Israeli media: Mossad assassinated Al-Mabhouh

[AlicetheKurious]

It's totally possible Israel did do it and if they did, they should suffer whatever comes their way.

And yet, they never do. You still didn't answer my question, though.

[82_28]

[smiths]

ok. now i am sure that the exposure of the Dubai assassination was not just a bungle

On Jan. 16, a team of senior military officers from the U.S. Central Command arrived at the Pentagon to brief Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The team had been dispatched by CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus
The briefers reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM's mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that Mitchell himself was (as a senior Pentagon officer later bluntly described it) "too old, too slow ... and too late."
The January Mullen briefing was unprecedented. No previous CENTCOM commander had ever expressed himself on what is essentially a political issue; which is why the briefers were careful to tell Mullen that their conclusions followed from a December 2009 tour of the region where, on Petraeus's instructions, they spoke to senior Arab leaders.
"Everywhere they went, the message was pretty humbling," a Pentagon officer familiar with the briefing says. "America was not only viewed as weak, but its military posture in the region was eroding."

then we have the Dubai hit that Dubai just suddenly feels they need to air so that everyone can slag off Israel in unprecedented manner

then we have Biden Wiping the Spit Off His Face


-------

i for one dont see the assassination exposure in the middle of this as a coincidence of timing,
i never bought the Mossad bodged it story,
and the more Israel's spat with America increases the more i think the hit was run-of-the-mill, but the exposure was designed to make Israel look out of control, belligerent and isolated

[MinM]

J. J. Angleton's boy, E. J. Epstein, has an interesting alternative conspiracy theory in this case. Much like he did with his theory about Lee Harvey Oswald

Edward Jay Epstein: More Questions About the Dubai Assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh - WSJ.com

By EDWARD JAY EPSTEIN

James Jesus Angleton, the legendary CIA counterintelligence chief, once discussed a series of suspicious deaths in Germany with me. "Any gang of thugs could murder someone," he said, "but it took an intelligence services to make a murder appear to be a suicide or natural death."

According to this precept, the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai on the evening of Jan. 19, 2010, was almost certainly the work of an intelligence service. When Mabhouh's body was discovered the next day in his room in the five-star Al Bustan Rotana hotel, it appeared he'd died in bed of natural causes. There were no wounds, bruises or other signs of foul play.

Room 230 had no balcony or windows that could be opened, and the electronic door latch appeared to have been locked from the inside. If an ordinary tourist died under such nonsuspicious circumstances, investigators would routinely assume he had died in his sleep from natural causes.

But Mabhouh was no ordinary tourist. He was a senior commander and a co-founder of Hamas's military wing, Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades. His activities included the abduction of Israeli soldiers, and he was wanted in three countries: Israel, Egypt (where he had been imprisoned for almost a year for his Muslim Brotherhood activities and was wanted on suspicion of subversion) and Jordan, on suspicion of terrorism.

Based in Damascus, Syria, Mabhouh was also a key intermediary in the covert arms traffic between Iran's Revolutionary Guard, the Syrian intelligence service, the Hamas government in Gaza, and other militants. He was ordinarily protected by a team of armed bodyguards. But they had not been allowed to accompany him to Dubai on Jan. 19 because there was no room on the flight, according to a Hamas spokesman in Damascus, Talal Nasser. So whether by design or accident, he was stripped of his protection, making his assassination easier to accomplish.

When the Dubai police, under pressure from Hamas, looked more closely into the crime scene, they found that the electronic lock on the door of his room had been reprogrammed to allow others to enter. The electronic lock can be accessed directly at the hotel room door by a sophisticated hacker.

Then a Dubai forensic lab retesting his body fluids discovered traces of succinylcholine. This is a quick-acting, depolarizing, paralytic drug that, by rendering Mabhouh incapable of resisting, could account for the lack of bruise marks on the body.

In February, Dubai's chief coroner, Fawzi Benomran, reversed his verdict of a natural death. Instead, describing the death as "one of the most challenging cases" in the history of the emirate, he concluded it was a disguised homicide "meant to look like death from natural causes during sleep."

Meanwhile, Dubai investigators examined 645 hours of videos from surveillance cameras at the hotel and elsewhere. They saw that, after Mabhouh left his hotel room, four suspicious-looking individuals got out of the elevator on the second floor near his room. Several hours later, at 8:25 p.m., Mabhouh returned to his room (according to the electronic lock). Shortly afterwards, the four men were seen via the cameras leaving the floor.

