Social Democracy Now

On February 14, 2005, the former Prime Minister of Lebanon, corrupt billionaire businessman Rafik Hariri, was assassinated in Nejmeh Square in Beirut, in an explosion that took the lives of 22 other individuals. The U.S. promptly blamed Syria, while most Middle Eastern sources and certain important western websites (including the World Socialist Web Site) pointed to Israel as the more likely beneficiary of the murder. The United Nations subsequently launched an investigation which was headed by Detlev Mehlis, who is usually referred to simply as a 'German prosecutor.'

The preliminary findings of the Mehlis investigation were released this week in a report whose conclusions were widely reported by most major news outlets. It became known almost immediately that the report supported early U.S. allegations of Syrian involvement. However, no news outlet saw fit to tell its readers the report's grounds for implicating Syria. To find out what they are, you have to get a hold of the report itself. As far as I can determine from a slipshod document that shows abundant signs of having been assembled in considerable haste, the case against Syria rests on four pieces of information which are apparently deemed incriminating:

1. The existence of tension between Hariri and 'senior Syrian officials, including Syrian President Bashar Assad' over the extension of President Emile Lahoud’s term which allegedly culminated at a meeting held on August 26, 2004.
2. The claim that, due to extensive Syrian intelligence capabilities in Lebanon, a 'complex assassination plot' could not have taken place in Beirut without Syrian involvement.
3. Allegations from persons claiming inside knowledge of Syrian involvement, above all, one Zuhir Ibn Mohamed Said Saddik, who claims to have been extensively involved in the assassination plot himself.
4. The claim that Syrian authorities refused to cooperate with the U.N. investigation. As an example of non-cooperation, the report states that 'The letter addressed to the Commission by the Foreign Minister of the Syrian Arab Republic proved to contain false information.'

The problem is that not one of the four pieces of information is necessarily incriminating:

1. There is nothing inherently suspicious about strong disagreement between Hariri and the Syrians over the extension of Lahoud's term. According to Hariri himself - in a conversation recorded on February 1, 2005 - he was extremely disturbed when he learned during a 15-minute meeting with President Assad that Assad planned to extend Lahoud's term. However, the fragment of the conversation included in the Mehlis report implies that Hariri had no actual say in the decision - it was, apparently, a decision Assad alone had the right to make. While Hariri describes himself as 'pale-faced' after his meeting with Assad, he does not indicate that he forcefully objected. The only incriminating aspect of the matter is the claim made on June 22, 2005, by (anti-Syrian) Beirut newspaper editor Jubran Tueni that Hariri had told him that Assad had said that if he voted against Lahoud's extension he would 'blow him up.' However, this remark is ex post facto and no other individual cited in the report, including Hariri's son Saad, mentions Assad threatening to blow him up. What's more, on September 3, 2004, 'the Hariri bloc' approved of Lahoud's extension. So what was Syria's motive for killing Hariri? Assad had gotten what he wanted five months before. Nor should we forget that by February 2005 Hariri was a former prime minister. What would Syria have stood to gain from assassinating a former prime minister? And in any case, why not get rid of Hariri by less conspicuous means? Scarcely anyone would have noticed if the former prime minister of Lebanon had died of apparent food poisoning or some other plausible illness. Yet the method chosen only ensured the attention of the world.

2. This point is of no value whatsoever. The same claims could be made of Israeli and U.S. intelligence, which maintain as pervasive a presence in Lebanon as Syrian intelligence. In short, if the Syrians did plan to blow up Hariri, then Israeli and U.S. intelligence knew about it and did nothing to stop it. They are therefore culpable along with the Syrians.

3. Claims of inside knowledge of the Syrian plot - such as the witness who claims that the Mitsubishi Canter van used in the attack was driven from a Syrian military base in Hamma to Beirut by a Syrian Army Colonel from the Army Tenth Division - defy belief. I know of no political assassination in which so many people professing inside knowledge have revealed what they knew so soon afterwards. (Remember, for example, that twenty years later we still have no idea who assassinated Swedish prime minister Olaf Palme.) Unfortunately, most of the persons professing to possess inside knowledge go unidentified. Not only are anonymous sources inherently suspect, they could even be fictional. What guarantees do we have that these witnesses exist, let alone that they are telling the truth?
The named exception is Zuhir Ibn Mohamed Said Saddik, a man who claims to have been extensively involved in the plot. I find myself absolutely astonished that someone who was himself involved would even speak to investigators. Even if we assumed he would be so stupid as to admit his involvement, wouldn't the Syrians, if they were responsible for the crime, do away with Saddik before he had a chance to speak to them? So how credible can Saddik be? The report writes 'The fact that Mr. Saddik implicates himself in the assassination, which ultimately led to his arrest, adds to his credibility.' (p. 31) My view is the complete opposite: an actual participant would remain silent about his involvement in such a heinous crime. Saddik's willingness to come forward and to speak fulsomely about it implies that he is working for an agency which wishes to pin it on Syria.
Interestingly, the report does not tell us who Saddik actually is, how he came to be involved in such a high level assassination plot, how he came to the attention of investigators or why he has chosen to betray his co-conspirators. Most of these questions are answered in an article in the German magazine Der Spiegel, however. According to an English translation I have seen of this item, Saddik is a 'multiply convicted swindler' whose contact with the Mehlis investigators was initiated by Syrian dissident Rifaat al-Assad, an uncle of President Bashir al-Assad, who opposes his nephew's regime. What's more, it is well-known that Saddik is lying. 'At first he had claimed to have left Beirut in the month prior to the deed. Then, at the end of September he admitted to having been involved in the implementation of the assassination. Apparently Sadik had received money from a third party for his testimony. According to a statement by his brother, Sadik had called him from Paris in late summer and said “I’ve become a millionaire!” (SOURCE) Yet, although the Syrian government informed Mehlis some time ago that Saddik was deceiving him, Mehlis was so desperate to deliver up information impugning Syria that he kept this totally unreliable material in his report. Mehlis's use of Saddik's lies shows all too clearly that his is no objective investigation.

