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Been there....done that! Dubai, Mossad, assassinations, CCTV, etc. etc.

It's all over the news....what appears almost certain to have been Mossad's assassination of a Hamas leader in Dubai. The story has still some way to unfold.

Meanwhile, Paul McGeough, veteran journalist in the Middle East and author of the must-read book, Kill Khalid: The Failed Mossad Assassination of Khalid Mishal and the Rise of Hamas, [the true account of the attempt by Mossad to assassinate Khalid Mishal in Amman back in 1997] is interviewed on Democracy Now, bringing up-to-date the present situation of the assassination in Dubai and putting the whole thing into context:

"Well, the similarities are that the Mossad chose, and funnily enough, while Benjamin Netanyahu was prime minister in an earlier incarnation—these sorts of missions require the prime minister’s sign-off—they chose a foreign setting. They chose Amman, the capital of Jordan, notwithstanding the fact that King Hussein of Jordan was Israel’s best friend in the Arab world and had gone out on a limb to sign a peace treaty with Israel.

Again, it was a very clever plan. They proposed that they would inject a secret mysterious poison into Khalid Mishal’s ear as he walked down the street. He wasn’t expected to be aware that this had happened. The hope was that he would go home and lie down, feeling tired, and die. And when there was an autopsy, there would be no trace of this mysterious poison in his system.

In fact, what happened was, the brilliance of the plan ended up being its Achilles’ heel, because they left enough time for the poison to work so that Mishal would have departed the setting of the injection, so that his people would not link the accidental bumping of somebody up against him in the street with his subsequent death. But the time they left for the poison to work was the time in which Jordanian doctors were able to put in place the effort to save him.

And while that was going on, Mishal’s bodyguards captured two of the Mossad agents, thereby delivering to King Hussein bargaining chips. King Hussein was able to demand, in deliberate humiliation of Benjamin Netanyahu, the release of Hamas prisoners from Israeli prisons. And also he put the word on Bill Clinton, then US president, to force Netanyahu to hand over to the Jordanians the secret poison and an antidote."

Go here to read the whole most interesting interview.

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