A second Israeli assassination in eastern Europe?

Israel appears intent on maintaining its image as a pariah state that flouts international law in carrying out political assassinations using what many Israelis now see as a revived Mossad -- an intelligence agency that provides the same type of national self-esteem for Israelis as the Waffen SS did for German Nazis.

Israel is now suspected to using two Israel Defense Force (IDF) Gulfstream V intelligence aircraft in the skies over Budapest to assassinate Bassam Trache, a Hungarian-Syrian citizen. Trache was shot in his car by a single assassin on foot while he was stopped at a traffic light in the suburbs of Budapest. Trache's assassin, who has not been identified, also removed a briefcase from his car. The United States and the rest of NATO failed to respond to the Israeli aggression by using the collective defense clause that states that and attack on one NATO nation -- in this case, Hungary, is an attack against every NATO country. In fact, there is now evidence that three NATO nations -- Turkey, Bulgaria, and Romania conspired with the Israelis in allowing the IDF planes to overfly their territories to complete their deadly mission in Budapest. The Turkish General Staff and Air Force Command admitted that it had granted "conditional" overflight rights to the Israelis. The conditions stated by the air force were that the aircraft had to stay within set air corridors, could not refuel in mid-air, and not be "equipped with electronic apparatuses intended for photography, exploration and intelligence."

The Israeli aggression against Hungary follows the Mossad's assassination in a Dubai hotel of Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. The assassins used cloned passports from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Ireland, and Australia to enter the United Arab Emirates. The actions resulted in Britain expelling from the Israeli embassy in London the Mossad station chief and Dubai restricting the entry of Israelis into the city-state.

The Israeli incursion into Hungarian airspace took place on March 17 and Hungary's security services claimed they were not informed that the planes were flying into Hungary. The political toll in Hungary over the incident has already resulted in the suspension of the chief of the air transport division of Hungary's National Transport Authority (NKH) and members of his staff. Hungarian Defense Minister Imre Szekeres countered the Hungarian security services by saying the Defense Ministry had previously been informed of the Israeli aircraft "training exercise" over Budapest. However, Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai appeared to have been caught surprise by the Israeli action and he ordered a full investigation.

Israeli ambassador to Budapest Aliza Bin-Noun denied the Israeli planes conducted an intelligence mission even though Israel Radio reported the planes were equipped with the IDF's most sophisticated intelligence systems. After the Dubai incident and Israel's surprise announcement of further settlements building in east Jerusalem during Vice President Joe Biden's visit, a number of governments are inclined to disregard Israeli diplomatic statements as lies and distortions.

There were also reports that Hungary's Defense Ministry had not been informed of the Israeli aircraft mission. Defense Ministry spokesman Istvan Bocskai denied his ministry had been informed about the flights while Szekeres said the Israeli flights had been cleared with NATO and the European civil aviation administration, EUROCONTROL.

According to the4 Hungarian MTI news agency, Peter Honig, the Transport Minister, said the Israeli aircraft flight was not in full compliance with Hungarian law, while Gyorgy Keleti, a Socialist MP, said the planes represented a "national security risk" to Hungary.

Bajnai, a Socialist, faces a parliamentary election on April 11 and Jewish propaganda outlets in Israel and Hungary suggested that the opposition conservative Fidesz Party was hyping the Israeli aircraft incident to cater to anti-Semitic voters. However, polls conducted before the Israeli action showed Fidesz would trounce the Socialists without any grandstanding to anti-Semitic voters.

The overflight of several eastern European countries by two Israeli F-16s on the same day the Gulfstream Vs flew over Budapest was also reported by some eastern European media outlets.

On March 24, the Hungarian newspaper Nepszabadsag reported in an editorial that the Israeli aircraft were merely flying missions to collect radar signature data on the Russian-supplied advanced radar system at Slovak Nyitra in Slovakia and other Russian-manufactured radar systems used in Bulgaria and Romania. The paper, which generally leans to a pro-George Soros and Zionist line, suggested that the Israelis were collecting radar electronic signature data on the systems because they are also used by Iran. The editorial also suggested that Israel's operation was carried out with the knowledge of the United States.

Seymour Hersh: Secret US Forces Carried Out Assassinations in a Dozen Countries, Including in Latin America

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh created a stir earlier this month when he said the Bush administration ran an “executive assassination ring” that reported directly to Vice President Dick Cheney. “Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or to the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving,” Hersh said. Seymour Hersh joins us to explain. [includes rush transcript]

Guest:

Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist for The New Yorker. His latest article is titled “Syria Calling.”

Rush Transcript

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• "Syria Calling" (The New Yorker)

AMY GOODMAN: Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh created a stir last month when he said the Bush administration ran an executive assassination ring that reported directly to Vice President Dick Cheney. Hersh made the comment during a speech at the University of Minnesota on March 10th.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination wing, essentially. And it’s been going on and on and on. And just today in the Times there was a story saying that its leader, a three-star admiral named McRaven, ordered a stop to certain activities because there were so many collateral deaths. It’s been going in—under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or to the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving.

