U.S. Sending More Arms To Lebanon: But Who Are They Going To?

MAY 27, (LPAC)--Investigators for Executive Intelligence Review are probing the ongoing destabilization of Lebanon, and are finding increasing evidence that the Cheney-Abrams apparatus inside the Bush White House may be willfully fueling a new civil war, pitting armed Sunni Islamists against Hezbollah.

Eyewitness accounts provided to EIR sources indicate that the Fatah al-Islam group, which has been engaged in a showdown with the Lebanese Army inside a Palestinian refugee camp near the northern Lebanon city of Tripoli, have been financed and armed by Saudi Arabia, and by Saad Hariri, the son of slain Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, with the backing of the Cheney-Abrams circles in Washington. According to these sources, the Fatah al-Islam group is a Taliban-like grouping of Salafi Islamists, who earned the hatred of many people inside the Palestinian refugee camp, for attempting to impose harsh Islamic law. Reportedly, the vast majority of the estimated 300-400 members of the group are not Palestinian, but came into Lebanon from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, North Africa, and other parts of the Muslim world.

Since Thursday, May 24, a total of eight cargo planes full of military equipment have arrived in Beirut, ostensibly to boost the Lebanese Army. Four of the planes came from the U.S. Air Force, two from the United Arab Emirates and two from Jordan, according to a brief report published in the Washington Post on May 27.

Sources on the ground in Lebanon, according to EIR , are perplexed over the massive military resupply effort, given the small size of the Fatah al-Islam, and given that under a 1969 treaty, the Lebanese Army cannot enter the Palestinian camps, which are considered to be sovereign Palestinian territory. Groups like Fatah al-Islam, according to sources, have proliferated in the eight Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, since the Israeli military assaulted the Palestinian Authority during the period of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the first George W. Bush Administration. The destruction of the Fatah/PLO infrastructure contributed to the ungovernability inside the PLO-administered camps in Lebanon, and created the opportunity for the fundamentalist gangs to emerge, sources emphasized to EIR correspondents. At that point, the Hariri camp, along with Saudi businessmen and princes, with the blessing of Prince Bandar, began arming and funding groups like Fatah al-Islam, to create what one senior U.S. intelligence official described as a "Saudi-controlled asymmetric warfare capability, to challenge Iran."

The massive arms shipments into Lebanon over the past five days have raised serious questions, according to Arab sources contacted by EIR , about where the arms are actually destined: to the Lebanese Army, or to the Sunni countergangs and the private militias of Saad Hariri? Sources also warn of a humanitarian nightmare, with tens of thousands of Palestinians fleeing the refugee camp, in the wake of artillery barrages targeting the Fatah al-Islam enclaves inside the sprawling facility.