Mossad Assassination of Zia ul-Haqis is a Non-News in America

John Gunther Dean, former US ambassador to India, suspects Mossad of assassinating Pakistan's General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq and yet this is not considered a news item in the United States. It’s an important news story in Pakistan, of course, and Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, India, North Korea, Taiwan, and even Australia and Britain, but not here in the United States. As of this evening, a Google News search returns eleven results on this story.

"Of all the violent political deaths in the twentieth century, none with such great interest to the United States has been more clouded than the mysterious air crash that killed President [and Army Chief General] Mohammed Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan in [August] 1988, a tragedy that also claimed the life of a serving American ambassador and most of General Zia's top commanders," writes Barbara Crossette, the New York Times bureau chief in South Asia from 1988 to 1991. "The list of potential malefactors has grown as the years have passed, compounding the mysteries buried in this peculiar, unfinished tale."

The one unarguable fact is that no serious, conclusive, or even comprehensive inquiry into the crash has been undertaken in the United States, although one of its top diplomats, Arnold Raphel, and an American general were killed—and in an Americanbuilt aircraft. Congress held a few hearings, but the FBI was kept away from the case for a year. No official report was made public. Indeed, a file in the National Archives containing about 250 pages of documents on the event is still classified secret.

Classified secret because the U.S. government knows damn well who killed President Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, Arnold Raphel, and an American general—the Israelis, the same Israelis who attacked the USS Liberty and killed 34 US seamen and wounded 171 out of a crew of 297. "Despite the overwhelming evidence that Israel attacked the ship and killed American servicemen deliberately, the Johnson Administration and Congress covered up the entire incident,"...

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