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Wednesday, April 10, 2002

The Man Who Would Testify Against Sharon Is Blown Up. - by Robert Fisk

The Man Who Would Testify Against Sharon Is Blown Up.
Is This Another Targeted Killing?

Elie Hobeika, of course, will not be giving evidence against Mr Sharon. His body – in bits, some bones blackened by fire – were all that remained of Lebanon's most hated man yesterday, scattered 50 metres from his burning Range Rover.

Call it a "targeted killing"; which, by chance, is how the Israelis describe their death squad execution of Palestinian militants in the West Bank and Gaza. The man who led his murderers into the Palestinian camps on Israel's orders 19 years ago was dead – to the jubilation of millions of Palestinians. "Our blood was not in vain," they screamed yesterday in the refugee camp of Bourj el-Barajneh.

When I reached the cramped Beirut Christian suburb of Hazmiyeh a few minutes later, all that was left was Hobeika's smouldering, shattered Range Rover, a fiercely burning Mercedes – in which the bomb had been placed – and carbonised skeletons.

It needed at least four men to assassinate Hobeika – one outside his home 100 metres away to alert the bombers, another to have guarded the car bomb, two more to have "line of sight" and press the detonation switch.

Within hours, Belgian lawyers seeking to indict Mr Sharon – the Israeli defence had only finished giving its reasons for opposing a trial on Wednesday – expressed their "profound shock" at Hobeika's murder.

"Mr Hobeika had several times expressed his wish to assist the Belgian inquiry on the massacres at Sabra and Chatila," a statement from the lawyers said. "His determination to do so was reported widely on the eve of his assassination. The elimination of the key protagonist who offered to assist with the inquiry is an obvious attempt to undermine our case."

In this area of Christian east Beirut, Hizbollah militia men or Syrian agents would have a hard task to set up such a murderous ambush. Which was why I couldn't find a single Lebanese who didn't believe Israel was behind the killing. "Just watch who gets murdered next," a policeman muttered. "Relatives will want revenge – and we'll be able to find out who the murderers were."

Less than two days before the killing, at 5pm on Tuesday, to be exact, Hobeika had met two Belgian senators, Josy Dubie and Vincent van Quickenborne, in east Beirut, agreeing to be a witness at any trial for the Sabra and Chatila massacre. The meeting was supposed to be secret: Hobeika reportedly told the Belgians he had been threatened with death, but it was leaked to the Lebanese press. This may have been Hobeika's death certificate.

Just before 10am yesterday, he was driving his blue Range Rover from his home on Marroukoz Street with his three bodyguards, Dmitri Ajram, Walid Zein and Faris Suedan, when a white Mercedes 280 – parked in a basement garage level with the road – blew up. An estimated 100 kilos of explosives blasted Hobeika's vehicle across the narrow highway, killing all four men instantly.

Arshalouis Katchadourian, an Armenian woman living across the road, ran to her window to see if her grandmother Verikine had survived in her apartment above the car bomb. "First I heard the explosion," she said. "Then I saw a fireball and so much smoke. But there was a man with a Kalashnikov firing lots of bullets. I thought 'someone is going to kill him'. But who was he?" Nobody knows.

Charbel Moussalem, whose sister was wounded on his apartment balcony, says he saw only smoke and fire enveloping the building above the car bomb. "Elie Hobeika often drove down this road to his office," he said. "Not every day. But we knew him." So did the murderers.

.: posted by zein gasmi 1:58 AM

THE CAMP X-RAY CONCENTRATION CAMP

Shafiq Rasul, from Tipton, near Birmingham, is one of five Britons being held without charge and in contravention of every international convention at Camp X-Ray.

A man well over 6ft in height, with a thin frame and a normal weight of less than 11st, he has lost 3st and is described by his brother as "seriously emaciated". His family believes they glimpsed him on television, on February 21, shackled to a stretcher.

In this state, he was interrogated by agents of the British security service, MI5 - which itself contravenes the Geneva Convention on prisoners-of-war. At the same time, the Foreign Office claims it does not know the circumstances of the five men's arrests.

This brings to mind the evidence of a British official, Mark Higson, at the arms-to-Iraq scandal inquiry in 1994. Higson described a "culture of lying" pervading the Foreign Office.

