Scott Johnson at Power Line posted a very interesting article yesterday about the murder of Hamas leader Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh in Dubai last year. The article links to a GQ article by Ronen Bergman about the killing.
The article points out the Dubai in its coverage of the murder failed to mention some basic parts of the events surrounding the killing:
"Until now, the authorities have established a clear, detailed timeline. By studying hundreds of hours of closed-circuit security footage, they have meticulously reconstructed the movements of the many characters involved in the unfolding drama. But when Al-Mabhouh arrives at the mall, the river of information suddenly goes dry. What did he do during the next four hours, which were to be the last of his life? Where did he go? With whom did he meet? The official report does not provide even a sketchy outline of the missing hours.
"According to Israeli intelligence sources, Al-Mabhouh met with a banker who was assisting him with various international weapons transactions, and with his regular contact from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, who flew in to coordinate the delivery of two large shipments of weapons to Hamas the following month. The Dubai police had good reason to gloss over this part of the narrative, if they were indeed aware of it. Providing details of Al-Mabhouh's contacts would have been highly embarrassing to authorities eager to paint Dubai as a squeaky-clean international business center. It would also have served as a reminder that the victim of this cold-blooded Israeli execution had a fair amount of blood on his hands, raising inconvenient questions about why Al-Mabhouh was there in the first place--questions that the media largely forgot to ask in the furor that erupted after his assassination."
The GQ article is a detailed explaination of the mission. It shows where mistakes were made and the consequences of those mistakes. It points out a very interesting fact about Israeli secret intelligence missions:
"When it comes to false identities and false passports, the Mossad has a unique problem, one that most Western intelligence services do not face. When the CIA or the British SIS (or MI6, as it is commonly known) send an operative into the field, they can usually provide him or her with a valid U.S. or U.K. passport issued in whatever false name and identity the individual will be using. But an Israeli spy cannot use an Israeli passport, since the most important targets for Israeli espionage are in countries that do not maintain diplomatic relations with Israel. For this reason, the need for foreign documentation has always been an acute one in the Mossad, which has historically resolved this problem by forging what it needed. Naturally, this is done without the authorization of the countries involved."
I don't support 'hit teams' going into foreign countries and killing people they deem as evil, but I can easily understand why Israel thought this was necessary. Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh (aside from killing two defenseless Israeli soldiers in 1989) has been financing and planning suicide bombings in Israel and the trafficking of huge amounts of rockets and sophisticated weaponry into Gaza, which have been used to devastating effect since the start of the second intifada in 2000. By killing Al-Mabhouh, Israel probably saved a lot of lives. Again, I don't approve of assassinations of private citizens by foreign countries, but until the world takes terrorism seriously enough to deal with people who sell arms to terrorists, I am not sure there is an alternative.
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