Chimp_junta takes a preliminary, non-accusatory report and tries to sell a new war with it...the little bastard!

Washington seizes on UN report to threaten Syria

By Bill Van Auken
24 October 2005

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The Bush administration has seized upon the release of a United Nations report implicating senior Syrian and Lebanese officials in last February’s assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister and billionaire businessman Rafik Hariri as a pretext for escalating its threats against Damascus.

Backed by Britain, its principal ally in the Iraq war and occupation, Washington is pressing for a meeting of the United Nations Security Council this week to consider imposing international sanctions against the Syrian regime of President Bashar Assad.

The UN report cannot be “left lying on the table,” US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in a joint BBC interview with her British counterpart, Foreign Minister Jack Straw. “This really has to be dealt with.”

“The report indicates that people of a high level of this Syrian regime were implicated,” declared Straw. “We also have evidence from the Mehlis report of false testimony being given by senior people in the regime. This is very serious.”

The report, prepared by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, represents the interim findings of the UN-mandated investigation. Much of it consists of a description of the political situation in Lebanon in the period leading up to the assassination. The document makes clear that there does not yet exist sufficient evidence to charge anyone with Hariri’s killing, and that a “presumption of innocence” applies to those supposedly implicated.

Calling the report “politically biased,” the Syrian regime has vigorously denied the charge that top-level officials—including two members of President Assad’s family—were involved, and that it deliberately misled the UN investigators.

“It is a political statement against Syria based on allegations by witnesses known for their hostility to Syria,” declared information minister Mehdi Dakhlallah Friday in an interview with the Qatar-based television network, Al Jazeera.

At a Saturday news conference in Damascus, Syrian Foreign Minister Riyad Dawoodi also condemned the report as politically biased, based upon “presumptions and allegations,” but “no proof.”

“There’s a presumption taken by the (UN) commission that the very presence of Syrian troops and the Syrian security organs in Lebanon is something which should imply so and so and so,” he said. “You cannot put any weight on the idea (that) because you are present in Lebanon, everything happening in Lebanon ... should be done according to your knowledge and you know about it.”

The foreign minister continued: “The report has a conclusion that this operation, the assassination of late Prime Minister Hariri, cannot be done without a means, a very sophisticated means which belongs to a highly equipped security organ. And you just look around you, who is very, very well equipped?”

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