AMY GOODMAN: Yesterday, CNN interviewed Dick Cheney’s former national security adviser, John Hannah. Wolf Blitzer asked Hannah about Sy Hersh’s claim.

WOLF BLITZER: Is there a list of terrorists, suspected terrorists out there who can be assassinated?


JOHN HANNAH: There is clearly a group of people that go through a very extremely well-vetted process, inter-agency process, as I think was explained in your piece, that have committed acts of war against the United States, who are at war with the United States, or are suspected of planning operations of war against the United States, who authority is given to the troops in the field and in certain war theaters to capture or kill those individuals. That is certainly true.


WOLF BLITZER: And so, this would be, and from your perspective—and you worked in the Bush administration for many years—it would be totally constitutional, totally legal, to go out and find these guys and to whack ’em.


JOHN HANNAH: There’s no question that in a theater of war, when we are at war, and we know—there’s no doubt, we are still at war against al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and on that Pakistani border, that our troops have the authority to go after and capture and kill the enemy, including the leadership of the enemy.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s John Hannah, Dick Cheney’s former national security adviser. Seymour Hersh joins me now here in Washington, D.C., staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. His latest article appears in the current issue, called “Syria Calling: The Obama Administration’s Chance to Engage in a Middle East Peace.”

OK, welcome to Democracy Now!, Sy Hersh. It was good to see you last night at Georgetown. Talk about, first, these comments you made at the University of Minnesota.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, it was sort of stupid of me to start talking about stuff I haven’t written. I always kick myself when I do it. But I was with Walter Mondale, the former vice president, who was being amazingly open and sort of, for him—he had come a long way in—since I knew him as a senator who was reluctant to oppose the Vietnam War. And so, I was asked about future things, and I just—I am looking into stuff. I’ve done—there’s really nothing I said at Minnesota I haven’t written in the New York Times. Last summer, I wrote a long article about the Joint Special Operations Command.

And just to go back to what John Hannah, who is—was—I think ended up being the senior national security adviser, almost—if not the chief of staff, deputy chief of staff for Dick Cheney in the last three or four years, what he said is simply that, yes, we go after people suspected—that was the word he used—of crimes against America. And I have to tell you that there’s an executive order, signed by Jerry Ford, President Ford, in the ’70s, forbidding such action. It’s not only contrary—it’s illegal, it’s immoral, it’s counterproductive.

The evidence—the problem with having military go kill people when they’re not directly in combat, these are asking American troops to go out and find people and, as you said earlier, in one of the statements I made that you played, they go into countries without telling any of the authorities, the American ambassador, the CIA chief, certainly nobody in the government that we’re going into, and it’s far more than just in combat areas. There’s more—at least a dozen countries and perhaps more. The President has authorized these kinds of actions in the Middle East and also in Latin America, I will tell you, Central America, some countries. They’ve been—our boys have been told they can go and take the kind of executive action they need, and that’s simply—there’s no legal basis for it.

And not only that, if you look at Guantanamo, the American government knew by—well, let’s see, Guantanamo opened in early 2002. “Gitmo,” they call it, the base down in Cuba for alleged al-Qaeda terrorists. An internal report that I wrote about in a book I did years ago, an internal report made by the summer of 2002, estimated that at least half and possibly more of those people had nothing to do with actions against America. The intelligence we have is often very fragmentary, not very good. And the idea that the American president would think he has the constitutional power or the legal right to tell soldiers not engaged in immediate combat to go out and find people based on lists and execute them is just amazing to me. It’s amazing to me.

And not only that, Amy, the thing about George Bush is, everything’s sort of done in plain sight. In his State of the Union address, I think January the 28th, 2003, about a month and a half before we went into Iraq, Bush was describing the progress in the war, and he said—I’m paraphrasing, but this is pretty close—he said that we’ve captured more than 3,000 members of al-Qaeda and suspected members, people suspected of operations against us. And then he added with that little smile he has, “And let me tell you, some of those people will not be able to ever operate again. I can assure you that. They will not be in a position.” He’s clearly talking about killing people, and to applause.

So, there we are. I don’t back off what I said. I wish I hadn’t said it ad hoc, because, like I hope we’re going to talk about in a minute, I spend a lot of time writing stories for The New Yorker, and they’re very carefully vetted, and sometimes when you speak off the top, you’re not as precise.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what the Joint Special Operations Command is and what oversight Congress has of it.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, it’s a special unit. We have something called the Special Operations Command that operates out of Florida, and it involves a lot of wings. And one of the units that work under the umbrella of the Special Operations Command is known as Joint Special Op—JSOC. It’s a special unit. What makes it so special, it’s a group of elite people that include Navy Seals, some Navy Seals, Delta Force, our—what we call our black units, the commando units. “Commando” is a word they don’t like, but that’s what we, most of us, refer to them as. And they promote from within. It’s a unit that has its own promotion structure. And one of the elements, I must tell you, about getting ahead in promotion is the number of kills you have. Of course. Because it’s basically devised—it’s been transmogrified, if you will, into this unit that goes after high-value targets.