4. There may be good reasons why the Syrians refused to cooperate with the Mehlis investigation team (if indeed they did refuse to cooperate). The Syrians may have realized early on that the investigation is a hostile one whose mission is to blame Syria at all costs. (The use of the Saddik material shows clearly enough that this is in fact the case.) They would have had good reason from the outset to be wary of a Commission headed by Detlev Mehlis, who since 1981 has had a history of investigating crimes in which the blame has invariably been placed upon countries hostile to Israel (Palestine, Libya, Iran and Syria). In particular, Mehlis was responsible for blaming Libya for the bombing of the La Belle Disco in West Berlin on April 5, 1986, an event which is suspected by many to have actually been perpetrated by the Mossad as a means of provoking the U.S. into bombing Libya. (SOURCE 1 and SOURCE 2) In short, Mehlis's motives are not above scrutiny; indeed, the indications, such as they are, suggest that he may be a covert Mossad operative who specializes in blaming Arabs, any Arabs, for Israeli crimes, while the real perpetrators are protected.

In respect of the issue of alleged Syrian non-cooperation, one of the many puzzling aspects of the Mehlis report is that it admits that pressure was placed on Syrian officials to be interrogated in an unnamed 'third country' instead of Syria or Lebanon but the offer was refused. Does this refusal constitute 'non-cooperation'? If the third country was Israel, it is only too obvious why Syrian officials would have refused to be interrogated there. (If the unnamed country was not Israel, it is hard to see why its name would not be given in the report. The report does not hesitate to mention Switzerland by name.) As for the letter containing 'false information' which the Syrian foreign minister sent the Mehlis Commission, the report does not tell us what the false information was. If the investigators knew the information was false, they should have at least indicated in what way the Syrian foreign minister had been attempting to deceive them. The fact that this crucial information goes unmentioned implies that the false information concerned nothing relevant to the investigation.

In conclusion, the Mehlis report must be viewed with great suspicion. It fails to clarify even the most basic facts concerning the assassination, meaning that it is way out of its depth when it comes to the matter of attributing responsibility. While it asserts that the explosion was caused by TNT detonated inside a Mitsubishi Canter van, it contains no information of a forensic kind which would permit this conclusion to be drawn. As Willam Bowles writes, 'No trace of the driver of the truck has been found, nor does [the report] offer any evidence that it was the truck other than the fact that it was parked outside the hotel, admitting that because all the relevant evidence was moved on the day of the bombing, made it impossible to carry out a thorough forensic examination of the scene.' Presumably not by coincidence, Mehlis and his team failed to follow up the van issue. Although the report states that it was stolen in Sagamihara City, Japan, in 2004, it does not explain how the van reached Beirut. (SOURCE) It is not hard to see why the report does not focus on this problem: Mehlis and his team of investigators are fairly obviously not interested in learning the truth about the case, only in laying the foundations of a case against Syria. It would not surprise me if those who wrote the report were actually withholding information on this subject because it did not incriminate the Syrians.

A testament to bias, the report eschews hard facts in favour of innuendo; the case against Syria depends critically on improbable revelations from unidentified individuals purporting to possess inside knowledge of Syrian activities, as well as a con man who was paid handsomely for his revelations. Interestingly, the latter, Mr Saddik, does not seem to have furnished investigators with information sufficient to determine how the plot was actually carried out - whether, for example, a suicide bomber was used, or whether the explosion was set off remotely, a matter which the Mehlis report leaves unresolved. Since Saddik says some of the planning meetings were held in his own apartment, you'd think he'd know something about the crucial logistical details, wouldn't you?

What's more, the report suffers from the fact that it only discusses the question of Syrian involvement. The involvement of Israel, which is widely seen in the Middle East as most likely responsible, is never even mentioned, let alone investigated. No investigation which does not consider alternative candidates - in particular, the main alternative candidate - can be taken seriously. The report also neglects the issue of context, above all, the fact the U.S. and Israel would dearly love to invade Syria, and have at present a strong motive to fabricate a pretext for military action. The Hariri assassination may be part of a complex intrigue by which the Americans are trying to take effective control of Lebanon. A motive may be in order to use Lebanon - a future government may well cede the U.S. a base in the country - as a location from which to launch an invasion of Syria. According to Wayne Madsen, 'Hariri, a pan-Arabist and Lebanese nationalist, was known to adamantly oppose the construction of a major U.S. air base in the north of Lebanon. The United States wants Syrian troops completely out of Lebanon before construction of the base is initiated.' Mehlis would have us believe that a long-resolved dispute over the extension of President Lahoud's mandate furnished the motive for the assassination. A more compelling motive, though, would be U.S. fears that a future Lebanese government would be headed by a man who would refuse to cede the U.S. a base inside the country. This certainly makes a whole lot more sense than the threadbare motive fleshed out in Mehlis's substantially mendacious report.

BELOW: A frame from a security camera tape showing the van alleged to have been used in the attack:



However, as Christopher Bollyn pointed out back in February, 'there is no evidence that a large vehicle carrying tons of explosives smashed into Hariri's vehicle.' The Mehlis report conspicuously fails to present any such evidence. Bollyn's critique of the report - the best published so far - is available here and here. Bollyn is interviewed about the assassination by Daryl Bradford Smith here (the interview starts about halfway through).

NOTE: The Mehlis report can be read here, while a pdf of the complete text is available here. The report is also available here and a pdf of the complete text can be downloaded from the same website here.