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[MinM]

Lebanese in Shock Over Arrest of an Accused Spy

Ali al-Jarrah

MARAJ, Lebanon — For 25 years, Ali al-Jarrah managed to live on both sides of the bitterest divide running through this region. To friends and neighbors, he was an earnest supporter of the Palestinian cause, an affable, white-haired family man who worked as an administrator at a nearby school.

To Israel, he appears to have been a valued spy, sending reports and taking clandestine photographs of Palestinian groups and Hezbollah since 1983.

Now he sits in a Lebanese prison cell, accused by the authorities of betraying his country to an enemy state. Months after his arrest, his friends and former colleagues are still in shock over the extent of his deceptions: the carefully disguised trips abroad, the unexplained cash, the secret second wife.

Lebanese investigators say he has confessed to a career of espionage spectacular in its scope and longevity, a real-life John le Carré novel. Many intelligence agents are said to operate in the civil chaos of Lebanon, but Mr. Jarrah’s arrest has shed a rare light onto a world of spying and subversion that usually persists in secret.

Mr. Jarrah’s first wife maintains that he was tortured, and is innocent; requests to interview him were denied.

From his home in this Bekaa Valley village, Mr. Jarrah, 50, traveled often to Syria and to south Lebanon, where he photographed roads and convoys that might have been used to transport weapons to Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group, investigators say. He spoke with his handlers by satellite phone, receiving “dead drops” of money, cameras and listening devices. Occasionally, on the pretext of a business trip, he traveled to Belgium and Italy, received an Israeli passport, and flew to Israel, where he was debriefed at length, investigators say.

At the start of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, Israeli officials called Mr. Jarrah to reassure him that his village would be spared and that he should stay at home, investigators said.

He was finally arrested last July by Hezbollah, which now has perhaps the most powerful intelligence apparatus in this country. It handed him to the Lebanese military — along with his brother Yusuf, who is accused of helping him spy — and he awaits trial by a military court.

Several current and former military officials agreed to provide details about his case on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to discuss it before the trial began. Their accounts tallied with details provided by Mr. Jarrah’s relatives and former colleagues.

It is not the family’s first brush with notoriety. One of Mr. Jarrah’s cousins, Ziad al-Jarrah, was among the 19 hijackers who carried out the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, though the men were 20 years apart in age and do not appear to have known each other well.

Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, declined to discuss Mr. Jarrah’s situation, saying, “It is not our practice to publicly talk about any such allegations in this case or in any case.”

Villagers here seemed incredulous that a man they knew all their lives could have taken money to spy for a country that they regard with unmixed hatred and disgust.

Many maintained his innocence. But Raja Mosleh, the Palestinian doctor who was his partner for years in a school and health clinic near here, did not.

“I never suspected him before,” Dr. Mosleh said. “But now, after linking all the incidents together, I feel he’s 100 percent guilty.”

“He used to talk about the Palestinian cause all the time, how he supported the cause, he supported the people, he liked everybody — this son of a dog,” Dr. Mosleh added, his voice thick with contempt.

Mr. Jarrah would often borrow money to buy cigarettes, apparently posing as a man of limited means. Investigators say he received more than $300,000 for his work from Israel.

Only recently did he begin to spend in ways that raised questions. About six years ago, neighbors said, he built a three-story villa with a terra-cotta roof that is by far the grandest house in this modest village of low concrete dwellings. Outside is a small roofed archway and a heavy iron gate, and on a recent day a German shepherd stood guard.

Dr. Mosleh asked him where he got the money, and Mr. Jarrah said he got help from a daughter living in Brazil. It is a natural excuse in Lebanon, where a large portion of the population receives remittances from relatives abroad.

Mr. Jarrah also had a secret second wife, according to investigators and his former colleagues. Unlike his first wife, Maryam Shmouri al-Jarrah, who lived in relative grandeur with their five children in Maraj, the second wife lived in a cheap apartment in the town of Masnaa, near the Syrian border. This apparently allowed Mr. Jarrah to travel near the border in the unremarkable guise of a local working-class man.

Mr. Jarrah has said he was recruited in 1983 — a year after Israel began a major invasion of Lebanon — by Israeli officers who had imprisoned him, according to investigators. He was offered regular payments in exchange for information about Palestinian militants and Syrian troop movements, they said.

After Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, thousands of Lebanese from the occupied zone in the south were tried and sentenced — mostly to light prison terms — for collaborating with Israel.

Far from the border, a different class of collaborators, rooted in their communities, persisted. A few have been caught and sentenced.

Mr. Jarrah’s motives remain a mystery. He said he tried to stop, but the Israelis would not let him, investigators said.

It all came to an end last summer. He went on a trip to Syria in July, and when he returned he said he had been briefly detained by the Syrian police, his first wife said. He seemed very uneasy, not his usual self, she said.

He left the house that night, saying he was going to Beirut, and never returned, Mrs. Jarrah said. Only three months later did she get a call from the Lebanese Army saying it had taken custody of him.