And where Cheney comes in and the idea of an assassination ring—I actually said “wing,” but of an assassination wing—that reports to Cheney was simply that they clear lists through the Vice President’s office. He’s not sitting around picking targets. They clear the lists. And he’s certainly deeply involved, less and less as time went on, of course, but in the beginning very closely involved. And this is the elite unit. I think they do three-month tours. And last summer, I wrote a long article in The New Yorker, last July, about how the JSOC operation is simply not available, and there’s no information provided by the executive to Congress.

AMY GOODMAN: What countries, Sy Hersh—what countries are they operating in?

SEYMOUR HERSH: A lot of countries.

AMY GOODMAN: Name some.

SEYMOUR HERSH: No, because I haven’t written about it, Amy. And I will tell you, as I say, in Central America, it’s far more than just the areas that Mr. Hannah talked about—Afghanistan, Iraq. You can understand an operation like this in the heat of battle in Iraq, killing—I mean, taking out enemy. That’s war. But when you go into other countries—let’s say Yemen, let’s say Peru, let’s say Colombia, let’s say Eritrea, let’s say Madagascar, let’s say Kenya, countries like that—and kill people who are believed on a list to be al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda-linked or anti-American, you’re violating most of the tenets.

We’re a country that believes very much in due process. That’s what it’s all about. We don’t give the President of United States the right to tell military people, even in a war—and it’s a war against an idea, war against terrorism. It’s not as if we’re at war against a committed uniformed enemy. It’s a very complicated war we’re in. And with each of those actions, of course, there’s always collateral deaths, and there’s always more people ending up becoming our enemies. That’s the tragedy of Guantanamo. By the time people, whether they were with us or against us when they got there, by the time they’ve been there three or four months, they’re dangerous to us, because of the way they’ve been treated. But I’d love to move on to what I wrote about in The New Yorker.

AMY GOODMAN: One question: Is the assassination wing continuing under President Obama?

SEYMOUR HERSH: How do I know? I hope not.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Sy Hersh. We’re going to go to break, and then we’ll be back with him, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His piece in The New Yorker is called “Syria Calling: The Obama Administration’s Chance to Engage in a Middle East Peace.” Stay with us.

Assassinatos seletivos

Lejeune Mirhan *

Desta vez a mídia grande não teve como esconder. No último dia 20 de janeiro, agentes do Serviço Secreto de Israel, o Mossad, assassinaram, a sangue frio, após uma sessão de tortura, um dos líderes do grupo Hamas, que luta pela libertação da Palestina.

Mahmoud Abdel Rauf Al Mabhouh encontrava-se hospedado em um hotel na cidade de Dubai, nos Emirados Árabes Unidos. Passado um mês, muitas investigações, acho fundamental que comentemos sobre esse caso esta semana.

Uma prática criminosa de Israel

Não é de hoje que Israel assassina líderes palestinos. E isso ocorre não só nos territórios ocupados ilegalmente por esse Estado criminoso e agressor. Fazem isso em qualquer lugar do mundo. Na Faixa de Gaza, Israel chega a usar bombardeios de alta precisão, lançados de aviões de combate, que atingem a casa específica de um líder da resistência, matando não só a liderança como também toda a sua família. Fez isso inclusive com um dos fundadores do Hamas, xeque Ahmed Yassin, morto em 2004.

Neste caso, o líder assassinado é um dos fundadores das Brigadas Ezzedine Al-Qassam, uma espécie de braço militar do Hamas. Uma pessoa do alto escalão da direção do grupo, que funciona como partido político de orientação religiosa e que atua quase que exclusivamente na Faixa de Gaza. Mahmoud, de 50 anos, que morava na cidade de Damasco com sua família, fazia viagens constantes à Dubai, nos EAU. No último dia 19 de janeiro, quando chegou à capital dos Emirados, dirigiu-se diretamente ao Hotel Al Bustan Rotana e hospedou-se no quarto 230. No dia seguinte, sai para dar uma volta pela cidade e retorna por volta das 8h30.

A partir desse momentos, entra em operação os 11 agentes do Mossad (que em Hebraico quer dizer “Instituto”, que é o nome do Instituto de Espionagem e Tarefas Especiais de Israel). Todos disfarçados (apenas uma mulher no grupo), usando bigodes e perucas falsas, usando passaportes europeus verdadeiros acabam entrando em seu quarto. E, por ironia, colocaram na porta o aviso “não perturbem”.

