Syria is definitely feeling the heat.
This, I must say, stunned me:
The publication of the report on the deaths of Hariri and 22 other people in a car bombing in Beirut on Feb. 14 unleashed a reaction seldom seen in the Middle East. The 54-page document was read in its entirety on al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite television network; other stations broadcast hours of coverage Friday on the report and its fallout. To many people here, its publication marked a turning point in Middle East politics, signaling a looming confrontation with an uncertain outcome. (My emph.)
Of course, the report itself didn't directly blame the Syrian government. But the implication was certainly clear enough.
The report stopped short of directly blaming President Bashar Assad or members of his inner circle, where his relatives occupy the most sensitive posts. But it bluntly said that the investigation's leads pointed directly at involvement by Syrian security officials in the assassination and insisted that Syria clarify unresolved questions.
And, of course, there's virtually no chance Syrian intelligence was involved without the blessing of the top levels of Syrian government.
This article doesn't go into it, but the broadcast stories last night were focusing on the complaints that Syria wasn't cooperating, was essentially "obstructing justice," and the role that complaint played in getting an extension to the investigation. But while the article didn't tease out those implications, it did lay out some specifics:
The report said Syria's longtime foreign minister, Farouk Charaa, lied in a letter to investigators. It also cited one witness as implicating Assad's powerful brother-in-law, Asef Shawkat. Another claim that Shawkat, Assad's brother Maher and other senior officials played a role in planning the assassination was deleted from the final report.
The article also goes into great detail regarding the pressure this puts on the pro-Syrian Lebanese Prime Minister, who is implicated in the report at least as someone who knew what the Syrians were up to. The Lebanese have been awaiting this report with baited breath, and this may still shake their politics to the core. (The reporter notes that the Syrian people are somewhat blase about the report, weren't waiting for it, don't seem interested in it. But he doesn't point out that this says more about the fact that the Lebanese managed to throw over the oppressive yoke of Syrian intelligence than anything else.)
By the way, engaged in my usual channel surfing, I got bits of all three networks coverage of the report, but not any of the three in their entirety. I've got a question for you guys that I won't be able to resolve until I get to the office Monday and get access to Lexis-Nexis. It seemed to me as the nets did not mention that the President has asked Condi to take this to the Security Council. Did any of you catch a network report last night? If so, please let me know if they reported on the UN angle using the comments section.
Update: Now this is fascinating. The Post's article, you'll notice, is page 1. The Times makes the report its lead story, but takes a completely different approach. Normally when I compare the coverage of the two papers, we're looking at differences in framing, the use of different quotations, so on and so forth, and the comparison is so important because we've got two outlets covering the same story in ways that are different on the margins but that have enormous differences in a reader's ultimate understanding of an event. This time the two papers have looked at the event and simply decided that radically different aspects of it are what merit coverage. So while the Post focused on the way the report was received in the two countries most impacted -- Syria and Lebanon -- the Times is providing a straight news focus on the United States' efforts to have the report taken up by the United Nations and what that will mean. In other words the two papers (as is regularly the case) had the same news judgment about what was likely the top story of the day -- the UN report on the Hariri assassination -- but had radically divergent judgments on what was the most important way to cover that story (which is far less often the case.)
This approach also means we get much more from the Times about the details of what's actually in the report. (I find it interesting, given that the UN has never come to agreement on a single definition of what "terrorism" is, that the German prosecutor responsible for the report apparently called this an act of terrorism. To me, by the way, this would not meet the definition since the very essence of the crime, what's got everybody so up in arms, is that it's not just state-sponsored, ordered by a state, it's likely state-conducted. For my money, terrorism is violence undertaken by sub-state actors.)
Now, look at this:
Though the report transmitted to Security Council members on Thursday evening did not name the key conspirators, an electronic version of it that included five names was distributed to some media outlets. The names included those of Maher Assad, brother of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and their brother-in-law Asef Shawkat, the chief of military intelligence, who is considered the most powerful man in the country after the president.
Excellent. So the Times obviously was on the distribution list for the electronic version.
Hey, Times -- where's the hyperlink? Is the thing classified? Why would it be? (In fact it's on the UN's web site. The Times, as you no doubt have noticed, always scatters its stories with annoying and worthless links, like for "Britain" and "Alabama." Why not actually add useful links, like to the very report the story is about? Those never seem to be available. (Especially for the Times' polling results, but I digress.)
