Seymour Hersh and the Lebanon Crisis

Further on the mystery behind Fatah al-Islam, the group at the center of this week's crisis in Lebanon: Michael Young, opinion editor of the Daily Star in Beirut, has taken on U.S. journalist Seymour Hersh over Hersh's recent reporting on the group.

In a piece in the New Yorker magazine issue of Mar. 3, 2007, Hersh suggested that the Sunni-led government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora may be behind weapons and money being channeled to Fatal al-Islam. Hersh's suggestion was part of an article describing a "redirection" of U.S. policy aimed at undermining Iran and its Shiite allies like Hizballah, a by-product of which, Hersh said, was the "bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda."

The Lebanese government and various Lebanese analysts are accusing Syria of sponsoring Fatah al-Islam to sow turmoil in Lebanon. Hersh's article is one of the only reference sources arguing instead that the Lebanese government may be supporting the group. Pro-government Syrian commentators and even Hizballah's media outlets are holding up Hersh's article as proof that Syria is not behind Fatah al-Islam.

I'll paste the relevant excerpt from Hersh's article below, but here's what Young has to say about "how easy it was" for pro-Syrian Lebanese operators "to manipulate" the award-winning reporter:

Young presents a case that Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime has given Fatah al-Islam logistical assistance and may be collaborating with it to achieve several aims; to send a message that a U.N. tribunal that may prosecute Syrian officials for the Rafic Hariri assassination "will mean a Lebanon in flames"; to ensure it has a decisive say in the election of a new Lebanese president later in 2007; to impose indirect hegemony over Lebanon through a network of allies and agents.

Young says that Hersh's "only evidence" for his suggestion that Lebanese government interests were beind Fatah al-Islam was a quote attributed to Alastair Crooke, a former MI6 agent, who told Hersh he "was told" that weapons and money were offered "by people presenting themselves as representatives of the Lebanese government's interests--presumably to take on Hezbollah." (In fairness, Hersh also cites American, European and Arab officials telling him about the Siniora government allowing aid to end up with Sunni radical groups--but Crooke is the only one Hersh identified by name; Hersh also cites an International Crisis Group report that says Hariri's son and heir Saad Hariri paid bail money and won amnesty for many members of an Islamic group involved in clashes seven years ago.)

To explain what Young says really happened this time, and why Hersh's story has wrongly gained credence, Young reports that the sister of Rafic Hariri paid off some Sunni fundamentalists to get them out of the southern Lebanese city of Sidon, the Hariri political stronghold. Members of the group, Jund al-Sham, then left Sidon for the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp near Tripoli in northern Lebanon and signed up with Fatah al-Islam. "Now the Hariris look like they financed Islamists, when they were really only doing what they usually do when facing a problem: trying to buy it away," Young says.

Here's what Hersh's article reported:

American, European, and Arab officials I spoke to told me that the Siniora government and its allies had allowed some aid to end up in the hands of emerging Sunni radical groups in northern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and around Palestinian refugee camps in the south. These groups, though small, are seen as a buffer to Hezbollah; at the same time, their ideological ties are with Al Qaeda.

During a conversation with me, the former Saudi diplomat accused Nasrallah of attempting "to hijack the state," but he also objected to the Lebanese and Saudi sponsorship of Sunni jihadists in Lebanon. "Salafis are sick and hateful, and I'm very much against the idea of flirting with them," he said. "They hate the Shiites, but they hate Americans more. If you try to outsmart them, they will outsmart us. It will be ugly."

Alastair Crooke, who spent nearly thirty years in MI6, the British intelligence service, and now works for Conflicts Forum, a think tank in Beirut, told me, "The Lebanese government is opening space for these people to come in. It could be very dangerous." Crooke said that one Sunni extremist group, Fatah al-Islam, had splintered from its pro-Syrian parent group, Fatah al-Intifada, in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, in northern Lebanon. Its membership at the time was less than two hundred. "I was told that within twenty-four hours they were being offered weapons and money by people presenting themselves as representatives of the Lebanese government's interests—presumably to take on Hezbollah," Crooke said.
The largest of the groups, Asbat al-Ansar, is situated in the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp. Asbat al-Ansar has received arms and supplies from Lebanese internal-security forces and militias associated with the Siniora government.

In 2005, according to a report by the U.S.-based International Crisis Group, Saad Hariri, the Sunni majority leader of the Lebanese parliament and the son of the slain former Prime Minister—Saad inherited more than four billion dollars after his father's assassination—paid forty-eight thousand dollars in bail for four members of an Islamic militant group from Dinniyeh. The men had been arrested while trying to establish an Islamic mini-state in northern Lebanon. The Crisis Group noted that many of the militants “had trained in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan."

According to the Crisis Group report, Saad Hariri later used his parliamentary majority to obtain amnesty for twenty-two of the Dinniyeh Islamists, as well as for seven militants suspected of plotting to bomb the Italian and Ukrainian embassies in Beirut, the previous year. (He also arranged a pardon for Samir Geagea, a Maronite Christian militia leader, who had been convicted of four political murders, including the assassination, in 1987, of Prime Minister Rashid Karami.) Hariri described his actions to reporters as humanitarian.

In an interview in Beirut, a senior official in the Siniora government acknowledged that there were Sunni jihadists operating inside Lebanon. "We have a liberal attitude that allows Al Qaeda types to have a presence here," he said. He related this to concerns that Iran or Syria might decide to turn Lebanon into a “theatre of conflict."

The official said that his government was in a no-win situation. Without a political settlement with Hezbollah, he said, Lebanon could “slide into a conflict," in which Hezbollah fought openly with Sunni forces, with potentially horrific consequences. But if Hezbollah agreed to a settlement yet still maintained a separate army, allied with Iran and Syria, "Lebanon could become a target. In both cases, we become a target."

An important element to the story that neither Hersh nor Young got into is the shadowy history of Fatal al-Islam's links with Syria. The group's leader, Shaker al-Ansi, was part of a group called Fatah al-Intifadeh, which was created and backed by the Syrian regime in 1983 as a rebellion against Yasser Arafat's Fatah group, the largest in the PLO. It is common knowledge in the Middle East that for all of its 24 years in existence, Fatah al-Intifadeh has worked only as a Syrian proxy and not as a genuine Palestinian faction. It seems improbable, though not impossible, that al-Absi might have engineered a genuine rebellion against his former Syrian handlers. Or that Siniora's officials and the Hariri family, which strongly believe that Syria is behind Hariri's assassination, would have knowingly got mixed up with a faction that could reasonably be suspected of being a Syrian plant in Lebanon.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo