Disinformation Services

Mossad's spooks operate in accordance with the motto 'By deception, thou shalt do war', and regard the rest of the planet as their personal killing field. They've just rubbed out their latest target, this time in Dubai, but would have us believe, however implausible, that they're still somehow squeeky clean. How? Simple - just feed a few falsehoods to one of their journalist embeds in the Israeli media, and sit back and watch as propaganda mills such as Murdoch's News Limited, who think the sun shines out of Israel's nether regions, lap it up.

Take a look at the following headlines and opening sentence, for example:

"Crowded cast in Hamas's whodunnit/ The Gaza rulers have vowed revenge for an assassination, but there are too many suspects/ The Middle East has no shortage of people who one intelligence service or another want dead."

That's how The Australian's Middle East correspondent John Lyons opens his February 6 report on Mossad's assassination of Hamas freedom fighter Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in his Dubai hotel room on January 20. Lyon's claim is that "at least four intelligence services may have been gunning for him," and adds hilariously that "[t]he five passports he carried - four with false identities - suggested he had a few problems."

Lyons asserts that Mossad is merely "the obvious first suspect" in the crime. He then tables the following 'evidence' to back his insinuation that just about everyone in the region had it in for Mabhouh: "Hamas quickly suggested the involvement of Egyptians, Jordanians or even the complicity of Dubai. Some Hamas officials were reported to have posed a question worthy of Inspector Barnaby from Midsomer Murders: 'How did they (Dubai officials) know that they needed to inform the Hamas leadership and the family in Damascus that Mabhouh had died in a hotel room in Dubai despite the fact that he was registered under a different name and had entered with a passport bearing a different name?... One of Hamas's Lebanon-based officials, Osama Hamdan, had a different villain, implicating Hamas's Palestinian rival, Fatah, which runs the Palestinian Authority. 'It is quite possible that Palestinian Authority security forces were involved', he said."

Some Hamas officials, eh? who shall remain nameless.

In fact, Lyons has simply taken his cue, unacknowledged, from the 'reporting' of Haaretz's Arab affairs correspondent Avi Issacharoff: "Even the first suspicion of Mabhouh's relatives and Hamas... has been replaced by suspicions that an Arab intelligence organization may have been responsible for his death. Dubai police chief Dahi Khalfan told Arab journalists Sunday that he was not ruling out the possibility that the Mossad had killed Mabhouh, but neither was he ruling out other suspects. Unofficially, Hamas has conceded that quite a few parties had an interest in taking out Mabhouh, who had become central to the Iran-Gaza Strip axis... A Hamas source yesterday told Haaretz that Mabhouh had been imprisoned in Egypt for almost a year in 2003, and that he was wanted not only by the Israelis, but also by the Jordanians and the Egyptians and did not lack enemies." (Who killed Mahmoud al-Mabhouh?/Many wanted Hamas man dead, 3/2/10)

The words unofficially and a Hamas source would be a dead give away for any serious journalist - but not for the likes of Lyons.

Issacharoff continued hammering the same theme 3 days later with a reference to a supposed Hamas preliminary investigation, which merely suggests that the likely assassins were Arabs: "A preliminary investigation conducted by Hamas suggests that the assassination of one of its officials in Dubai last month was likely carried out by agents of an Arab government, and not by Israel's Mossad spy agency... [D]etails of a Hamas inquiry passed to Haaretz reveal that Arab states, not Israel, now top the suspect list. Both Hamas and Dubai police say that Mabhouh had enemies across the Middle East, any of whom may have had a motive for his murder. A Hamas source told Haaretz on Monday that Mabhouh was wanted by authorities in both Jordan and Egypt, where he previously spent a year in prison. Hamas also suspects its Palestinian rivals in the West Bank. 'It is quite possible that Palestinian Authority security forces were involved', Osama Hamdan, a Hamas leader in Lebanon, told Hezbollah's television station Al-Manar on Monday." (Hamas: Dubai assassins were likely Arabs, not Israelis, 6/2/10)

Unfortunately, the ms media being what it is, Issacharoff's Mossad forgery, and its spin-offs such as Lyons', will be off and running, possibly even going on to achieve the status of received wisdom, while the following reality check from Dubai's Gulf News will, likely as not, not even make it out of the starter's gate: "Chief of Dubai Police and Hamas officials on Tuesday made light of an Israeli press report pointing fingers at Arab parties, and not Israelis, for the assassination of a Hamas leader in Dubai two weeks ago. 'As usual, they are lying', Lt General Dahi Khalfan Tamim, Chief of Dubai Police, told Gulf News when reached for his comment on a report published by the Haaretz newspaper. Hamas officials, also, accused the Israeli media of deception and 'covering their crime', a reference to the killing of senior Hamas military commander Mahmoud Al Mabhouh in his hotel room... Hamas officials... stressed that no official from the resistance group would give such statements to an Israeli newspaper. Osama Hamdan, Hamas spokesperson in Beirut, said: 'This is fabrication... They [Israelis] are aiming to create problems'. Musheer Al Masri, a Hamas official in the Gaza Strip, too, scoffed at the Israeli report. He explained that 'investigations were not completed until this moment'... Dubai Police have not excluded any possible angle in the killing but indicated that the crime points to Mossad involvement." (Al Mabhouh slaying: Dahi, Hamas rebut Israeli report, Jumana Al Tamimi, gulfnews.com, 3/2/10)

And that sketchy reference in Issacharoff/Lyons to Mabhouh being wanted by the Egyptians, isn't it strange that no mention is made of it by Saleh Al-Naami in his report on the assassination in Egypt's Al-Ahram Weekly, Several birds, one stone (4-10/2/10 )? Is it any wonder I couldn't be bothered checking out their reference to Jordan?

PS: Hey, John. Seen this? "If there were ever any doubts about Israel's responsibility, Britain, France and Ireland put them to rest by publicly asking Israel to explain the fraudulent use of their passports to smuggle the killers into the Gulf city-state." (US credit card link to Dubai killing, The Australian, 20/2/10, The Wall Street Journal, Agencies)