All 194 prisoners on Cuba, it is now becoming clear, have committed no crime. That is true of all but a handful of the 400 captured in Afghanistan many of whom do not belong to al-Qaeda.

In three months of investigation by an army of FBI and other police officers, not a shred of evidence has been produced linking them to the attacks of September 11 or identifying them as "terrorists fighting America".

Yet, in the House of Commons, ministers have defamed them as "among the most dangerous men in the world", echoing almost word for word the statements of Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of Defence.

This is the man who has admitted setting up an office in the Pentagon with the sole function of lying to foreign governments and foreign media about the "war on terrorism".

Acting for the family of Shafiq Rasul is Gareth Peirce, the solicitor and fighter against miscarriages of justice who was portrayed in the film In The Name Of The Father.

She says: "Given that [Shafiq] was so clearly emaciated, it means that we are letting loose our agents on to those detainees for the purpose of interrogating them in wholly unsafe circumstances and acting parasitically on the backs of wholly unlawful detentions by the Americans."

Another British solicitor and human rights campaigner, Louise Christian, represents 22-year-old Feroz Abassi. She is threatening the British Government with legal action for collaborating with the US in Feroz's "illegal interrogation".

She has been told by the government solicitor to delay her application for a judicial review by the High Court because Tony Blair and his ministers have yet to decide what to do.

IN other words, they are asking the Americans how they should act on the human rights of British citizens against whom there is clearly no case. Recently, an Algerian pilot, Lotfi Raissi, was released from Belmarsh prison after five months on remand and without any terrorism charge being laid against him.

The bogus reasons for the "war on terrorism" are unravelling by the day, as is Blair's complicity with its crimes of violence in Afghanistan and denial of rights. The original purpose of Camp X-Ray was as a piece of grotesque theatre for the ever-manipulated American public.

In releasing deliberately provocative photographs of cowed men in chains, the Bush regime believed it could distract public opinion from the debacle of its "war" in Afghanistan, in which its war machine failed to capture or kill Osama bin Laden or a single senior member of al-Qaeda.

Even the Taliban leader Mullah Omar got away. All they got was the Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan, a relatively minor functionary.

The price of this American disaster for the people of Afghanistan was, according to a recent study at the University of New Hampshire, at least 5,000 civilian lives.

For all the posed photographs of American troops against desert landscapes, hardly any of them have seen combat. Instead, impoverished people in dusty villages are killed from the sky.

Not even the cost of an American B52 bomber has reached the Afghan people in aid - in spite of "pledges" by America and Europe and the "we-shall-never-desert-Afghanistan-again" windbaggery of Blair.

In spite of a public relations drive to prove that the American-installed regime in Kabul is radically different from that of the Taliban, the main changes are a return to a bloody civil war and feudalism and the renewal of the heroin trade.

As for the human rights of the long-suffering population, the new government will, like the Taliban, impose sharia Islamic law on its people. Judge Ahamat Ullha Zarif says that public executions and amputations will continue, but there will be one variation: "For example, the Taliban used to hang the victim's body in public for four days. We will only hang the body for a short time, say 15 minutes."

Judge Zarif made clear that the ultimate penalty would remain in force for adulterers, both male and female. They would still be stoned to death, "but we will use only small stones".

This is the regime whose leaders have a bodyguard of British soldiers. And still the Americans bomb - while famine sweeps the north and west of Afghanistan in the wake of the American attacks.

On February 12, a World Vision Health and Nutrition Team reported from the North West that "numerous groups of women and children are scavenging the valley fields for weeds, roots and grass to eat".

The French aid agency Medecins sans Frontieres says that more and more people are becoming malnourished. "The food system is not working," said a nurse, Jenny Andersson. "Although the World Food Programme has been providing food for more than 300,000 people, it simply isn't reaching the people that need it."

NONE of these horrors has been addressed by the American or British governments, the principal partners in the Washington-bribed "coalition" claiming responsibility for the Afghanistan disaster, which Jack Straw calls "our vindication".

It is not surprising that, even as ex-Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic stands trial in The Hague, the Americans are pressing for an end to war crimes trials altogether. This means that the Bush administration is afraid that the process might slip out of its control and become a permanent fixture, encouraging the setting up of an International Criminal Court, which Washington opposes.

