espionage dossiers, spies are divided into many classes, mainly information gatherers and executive spies. The first class works on gathering information either through human efforts or through devices and tools provided to them by the Israelis.
The second class of spies includes the executives whose missions include information gathering. However, their main job is to carry out security operations like assassinations, explosives, surveillance, and logistics, not to mention transporting and housing Israeli officers and securing them to ground and sea evacuation points. In March 2004, Israeli officers entered Lebanon through the sea and were hosted by Al-Jidd for 50 hours in a location in Mount Lebanon.
Al-Jidd was in the Saint George area the day before PM Rafiq Hariri was assassinated in the same location. The presence of the executive agent Al Jidd at that site only can mean one thing: he was involved in a liquidation operation ordered by its Israeli operators. Of course, he was not there to take a coffee and enjoy Beirut´s sun.
DEFINITIVE PROOFS IN WESTERN COURTS
In any Western country, this type of surveillance by a terrorist group would be a definitive proof of the preparation of an attack against the tracked person. In Spain, for example, an ETA member, Nerea Garaizar San Martín, was sentenced to a ten-year prison term in February 2008 for conspiracy for murder because of her surveillance of the residence and moves of the President of the People´s Party. Thus, Israel´s surveillance of Hariri´s moves should be considered that way too.
The Hariri case has an evident similitude with the murder of the Majzoub brothers in May 2006. Al Jidd´s role was played that time by another Israeli spy, Adib al Alam. His Israeli operators told him to monitor the coastal highway in the city of Jbeil to find out whether there was any suspicious movement or military or security patrols. Lebanese security officers linked Al-Alam’s mission with the confession of another Israeli agent, Mahmoud Rafea, who took part in the assassination of the brothers. Rafea said that he had transported an Israeli officer from the southern border the day before the crime. He added that after the murder, he transported the same officer to the Jbeil shore, where an Israeli commando arrived to pick him up.
It is noteworthy to point out that intelligence data are collected on the site of an operation through systematic observation by deployed agents and a variety of electronic systems, including drones. Surveillance and reconnaissance are methods of obtaining this information. The information is then passed to intelligence personnel for analysis, and then to the commander and his staff for the formulation of the operation. They need preliminary reconnaissance of the terrain and its features, including the expected or unexpected presence of members of security forces. This is what Al Jidd was allegedly doing the day before Hariri was killed in the Saint George area.
Israel has a long history of utilizing assassination as an instrument of its state policy. The Israeli regime has often carried out acts of terror and blamed them on its enemies. Among the more infamous examples was the so-called Lavon Affair, in which the Mossad organized a covert network inside Egypt which launched a series of bombing attacks in 1953. The targets included US diplomatic facilities, and the attackers left behind phony evidence implicating anti-American Arabs. The goal was to sabotage US relations with Egypt.
In its long history of assassinations of Palestinian leaders, many of them carried out in Beirut, the Israeli regime has attempted to implicate rival Palestinian factions. Car bomb killings in Beirut have been a regular part of Mossad´s activities in the past few decades.
In his book “The Other Side of Deception”, former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky, wrote that Israel had persuaded Ronald Reagan to bomb Libya in 1986. Some Israel commandos were dropped at the beach of Tripoli and installed a communication system, called “Trojan”, with a dish-like antenna in an apartment in the Libyan capital. They started to send messages intended to be listened by US and British stations. “Using the Trojan, the Mossad tried to make it appear that a long series of terrorist orders were being transmitted to various Libyan embassies around the world. As the Mossad had hoped, the transmissions were deciphered by the Americans and construed as ample proof that the Libyans were active sponsors of terrorism,” he said.
This operation led the Americans to believe that Libyans were linked to a bomb attack carried out in the disco La Belle in Berlin on April 5 2006, which killed one US soldier and injured several others and was the catalyst for the April 14 bombing of Libya by the Americans.
One more recent killing was that of Elie Hobeika, an ex-Lebanese cabinet minister, in January 2002. He was killed along with three bodyguards by a remote-controlled car bomb on a Beirut street. Hobeika, who participated in the massacre of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in 1982, had announced just days earlier that he was prepared to testify on the role played by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in the killings. In June 2004, a Lebanese judge indicted 5 Arab agents of Mossad who were taken part in a plot to murder Sayyed Nasrallah. At least one of them testified that the Israeli intelligence agency had organized the Hobeika murder.
In 2002, Meir Dagan, who had previously commanded the Israeli occupation zone in South Lebanon, became the Mossad´s chief. Sharon reportedly gave Dagan an order to revive the traditional methods of Mossad, including assassinations abroad. The US publication Executive Intelligence Review pointed out that Sharon, Dagan, and General Effie Eitam were the proponents of such dirty-war tactics.
It is also noteworthy to point out that Lebanese government formally charged more than twenty Israeli spies within the past year, many of them planted in Alfa. Hezbollah claims that the Alfa spies have sabotaged the investigation of late Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri’s assassination. They claim the Israeli spies helped Alfa collect false cellular communication intelligence in order to incriminate Hezbollah.
Unfortunately, the politicization of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon has led its investigators to ignore these facts and, therefore, the STL issued several reports accusing the Syrian regime, based on non-credible witnesses. It took four years for the tribunal to admit that “the evidence” against Syria was fabricated by false witnesses, some of them even tied to Israeli intelligence (Abdelbasit Bani Odeh) or the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies (Ahmad Marie and Zuhair Siddiq). Significantly, when the Bush Administration fell and his anti-Syrian fiercely stance was at least partially abandoned by the current US Administration, the STL changed its focus towards Hezbollah, although it recognized that it has only circumstantial indices.
However, Sayyed Nasrallah´s revealed information on the Hariri murder is much more than simple indices and shows the right path that any impartial court should follow to find out who were the real murderers of PM Rafiq Hariri.
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian
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