CIA and Mossad killed senior Hezbollah figure in car bombing

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Washington Post

CIA and Mossad killed senior Hezbollah figure in car bombing
By Adam Goldman and Ellen Nakashima January 30 at 10:14 PM

On Feb. 12, 2008, Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah’s international operations chief, walked on a quiet nighttime street in Damascus after dinner at a nearby restaurant. Not far away, a team of CIA spotters in the Syrian capital was tracking his movements.

As Mughniyah approached a parked SUV, a bomb planted in a spare tire on the back of the vehicle exploded, sending a burst of shrapnel across a tight radius. He was killed instantly.

The device was triggered remotely from Tel Aviv by agents with Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service, who were in communication with the operatives on the ground in Damascus. “The way it was set up, the U.S. could object and call it off, but it could not execute,” said a former U.S. intelligence official.

The United States helped build the bomb, the former official said, and tested it repeatedly at a CIA facility in North Carolina to ensure the potential blast area was contained and would not result in collateral damage.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-and-mossad-killed-senior-hezbollah-figure-in-car-bombing/2015/01/30/ebb88682-968a-11e4-8005-1924ede3e54a_story.html

[mwrguy]

1. Murderers gonna murder

[leveymg]

2. This isn't the sort of thing that gets revealed unless there's an agenda behind it.

Something's going on - strained relationship w/Israel, an Agency shakeup, or a provocation.

U.S. involvement in the killing, which was confirmed by five former U.S. intelligence officials, also pushed American legal boundaries.

Mughniyah was targeted in a country where the United States was not at war. Moreover, he was killed in a car bombing, a technique that some legal scholars see as a violation of international laws that proscribe “killing by perfidy” — using treacherous means to kill or wound an enemy.

“It is a killing method used by terrorists and gangsters,” said Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor of international law at the University of Notre Dame. “It violates one of the oldest battlefield rules.”

[leveymg]

3. Note: target was on trial by Hezbollah as a suspected double-agent

Paragraph right at the bottom:

In fact, the damage to Hezbollah may have been compounded by the fact that the man charged with exacting revenge on Israel was a suspected Israeli asset. He was recently reported to be on trial in a Hezbollah court in Lebanon, but the group’s leader has downplayed the spy’s importance.

In a statement in 2008 after Mughniyah’s death, the office of then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s office said: “Israel rejects the attempt by terror groups to attribute to it any involvement in this incident. We have nothing further to add.”

If true, one wonders how long he was a Mossad asset, and what the Israelis knew when he did all those terrible things.

Provides yet another motive for his elimination. Silence.

[bemildred]

6. I was wondering why they decided to tell us all about this now.

All the technical details and so on. Why the reminder?

[leveymg]

7. Very much an "official leak" - W.H. wants this publicized in a big way.

Signals some sort of shift, for public consumption, of course. As the article points out, none of this was news to Hezb'allah or the Israelis, or anyone else who pays attention to these things.

Personally, this seems to be an admission that such joint actions are more routine than was previously acknowledged. Admission of sins of the previous Administration or justification by precedent for things to come?

[bemildred]

8. My guess:

What a twist: Washington decide

Jeff Dunetz flagged a disturbing report via Israel’s Channel 10 on Friday that indicated Israeli officials believe that Barack Obama’s White House has agreed to nearly all of Iran’s demands in multilateral negotiations over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.

“According to unnamed officials, Washington ‘has given the Iranians 80 percent of what they want’ out of the negotiations,” the report read. “Jerusalem officials appear alarmed at the prospect that the United States will soon strike a deal with the Iranian regime that will leave it with a ‘breakout capacity’ of months during which it can gallop toward a nuclear bomb.”

That’s the red line over which few think Israel will allow Iran to cross. Many analysts believe, however, that Israel no longer has a military option available to it after deferring to Washington’s pleas to allow diplomacy to run its course for years. In the interim, Iran has hardened or buried its nuclear facilities to a point that many suspect they may now be invulnerable to assaults via the air.

In 2012, amid a bruising fight over the president’s reelection, Obama assured reporters that his threat to use military means in order to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. “I think that the Israeli government recognizes that, as president of the United States, I don’t bluff,” Obama told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. '

http://hotair.com/archives/2015/01/30/what-a-twist-washington-decides-to-back-iranian-proxy-rebels-in-yemen/

[leveymg]

9. So, if Iran crosses a "red-line", the CIA will join Mossad in killing Iranian nuclear scientists?

Is that what you're driving at?

[bemildred]

10. No, there are parties who wish the Iran Nuke Deal not to go forward.

So to prevent it they provoke Iran & Hezbollah with an attack in Syria (three for one), hoping for a robust counter-attack, which would stall and or prevent the deal.

When that does not work, we get this too.