It fears that such a body might act truly judicially and order the arrest of "our" war criminals - that is, American and British politicians and officials who have ordered, or aided and abetted the bombing to death of thousands of innocent men, women and children and have run or collaborated in the running of a concentration camp like that in which emaciated men who are held and interrogated in breach of international law.

In his play Ashes To Ashes, Harold Pinter uses the images of Nazism and the Holocaust, while interpreting them as a warning that the totalitarian actions of western politicians seeking dominance over other human beings are no different, in principle and effect, from those of fascists - and terrorists.

The reality behind the Prime Minister's pretensions as a "war leader" become clearer every day.

http://www.zmag.org/content/TerrorWar/pilgercampx.cfm
THE conditions in which prisoners are being held brutally and illegally in an American concentration camp on Cuba go to the heart of the "war on terrorism", and mark the Blair government for its betrayal of the basic rights of British citizens to the interests of a foreign power.

Shafiq Rasul, from Tipton, near Birmingham, is one of five Britons being held without charge and in contravention of every international convention at Camp X-Ray.

A man well over 6ft in height, with a thin frame and a normal weight of less than 11st, he has lost 3st and is described by his brother as "seriously emaciated". His family believes they glimpsed him on television, on February 21, shackled to a stretcher.

In this state, he was interrogated by agents of the British security service, MI5 - which itself contravenes the Geneva Convention on prisoners-of-war. At the same time, the Foreign Office claims it does not know the circumstances of the five men's arrests.

This brings to mind the evidence of a British official, Mark Higson, at the arms-to-Iraq scandal inquiry in 1994. Higson described a "culture of lying" pervading the Foreign Office.

All 194 prisoners on Cuba, it is now becoming clear, have committed no crime. That is true of all but a handful of the 400 captured in Afghanistan many of whom do not belong to al-Qaeda.

In three months of investigation by an army of FBI and other police officers, not a shred of evidence has been produced linking them to the attacks of September 11 or identifying them as "terrorists fighting America".

Yet, in the House of Commons, ministers have defamed them as "among the most dangerous men in the world", echoing almost word for word the statements of Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of Defence.

This is the man who has admitted setting up an office in the Pentagon with the sole function of lying to foreign governments and foreign media about the "war on terrorism".

Acting for the family of Shafiq Rasul is Gareth Peirce, the solicitor and fighter against miscarriages of justice who was portrayed in the film In The Name Of The Father.

She says: "Given that [Shafiq] was so clearly emaciated, it means that we are letting loose our agents on to those detainees for the purpose of interrogating them in wholly unsafe circumstances and acting parasitically on the backs of wholly unlawful detentions by the Americans."

Another British solicitor and human rights campaigner, Louise Christian, represents 22-year-old Feroz Abassi. She is threatening the British Government with legal action for collaborating with the US in Feroz's "illegal interrogation".

She has been told by the government solicitor to delay her application for a judicial review by the High Court because Tony Blair and his ministers have yet to decide what to do.

IN other words, they are asking the Americans how they should act on the human rights of British citizens against whom there is clearly no case. Recently, an Algerian pilot, Lotfi Raissi, was released from Belmarsh prison after five months on remand and without any terrorism charge being laid against him.

The bogus reasons for the "war on terrorism" are unravelling by the day, as is Blair's complicity with its crimes of violence in Afghanistan and denial of rights. The original purpose of Camp X-Ray was as a piece of grotesque theatre for the ever-manipulated American public.

In releasing deliberately provocative photographs of cowed men in chains, the Bush regime believed it could distract public opinion from the debacle of its "war" in Afghanistan, in which its war machine failed to capture or kill Osama bin Laden or a single senior member of al-Qaeda.

Even the Taliban leader Mullah Omar got away. All they got was the Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan, a relatively minor functionary.

The price of this American disaster for the people of Afghanistan was, according to a recent study at the University of New Hampshire, at least 5,000 civilian lives.

For all the posed photographs of American troops against desert landscapes, hardly any of them have seen combat. Instead, impoverished people in dusty villages are killed from the sky.

Not even the cost of an American B52 bomber has reached the Afghan people in aid - in spite of "pledges" by America and Europe and the "we-shall-never-desert-Afghanistan-again" windbaggery of Blair.

In spite of a public relations drive to prove that the American-installed regime in Kabul is radically different from that of the Taliban, the main changes are a return to a bloody civil war and feudalism and the renewal of the heroin trade.