A few weeks ago, Mrs. Jarrah said, she was allowed to see him. He looked terrible, exhausted, she said.

Lebanese security forces released a photograph of Mr. Jarrah, taken before his arrest. In it, he appears against a blue and white backdrop, dressed in a formal dark shirt, wearing an enigmatic smile.

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, and Ethan Bronner from Jerusalem.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/world/middleeast/19lebanon.html
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'Like a Duck in a Noose'

[JackRiddler]

.

THIS POST DOESN'T COUNT B/C IT'S TOTALLY SPECULATIVE. Consider it a plot for a novel.

Three possible 9/11 operative teams:

One recruits real Islamists, or subcontracts their recruitment, or assembles patsies to look like the real thing, or tracks them, manipulates them or otherwise constructs the trail of hijackers.

One arranges and follows the events of the day in the air and necessarily involves or arranges the chain of command AWOL and the air defense circumvention. Since this is the network most ensconced within the government itself, I would expect the job of circumventing advance uncovering of the plot, losing the warnings, blocking things at Alec Station and Able Danger and the FBI is also centered here. (Pure intuition.) I would also expect this to be the approximate location of the full-operation executive and witting chief sponsors or planners.

The third, about which I am agnostic (since it's not necessary to the motives of the overall plot), is busy at the World Trade Center.

Afterward it's on the front-side officials to see to the cover-up, and to the media to predictably follow its conditioning.

If I had to guess what entities these three teams come out of in a game of "gun to your head," currently these guesses would be: 1) a nexus of spooks in subcontract to the No. 2 category, drawing from networks including Mossad and ISI; 2) a network around Cheney and Rumsfeld with experience in CoG exercises, Iran-Contra and Bush mob activities going back to the Safari Club, who understand themselves as constituting part of the permanent national security state, whether in or out of office; 3) (if) a small unit from a private military contractor or special forces under tight command, with a maintenance contract or security clearance for the Towers.

The operative commanders of the whole will be someone with Iran-Contra chops (and several miles of resentment at the rest of the world for being a bunch of com-symp surrender monkeys). Today, on a lark, I hereby pick Poindexter and North.

Now that I've solved 9/11 yet again, I'm off to lunch. (Color that ironic. Sorry!)

.

[American Dream]

Jack, your speculation sounds entirely credible to me, based on what I know of the situation.

Here, to add speculation on top of speculation is my added question:

If patsies were indeed part of this, to what degree, if any, were bonafide "mind control" techniques a part of the scenario? Who is running those ops and how do they run them?

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

Good hypothesis, JR.

Tarpley's historical false-flag model of:
> Dupes
> Moles
> Mechanics
...follows that model of specialization and compartmentalization, too.
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CIA runs mainstream media since WWII:
news rooms, movies/TV, publishing
...
Disney is CIA for kidz!

[JackRiddler]

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Back from sushi and wishing to apologize for the speculative outburst.* (HMW see note below.) After all, this is a very interesting story and worth a good search for all other stories on it. What I found for a start is a few about the breaking Lebanon spy arrests, not Jarrah.

Jarrah was arrested last year, apparently - why NYT suddenly interested?

What was the brother's role? How well did they know their nephew? Was that the extent of the Israeli penetration of the family, or the village?

Is this guy going to turn into a crown witness? Will his case be a big cause for Hizbollah, or Iran?

What's the relation to the other arrests, and the other localities mentioned in the reports (Nabatiyeh as opposed to Maraj, see stories below)?

I can easily see a swirl of 9/11 speculations -- well-founded or not -- bringing the issue back, perhaps encouraging other developments. For what it's worth, the public Iran-Contra revelations and limitation scandals started with a story out of the Beirut Star.

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Jewish Telegraph Agency
http://jta.org/news/article/2009/02/19/1003113/lebanese-arrest-man-on-spy-charges

[JackRiddler]

[Penguin]

Yeah. Too bad 8bitagent isnt here anymore to butt in
But I agree with JackRiddler.
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"Brother Gatling Gun of Patience"

[stickdog99]

[JackRiddler]

.

Seems like a good thread to kick on Sept. 12, 2009.

I like my own posts, anyway.

[nathan28]

Fuck 9/11. Whatever falsehoods and injustice crying out for correction that Troofers discover has been consigned to the scrapheap of history for the LaRouchites and fabulists to turn to shit. So forget about it.

And what with the Obamacons in office now we have a crowd of ascendant elites less interested in resorting to violence. The neocons and their retarded-ass president are gone. Done with. Over. Ollie North and John Poindexter are too fucking old to get involved in anymore pernicious shit. The "Traders" and their soft-touch Friendly Fascist asshole crowd of paternalistic libertarian policy wonktards with their program of In The Future You Will Enjoy Working Harder For Even Less Pay Because You Have An iPhone have taken power away from the militant fascist hawk Arrest The Pinkos and Bomb The Village To Save It crowd, who had 30 years of ascendancy with Team Bush.
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THE JEERLEADER

[nathan28]

Oh, and welcome back, JR
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THE JEERLEADER

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[nathan28]