[leveymg]

11. If they wanted to avoid such a provoked attack, perhaps they offered some sort of

radical Fail-Safe assurance, such as a promise by the US of some alternative measure - targeted CIA killings of Iranians, for instance?

Not an attractive alternative set of explanations, either way.

[geek tragedy]

14. Bibi is having to back down from the fight he picked with Hezbollah last week.

My guess it's to show Israeli voters he's still a Hezbollah-killing bad ass, and to try to torpedo talks between the US and Iran.

[bemildred]

15. Yeah, after thinking about it, I agree.

A good strategy works in many ways, and so does a bad one.

[PSPS]

4. Coming up next: CIA/Mossad suicide bombers. And maybe beheadings on YouTube.

[blackspade]

5. This makes us no better than any other group of terrorists.

Not that we ever were....
Setting off a bomb outside of a restaurant? Classy.

[Octafish]

12. Tradition!

EXCERPT...

The Rise and Rise of Robert Gates

The Specialist (Part 3)

By Roger Morris
TomDispatch, June 25, 2007

Beirut, Lebanon, Friday, March 8, 1985, an Islamic Sabbath -- In Bir El-Abed, an impoverished, crowded Shiite quarter in the southern reaches of the Lebanese capital, Muhammad Husain Fadlallah stops on the street to speak to an elderly woman; and so, the revered 51 year-old cleric, delayed momentarily, will not be home at the usual time when a car bomb explodes at his apartment doorstep with a force felt miles away in the Chouf Mountains and well out in the Mediterranean.

"Even by local standards," reported the New York Times from car-bomb and shell-shocked Beirut, the explosion "was massive." Eighty-one people were killed -- men, women, and children -- and more than two hundred wounded. Fadlallah, the target of the attack, was unhurt. The next day, a notice hung over the devastated area where grief-stricken families were still digging the bodies of loved ones out of the rubble. It read: "Made in the USA."

The sign was more apt than even its furious makers knew. The terrorist strike on Bir El-Abed was a classic product of American covert policy. Behind the bombing lay a convoluted secret history and, beyond that, a longer legacy of power wantonly uninformed by "intelligence."

Agreeing, as usual, with the proposals of CIA Director William Casey, President Ronald Reagan sanctioned the Bir attack to avenge a devastating truck-bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks at the Beirut Airport in October 1983 -- itself a bloody reprisal for earlier American acts of intervention and diplomatic betrayal in Lebanon's civil war that had cost hundreds of Lebanese and Palestinian lives. The barracks attack slaughtered 241 Marines, part of an international peacekeeping force sent to Lebanon in the wake of the 1982 Israeli invasion of the country.

After its own operatives had repeatedly failed to arrange Casey's car-bombing, the CIA "farmed out" the operation to agents of its longtime Lebanese client, the Phalange, a Maronite Christian, anti-Islamic party, avowedly built on the Italian fascist model. The CIA targeted Fadlallah, in particular, because of his reputation for fiery sermons in favor of social justice and national independence -- and because allied spy agencies -- Israel's Mossad, Saudi Arabia's GID, and Phalangist informers -- claimed he led a militant Shiite group that bore responsibility for the attack on the Marines.

In fact, Washington was unsure who had killed them. "We still do not have the actual knowledge of who did the bombing of the Marine barracks at the Beirut Airport," Caspar Weinberger, Reagan's Secretary of Defense, told PBS in 2001, "and we certainly didn't then."

CONTINUED...

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174814/roger_morris_the_cia_and_the_gates_legacy

[geek tragedy]

13. live by the car bomb, die by the car bomb.

I'm sure the families of those killed by this guy in Beirut, Buenos Aires, and elsewhere will be outraged.

The interesting question, as others have noted, is why release this now and by whom?

[quadrature]

16. who here, believes this fairy tale?

just curious.

[former9thward]

17. Just curious,

what part of this do you deem a fairy tale? The guy is dead. Did God smite him down?

[quadrature]

19. seems like... a lot of claims being presented as fact.

that always sets off alarm bells with me.

I don't know what happened here,
I simply don't take everything at face value.
(could be partly or completely true)

[oberliner]

18. Mughnniyah was on the FBI's most-wanted terrorists list

Here are some of the major attacks Mughniyah was allegedly involved in:

Bombing of U.S. Embassy in Beirut, 1983: The suicide bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut killed 63 people, including eight CIA officers.

Torture and killing of CIA's Lebanon station chief, 1984

Hijacking of TWA flight 847, 1985

Suicide bombing of Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, 1992: Four Israeli civilians and 25 Argentinians were killed in the 1994 attack on the embassy.

Bombing of Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, 1994: In the same city two years later, 85 people died. Most of the victims were Jewish.

Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, 1996: Mughniyah was also believed to be involved in this attack that killed 19 U.S. Air Force pilots and staff when a truck bomb blew up at the tower.