As for the human rights of the long-suffering population, the new government will, like the Taliban, impose sharia Islamic law on its people. Judge Ahamat Ullha Zarif says that public executions and amputations will continue, but there will be one variation: "For example, the Taliban used to hang the victim's body in public for four days. We will only hang the body for a short time, say 15 minutes."

Judge Zarif made clear that the ultimate penalty would remain in force for adulterers, both male and female. They would still be stoned to death, "but we will use only small stones".

This is the regime whose leaders have a bodyguard of British soldiers. And still the Americans bomb - while famine sweeps the north and west of Afghanistan in the wake of the American attacks.

On February 12, a World Vision Health and Nutrition Team reported from the North West that "numerous groups of women and children are scavenging the valley fields for weeds, roots and grass to eat".

The French aid agency Medecins sans Frontieres says that more and more people are becoming malnourished. "The food system is not working," said a nurse, Jenny Andersson. "Although the World Food Programme has been providing food for more than 300,000 people, it simply isn't reaching the people that need it."

NONE of these horrors has been addressed by the American or British governments, the principal partners in the Washington-bribed "coalition" claiming responsibility for the Afghanistan disaster, which Jack Straw calls "our vindication".

It is not surprising that, even as ex-Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic stands trial in The Hague, the Americans are pressing for an end to war crimes trials altogether. This means that the Bush administration is afraid that the process might slip out of its control and become a permanent fixture, encouraging the setting up of an International Criminal Court, which Washington opposes.

It fears that such a body might act truly judicially and order the arrest of "our" war criminals - that is, American and British politicians and officials who have ordered, or aided and abetted the bombing to death of thousands of innocent men, women and children and have run or collaborated in the running of a concentration camp like that in which emaciated men who are held and interrogated in breach of international law.

In his play Ashes To Ashes, Harold Pinter uses the images of Nazism and the Holocaust, while interpreting them as a warning that the totalitarian actions of western politicians seeking dominance over other human beings are no different, in principle and effect, from those of fascists - and terrorists.

The reality behind the Prime Minister's pretensions as a "war leader" become clearer every day.

.: posted by zein gasmi 1:55 AM

Mofaz to Destroy Palestinian Refugee Camp

[translated by Eric Mueller]

An al-Jazeera correspondent in Palestine has reported that the Israeli Chief of Staff, General Shaul Mofaz, is personally leading the operation to destroy Jenin refugee camp after two days of failed Israeli attempts to storm the camp. He adds that the commander of the brigade who had been in charge of the operation has been relieved of his command and Mofaz is personally in charge of the operation to destroy the camp over the heads of its residents.

Residents of the camp whom al-Jazeera was able to contact say that the Israeli chief of staff who is leading the operation from a helicopter in the air gave orders to his forces to intensify the bombardment from helicopters, tanks, and heavy artillery on the houses and positions in which the resistance fighters are taking cover and on anything that moves in the camps. Residents add that bodies are strewn throughout the streets and that their numbers can’t be counted because of the intensity of the shelling. Meanwhile this morning six bodies were discovered, three of which belong to Palestine Security Force men.

Senior Palestinian Negotiator, Saeb Erekat, has announced that all means of communication with President Yasir Arafat, who is besieged in his headquarters in Ramallah, have been cut off since dawn this morning. Erekat said on the American news network CNN from Ariha [Jericho] that this morning he had failed to make contact with Arafat.

An al-Jazeera correspondent in Palestine reports that explosions and gunfire can be heard near the headquarters of the Palestinian President as Israeli helicopters hover in the area. This was shortly after Israel cut the electricity off from the President’s headquarters. Palestinians say that these explosions might be the prelude to an assault on the headquarters that has been surrounded by Israeli tanks.

The Palestine News Agency (Wafa) quotes security sources as saying that the Headquarters of the Presidency in the city of Ramallah this morning came under sporadic heavy machine gun fire from Israeli occupation tanks concentrated near the headquarters. Grenades were also used.

Invasions of New Areas

Two Palestinians died as martyrs and seven others were wounded today as the Palestinian resistance stood up to the Israeli occupation forces that were storming the town of Yata, south of al-Khalil [Hebron]. Israeli infantry units supported by tanks this morning entered the town of Yata where battles are still continuing between occupation force and the Palestinian resistance.

