Condi Rice and Geroge Bush have been demanding the UN takes up the case of alleged Syrian involvement in former Lebanese Premier Hariri's assassination. Condi Rice went so far as to tell the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
that "all options are on the table" in regards to Syria, the same bellicose language that was used before the US invaded Iraq. At issue is the UN's Mehlis report, the key source having been a former Syrian intelligence officer, Zuheir al-Siddiq. We now have a breaking story from the German magazine Der Speigel in which serious questions are being raised about Siddig's reliability as a witness, a reliability which sounds remarkably similar to that of Chalabi, the Iraqi exile that fed Judy Miller of the NY
Times all the stories about Saddam working on an atomic bomb.
Bush and Rice, and their neocon allies in the media, are whipping the war fever against Syria, and just as they relied on forged documents to spread the lies about Saddam trying to get yellow cake uranium from Niger, we now have another fraud being perpetrated on the gullible public.
We should have suspected the Syria-Hariri assassination "linkage" the moment we saw Condi Rice and Bush railing against Syria. Those two have never told the truth about anything!
Link to original SPIEGEL article (in German) -
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,381056,00.html
Here is an English translation of the Spiegel article published in the Arab press:
Central witness to Mehlis report revealed as a paid swindler
Hamburg, 22 October - The most prestigious German political news-magazine, Der Spiegel, revealed today that the central witness, Zuheir al-Siddiq on whom Detlev Mehlis had relied during his investigations into the assault on Rafiq Hariri, was a dubious person with a criminal record as a convicted felon and swindler. Even the UN Commission which had submitted the Mehlis report to the UN Security Council yesterday, is raising serious doubts about the reliability and credibility of al-Siddiq's declarations, since it was revealed that the alleged former officer of the Syrian secret services had in reality been convicted more than once for penal offences related to money subtraction.
The German magazine reports that the UN investigating Commission is well aware that it had been lied by Siddiq, who at first had affirmed to have left Beirut one month before the assault on al-Hariri, but then had to admit at the end of September his direct involvement in the implementation of the crime. It is quite evident by now that the witness had received money for his depositions, considering that his siblings reveal to have received a phone-call from him from Paris, in late summer, in which Siddiq announced "I have become a millionaire". Doubts regarding the credibility of the man were further fuelled by the revelation that Siddiq had been recommended to Mehlis by the long-term Syrian renegate Rifaat al-Assad, an uncle of the Syrian President who more than once offered himself as "alternative President of Syria".
To Mehlis the central witness Siddiq is supposed to have declared that he had put his apartment in Beirut to the disposition of the conspirators to kill Hariri, among them several Syrian intelligence officials. Of himself he had declared to have gathered intelligence for the Syrian services regarding Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. But the Syrian government, revealed Der Spiegel, had sent weeks ago a documentation regarding the man to various Western governments, hoping that Detlev Mehlis would not get caught in the trap of a notorious imposter.
http://www.arabmonitor.info/news/dettaglio.php?idnews=11679&lang=en