Mahmoud foi torturado antes de morrer. Foi eletrocutado. Apanhou dos agentes. Sofreu estrangulamento, sufocamento. E acabou sendo morto por uma injeção de veneno aplicada em suas veias. Uma morte cruel, à sangue frio, perpetradas pelos agentes do sionismo.

As repercussões e desdobramentos

Os 11 terroristas que agiram à mando de Israel, usaram passaportes de cidadãos ingleses, irlandeses, um francês e um alemão. Todos os cidadãos são reais, existem e moram em Israel, possuindo cidadania israelense. Mas não sabiam da operação. Um deles inclusive comentou à uma rádio israelense: “fui dormir com pneumonia e acordei assassino procurado em todo o mundo”. Não se sabe até hoje se pessoas dos serviços secretos desses países estiveram envolvidos em fornecer tais passaportes, todos originais, não falsificados, aos agentes, que os receberam no aeroporto Ben Gurion, em Tel Aviv.

O chefe de política dos EAU, general Dahi Jalfan Tamin, já não tem mais dúvidas. Essa operação foi feita pelos agentes do Mossad, que entraram ilegalmente em Dubai com esses passaportes. Já foram arrolados 26 pessoas suspeitas de participarem da operação, cujo centro de comando, foi montado na Áustria. Mandatos de prisão para todos os suspeitos foram emitidos pela Política Internacional – INTERPOL.

Essa operação secreta foi realizada com a concordância e a expressa autorização do próprio primeiro Ministro de Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. O conceituado jornal inglês, Sunday Times divulgou essa notícia semana passada de que uma reunião em meados de janeiro teria ocorrido na sede do Mossad em Tel Aviv com a presença pessoal de Netanyahu e do chefe da agência de espionagem de Israel, Meir Dagan, de 63 anos e veterano dessas operações. A equipe teria estado inclusive presente e a frase que Netanyahu teria dito foi a seguinte: “O povo de Israel confia em vocês. Boa sorte”. A operação foi considerada relativamente simples e de “baixo risco” (sic), como quem diz, uma “simples rotina”, nos serviços executados por essa equipe, que leva o nome de Kidon que em hebraico quer dizer “Punhal” e é especializada em operações no exterior, de exterminar lutadores da resistência palestina e opositores do projeto sionista e colonial do Estado judeu.

Há um clima relativamente tenso entre os países cujos cidadãos tiveram seus passaportes usados, como a França, Alemanha, Irlanda e Inglaterra. Estes dois últimos chegaram a chamar os embaixadores de Israel junto às suas chancelarias para protestar formalmente pelo uso indevido dos passaportes. A França de Sarkozy exigiu completo esclarecimento e condenou com veemência o assassinato. A direitista Ângela Merkel preferiu o silêncio.

No governo de Israel reina o silêncio cúmplice de quem sabe de tudo, mas não pode confessar ao mundo. Reconhecer que isso foi feito pelo Mossad seria a confissão pública daquilo que todo o mundo já sabe: Israel é um estado bandido, um estado terrorista que passa por cima de todas as leis internacionais. Um estado pária na comunidade das nações.

Assim, ninguém admite em público a operação. Mas, a ex-chanceler, Tzipi Livni, hoje na oposição, líder do Kadima, partido de centro-direita, acabou confessando e vibrando publicamente com a operação. Disse publicamente que a morte de Mahmoud é “uma boa notícia” (sic), ou seja, uma alta autoridade, uma candidata a primeira Ministra nas últimas eleições (poderia ter sido nomeada como tal), vibra abertamente, não se constrange em apoiar o assassinato seletivo. É um péssimo exemplo ao mundo, mas uma confissão do que é Israel hoje no muno.

A União Europeia emitiu uma nota condenando essa operação e o uso indevido de passaportes de quatro de seus estados membros. Mas, cautelosa e subserviente à Israel e ao poder do sionismo internacional, não menciona na nota o nome desse país.

Do lado palestino, uma unanimidade nesse ponto. Todos os grupos, todas as facões em luta condenaram com veemência o assassinato. O enterro de Mahmoud em Damasco atraiu uma grande multidão. O líder no exílio do Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, fez veemente discurso emocionado, prometendo revidar essa brutal assassinato.

Esse episódio não deverá passar em branco. Mais uma vez, a paz vai ficando cada dia mais distante e quase impossível. Com práticas como essa, que Israel adota não há como chegar a uma paz justa e duradoura. Lamento tudo isso, mas os tempos de paz, de harmonia, de terra para os palestinos ainda estão distantes.

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* Presidente do Sindicato dos Sociólogos do Estado de São Paulo, escritor, arabista e professor. Membro da Academia de Altos Estudos Ibero-Árabe de Lisboa e da International Sociological Association.