The police theorized that these men had surreptitiously entered Mabhouh's room while he was out, incapacitated him with the paralytic drug on his return, induced a heart attack by suffocating him with a pillow, and reprogrammed the electric lock to make it appear it had been locked from the inside.

With the aid of facial recognition software, Dubai police then identified 26 suspects. All had been in Dubai at the time of Mabhouh's brief visit. All had entered Dubai using fake or fraudulently obtained passports from countries not requiring a Dubai visa, including Britain, Ireland, France, Germany and Australia.

All the passports turned out to be stolen identities with faked passport photos. The charge cards, airline tickets and pre-paid phone cards these suspects used were also in the name of their stolen identities. The only real clue to their real identities was that eight of the identities had been stolen from people with dual Israeli citizenship. Since Mossad, Israel's national intelligence agency, had previously used dual citizens' passports to fake identities, Dubai authorities concluded the suspects were from Mossad.

Dahi Khalfan Tamim, the head of the Dubai police force, stated on a government-owned Web site, that he "is 99 percent, if not 100 percent, that Mossad is standing behind the murder." While this authoritative finger-pointing was largely accepted as am "aha" moment by the media, Dubai is not exactly an uninterested party in the Mabhouh affair. It is, after all, the principal transshipment points for the lethal arms trade between Iran and Hamas—and Mabhouh had been one of the major players in this trade.

The much-publicized hotel surveillance videos, while highly diverting on YouTube, do not show any of the 26 suspects engaging in any illegal activities other than using false identities, a practice which is not unknown in Dubai. (Mabhouh himself reportedly had five different passports.) Even if all 26 identity thieves were intelligence operatives, as seems the case, it does not necessarily follow that they were all in Dubai on the same business, or even working for the same side.

Since Iran maintains its largest offshore financing facility in Dubai—which is used by the Revolutionary Guard, among others, to support its traffic in covert weapons— more than one intelligence service might be interested in Mabhouh's trip. Consider, for example, the peculiar fact that two of the 26 Dubai suspects exited by boat to Iran, according to Dubai authorities; this is not a likely escape route for Mossad agents.

Two other individuals whom the Dubai police had named as suspects worked for the Palestinian Authority, an arch-enemy of Hamas. (They were arrested in Jordan and turned over to Dubai.) Another person wanted by Dubai for questioning returned to Damascus just prior to the killing. And then there is the question of who in Syria played a role in stripping Mabhouh of his protection just hours before his flight to Dubai.

The key missing piece in the jigsaw remains Mabhouh's mission to Dubai—apparently important enough for him to travel there without his normal contingent of bodyguards.

Mabhouh arrived from the airport at his hotel shortly before 3 p.m., and after changing his clothes left for an unknown destination. He was gone for several hours. But even with its state-of-the-art surveillance cameras in Dubai, and extensive interviews with all the taxi drivers at the hotel, authorities claim they cannot determine either his whereabouts during these hours or the identity of whom he met.

The world-wide focus on the spooks—whose false identities allowed many of them to vanish in the intelligence netherworld—has diverted attention from the potentially embarrassing mission that brought Mabhouh to Dubai. The real intrigue here is not who killed a wanted terrorist, but what he was up to. Without this missing piece, any rush to judgment about who his killers were may be premature.

Mr. Epstein, who frequently writes on intelligence issues, is the author most recently of "The Hollywood Economist" (Melville, 2010).

rigorousintuition.ca - View topic - Britons queued at BenGurion Israeli officials clone passport

rigorousintuition.ca - View topic - Britain to expel Mossad's man in London

[AlicetheKurious]

Dubai is not exactly an uninterested party in the Mabhouh affair. It is, after all, the principal transshipment points for the lethal arms trade between Iran and Hamas—and Mabhouh had been one of the major players in this trade.

There is no basis whatsoever, even from a logistical point of view, let alone an evidential one, that Dubai is "the principal transshipment points" for any arms trade between Iran and Hamas. It's just one of those zionist articles of faith that Epstein's readers are expected to shut their eyes, hold their nose and swallow.

