|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Michael Pollak
|| On Fri, 25 Jan 2002, rhisiart wrote:
||
|| > this link is now at
|| >
|| >http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_east/newsid_1780000/
|| 1780946.stm
||
|| Weirdly, if you listen to the two minute real audio interview with the
|| Belgian senator (Vincent van Quickenborne), he seems to say
|| almost exactly
|| the opposite of what's widely attributed to him. He says that Hobeika
|| told him specifically that he *wasn't* going to implicate
|| Sharon any more
|| deeply than he already is. Rather his goal was to exonerate
|| himself -- a
|| quest that strikes me as pretty hopeless. Also he said he
|| would prove his
|| case with documents -- and the Senator seems to think there is a good
|| chance that those documents are in "safe legal hands." In which case,
|| killing him won't have availed much.
||
You know scepticism is a good thing but this is denial, something that's endemic on this list. The senator very clearly said on BBC that he found the timing of the assassination very meaningful. Hobeika's testimony would have probably supported that of the survivors of the Israeli roundup at the stadium. He would supply the facts about what happened after the Israelis took people out of the stadium and disappeared them. Perhaps that's not enough to implicate Sahron personally, but if Hobeika thought he could prove he was just "following orders", who could concievably be giving those orders besides the Israelis? The Druze? The Hezbollah? The Syrians?
This assassination isn't just about Sharon, it's about Israel's occupation of Lebanon. So nobody has as strong a motive a Israel to eliminate Hobeika, nobody would risk the Phalangist backlash and civil war just for account-settling, and nobody else could pull off something like this in Phalangist west Beirut.
So please get real and stop sticking your head in the sand.
Hakki