Occupation forces also stormed al-Fawwar refugee camp south of al-Khalil [Hebron] and the town of `Atil in the Tulkarm region, and the town of Qabatiya in the area of Jenin. Palestinian security sources said that the occupation army this morning, Saturday, entered Qabatiya, located 10 kilometers south of Jenin.

The Resistance Continues

In the cities of Jenin and Nablus and their adjoining refugee camps – where the number of martyred dead since yesterday has risen to 36, including a child – the Palestinian resistance fighters have defied death in their resistance to the occupation forces. Israeli helicopters and tanks have intensified their bombardment of the two cities and camps. A correspondent for al-Jazeera in Palestine says that there are numerous wounded people who are bleeding to death without medical assistance in the camps of Jenin and `Askar and the old town in Nablus. He said that columns of tanks are massed at the entrance to the city of Jenin in preparation for an assault.

The correspondent explained that the occupation forces are carrying out an operation of systematic destruction of Jenin camp that is surrounded on all sides. Fifteen houses have been destroyed with everyone inside. The Palestinian resistance announced a guerrilla operation carried out yesterday by a Palestinian among a group of Israeli soldiers inside a house in Jenin. Palestinian security officials said that the leader of the al-Aqsa Martys Brigades in the West Bank, Nasir `Uways, died a martyr in a commando operation in the city of Nablus when he blew himself up among a group of occupation troops in the Ras al-`Ayn area.

Three Israeli soldiers were killed and more than ten injured, one of them in grave condition, in Palestinian guerrilla attacks in Nablus, Jenin, and the adjacent camps. In an appeal he broadcast over al-Jazeera network, Palestinian Minister of Information, Yasir Abd Rabbuh warned of a massacre in Jenin refugee camp in the next few hours as more than fifty Israeli tanks have surrounded the camp.

In Bethlehem the occupation forces have maintained their grip on the city despite their declaration that the curfew had been partially lifted. The blockade that the occupation forces have imposed on the Church of the Nativity is still in force. Inside, food and medical supplies have been exhausted for the more than 200 people besieged in the building. As many foreign countries have evacuated their nationals from Bethlehem in fear for their safety, occupation forces are targeting ambulance crews who have as a result failed to reach the wounded Palestinians to take them to hospitals.

Christian sources expressed their fear that the Israeli forces would try to legalize an attack, which appears imminent, on the church by claiming that the monks inside are being held as hostages.

Attack on a Jewish Settlement

In the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian died a martyr in a violent battle that erupted inside the Rafih Jewish settlement that is next to the city of Rafah. A correspondent for al-Jazeera in the Gaza Strip reports on the authority of eyewitnesses that a number of Palestinians infiltrated into the settlement and battled with Israeli forces inside. Four Israelis were wounded during the battle.

The Islamic Jihad Movement announced its responsibility for the operation over loudspeakers in the streets of Rafah. Palestinian security sources said that Israeli tanks opened fire on the Tell Sultan area in Rafah inflicting damage on a number of buildings.

Powell – Arafat Meeting

In another development, Saeb Erekat, Senior Palestinian Negotiator, has repeated today in an interview with al-Jazeera that Palestinian officials will refuse to meet with American Secretary of State Colin Powell if he refuses to meet with the Palestinian President Yasir Arafat during his trip to the Middle East, which is scheduled to begin tomorrow.

Erekat said, “If he does that, Powell will cause the failure of his trip before it even starts.” But Erekat believes that Powell will meet Arafat “because he knows full well that the Palestinian President is the address of the Palestinian people and the key to any solution of the crisis.”

A spokesman for the American President, Ari Fleischer, said yesterday that Powell had not yet decided whether he would meet Arafat during his trip. After meeting the Jordanian Foreign Minister, Marwan al-Ma`shar in Washington, Powell said in response to a question about Fleischer’s statement that there are no plans at the moment for a meeting of this kind, but that does not mean that it would not take place at an appropriate time.

Powell said that Israel must withdraw its military forces from the Palestinian territories quickly and without delay. Powell told journalists that President George Bush expects that the Israeli incursions would stop in the shortest possible time and that the withdrawal of forces would begin without delay.

.: posted by zein gasmi 1:41 AM