Furthermore, what "arms trade"? Is Iran supplying the 'home-made rockets' and handguns that proved so powerful in defending the people in Gaza against the Israeli blitzkrieg? Besides:

Another raid in Gaza city destroyed a metal workshop, witnesses said. Israel believes blacksmith workshops are used to produce rockets that Gaza factions fire on Israel. ...Small militant groups in Gaza fired makeshift Qassam rockets at Israeli targets from time to time, causing property damage and occasional casualties. Israel has been responding to such attacks with air raids targeting militants, suspected weapons factories and smuggling tunnels in the area. Link

The zionists seriously need to get their story straight.

In contrast to Iran's fictional supplies to Hamas, both Iran and Hizbullah openly acknowledge Iran's support for the Lebanese resistance, and that it's one reason (among many others) why the bloodthirsty Israeli invaders had their asses kicked out of Lebanon not once, but twice. Israel keeps repeating, through its various mouthpieces, that "Iran is supplying arms to Hamas". If so, where are they? Why are the people of Gaza so helpless to defend themselves from Israel's constant 'incursions' and air strikes if they have access to "lethal" weapons from Iran?

Furthermore, Epstein assumes that readers will dutifully ignore the fact that Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian territories, that it is engaged in war crimes against a trapped civilian population, and that the Palestinians have not only the legal right, but the duty to pursue an armed struggle to resist.

The real intrigue here is not who killed a wanted terrorist, but what he was up to.

Capturing and killing the soldiers of an illegal occupation force is not "terrorism" by any definition but the illegal occupier's. That would be the same occupier that labels the burning alive of refugees, including babies, and home demolitions, bombing hospitals and schools and electric power plants, and land theft for racist colonies, as "self-defense".

There were no wounds, bruises or other signs of foul play.

I don't know why this is being repeated, when initial reports specified that he had been beaten, even in the Israeli press.

Hamas posted pictures of Mabhouh's body on its Web site Sunday. The photos showed the body wrapped in a white burial shroud and a green Hamas flag and headband. Mabhouh appeared to have been beaten, with bruises and welts on his nose and cheeks. Jerusalem Post, 31/01/2010

Maybe it's just an ego thing, pretending that there were no "signs of foul play", to make the Mossad murder look really professional rather than the clumsy amateurish fiasco it was.

But even with its state-of-the-art surveillance cameras in Dubai, and extensive interviews with all the taxi drivers at the hotel, authorities claim they cannot determine either his whereabouts during these hours or the identity of whom he met.

Yet, according to the Jerusalem Post, "authorities" claimed no such thing:

Dubai’s police chief said Wednesday that Mabhouh “was transiting in Dubai before traveling to China and did not meet anyone in the emirate. He just went shopping and returned to his hotel, where the crime took place.” Jerusalem Post, 19/02/2010

What is the purpose of this stupid article? The money quote:

The world-wide focus on the spooks—whose false identities allowed many of them to vanish in the intelligence netherworld—has diverted attention from the potentially embarrassing mission that brought Mabhouh to Dubai.

There's nothing "potentially embarrassing" about what Mabhouh was doing in Dubai. It seems that the point of this cobbled-together mash of outright lies and misinformation is designed to divert attention from a very different "embarrassing mission": that of the bumbling Mossad killers, which exposed far too much about the Mossad's methods and criminality.

[Ben D]

Some movement....
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100612/ap_on_re_eu/hamas_slaying

Alleged Mossad spy arrested in hit-squad case

By JUERGEN BAETZ, Associated Press Writer – Sat Jun 12, 2:26 pm ET

BERLIN – An alleged Mossad spy from Israel wanted in connection with the hit-squad slaying of a Hamas agent in Dubai has been arrested in Poland, officials said Saturday.

The man, using the name Uri Brodsky, is suspected of working for Mossad in Germany and helping to issue a fake German passport to a member of the Mossad operation that allegedly killed Hamas agent Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai in January, a spokesman for the German federal prosecutor's office told The Associated Press.

Brodsky was arrested in early June upon his arrival in Poland because of a European arrest warrant issued by Germany which is now seeking his extradition, the spokesman said, declining to be named in line with department policy.
The spokesman had no estimate of how long it could take for Brodsky to be extradited from Poland to Germany, saying "the matter is now in the hands of the Polish authorities." If Brodsky agrees, the extradition could take a few days, but that isn't likely, the spokesman said.

In Warsaw, Monika Lewandowska, a spokeswoman for Polish prosecutors, confirmed that the suspect, identified only as Uri B., was arrested at the city's international airport on June 4. She told the AP that the arrest warrant was made "in connection with the murder of a Hamas member in Dubai."
-snip-