Now, speaking of making the report public, this is absolutely intriguing. Doth the UN protest too much?
The last-minute adjustments to the report, made Thursday morning when Mr. Mehlis was meeting with Secretary General Kofi Annan, raised questions among reporters of whether the United Nations chief had asked that the report be toned down and made less accusatory of individuals.
Mr. Mehlis held a news conference and Mr. Annan released a statement on Friday, both vigorously denying there had been any interference.
Stepháne Dujarric, Mr. Annan's spokesman, said that the secretary general had insisted from the start on the independence of Mr. Mehlis's report. "The secretary general has at no time made any attempt to influence the content of the report," he said.
Mr. Mehlis said, "No one outside of the report team influenced these changes and no changes whatsoever were suggested by the secretary general or anyone at the U.N."
He said he himself had taken the step once he realized the report was to be made public Thursday night. He explained that he thought it was important to maintain their "presumption of innocence" since they had only been accused by an anonymous source.
Otherwise, he said, "It could give the wrong impression that this was an established fact."
The published report makes a single reference to Mr. Shawkat, saying he tried to force Ahmad Abu Adass, a member of a militant Islamic group, to make a false confession at gunpoint. The Mehlis report said that Mr. Adass had nothing to do with the crime.
But if that's intriguing, this is just annoying:
In an interview this week with the German news magazine Stern, Mr. Mehlis acknowledged that he knew his report would fuel the American-led campaign against Syria. "I don't want to compare myself to Hans Blix, but I know now how he must have felt," he said. His reference was to the former United Nations arms inspector in Iraq whose findings that there were no unconventional weapons were contested by Washington.
Perhaps this will fuel a campaign against Syria because Syria is worth campaigning against. What does the Times hope to accomplish by bringing up Blix? By their own account Mehlis is "a 25-year veteran of the Berlin prosecutor's office with a record of solving high-profile terror cases." Is this an effort to subtly imply that the United States has been attempting to exert pressure on him? To imply that there's a reason to doubt the contents of this report? What's the point of this?
Update: Then again, this story from the Times of London might explain why the hyperlink was missing. The Times story leaves the clear impression that certain outlets were simply given a more comprehensive version, no particular reason why, ho hum. When in fact, by mistake, they were given a version that had the feature that tracks edits turned on. Which of course also means that it's also possible to tell what time the edits were made. Which is information the Times (of New York) should have given its readers, don't you think, since, as the Times (of London) points out, when you match the time of the edits against the time Mehlis presented the final draft to Kofi, the story that Kofi did not pressure Mehlis, and had nothing to do with those final changes becomes much, much harder to sustain.
The Times of London, being a British paper, doesn't see its role as presenting the evidence and stopping there -- they draw the conclusions for the reader. It wasn't necessary for the Times of New York to go that far. But this was essential evidence in evaluating the UN's denials, and they denied their reader's the opportunity to fully and completely evaluate those denials when they kept that evidence out of the story, leaving their readers less than fully informed.
Shame on them. They may not believe the report was watered down on Kofi's orders, but that's a conclusion for the individual reader to draw, and it isn't their place to make it impossible for the reader to come to a fully informed conclusion. I didn't realize newspapers were in the business -- particularly so-called "elite" papers who have such a high impression of their audience -- of patronizing their audience.
Update: The Jerusalem Post (like the Times of London via Memeorandum) makes short work of the excuse the New York Times hung its hat on:
However, Mehlis admitted to making the last-minute changes after learning that the report would be made public, and would not remain confidential.
It was not clear how Mehlis could not have known that the report would be made public, when the whole world had been waiting for weeks for the results of the report.
Update: A day later and the Times is still keeping from its readers any hint that there is anything to the editing changes other than, well, editing changes.
A version of the report that was sent by e-mail to several news outlets contained, thanks to a computer glitch, some passages that had been removed from the official version. Those passages named other suspects and had apparently been edited out because the suspects had not yet been charged. (My emph.)
Given that the "apparently" there really means "here is there answer to some pretty good, or at least suggestive arguments being made given the details of those editing changes," doesn't the Times owe its readers the full story, that is to say, the details themselves?
For the Times to claim it's the paper of record, shouldn't you be more informed when you read a story in that paper than when you read it in any other?
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