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“The US is, in effect, employing freedom, rule of law and justice to achieve personal gains and has made these slogans insignificant,” said Hamdan
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By
Ayman AL-Masry, IOL Correspondent
BEIRUT,
August 21 (IslamOnline.net) - The US arrest warrant for the deputy chief
of Hamas politburo, Moussa Mohammad Abu Marzook, and the arrest of two
others for links with Hamas are just another wartime propaganda by the
US administration ahead of the November election and part of a series of
lies propagated by the right-wing-controlled administration, a Hamas
spokesman said Saturday, August 21.
Abu
Marzook, for his part, regarded the US move as nothing new and is based
on hoary-old allegations deemed groundless by the previous US
administration.
“Abu
Marzook has nothing to do with this case,” Hamas representative in
Beirut, Usama Hamdan, told IslamOnline.net, referring to US charges of
racketeering conspiracy, money laundering and assisting “terrorist
organization”.
“Israel
has tried in vain to press ahead with these charges in 1995, when he was
arrested in the United States but he was released later when it appeared
that it was nothing but a smear campaign and a mere calumny,” Hamdan
added.
US
Attorney General John Ashcroft issued
Friday , August 20, the arrest warrant against Abu Marzook and
announced that authorities had arrested two men, Mohammad Salah and
Abdelhaleem Ashqar.
The
US Treasury designated Hamas a “terrorist” organization in 1995,
while the State Department formally designated it a “foreign terrorist
organization” in 1997.
The
group, however, enjoys a wide popularity for its resistance to a
long-standing Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.
In
August last year, the White House decided to
freeze and block the assets of six Hamas leaders and five
pro-Palestinian charities in Europe and Lebanon.
‘Sheer
Lies’
Hamdan
further said the accusations of the three men are pat of a “series of
sheer lies and misleading measures by the US administration to win votes
in the November election”.
“It
is another attempt by Bush to appear as a wartime President and a
staunch advocate of the global war on terror,” he said.
“Salah,
for instance, was tried by an Israeli court and sentenced to five years
in prison for what they called terrorist activities. Now the US
administration wants a re-trial.”
Hamdan
said the United States is mistaken again and does harm to its interests.
“The
United States is, in effect, employing freedom, rule of law and justice
to achieve personal gains and has made these slogans insignificant.”
“And
there remains the question: Is the United States a terror state or law
state?”
Ashcroft’s
indictment came a few hours after US national security advisor
Condoleezza Rice admitted the administration's failure
to win hearts and minds of the world Muslims, in what experts
attribute to uneven-handed policy in the Middle East, including a
pro-Israeli bias.
‘Arbitrary’
Denouncing
the move as “arbitrary”, Abu Marzook questioned the credibility of
the US judiciary, wondering how on earth 15-year-old charges are now
brought to the surface though they have been regarded groundless by
successive US administrations.
Arguing
that Hama was not designated in the past by the United States as a
terrorist organization, Marzook said the US administration of George W.
Bush is making now too much fuss about Hamas to boost his “frenzy
re-election campaign”.
US-educated
Abu Marzook, who holds a Ph.D. in industrial engineering and lived in
the United States for 15 years, told IOL that he was arrested by US
authorities at an Israeli request in 1995 to be released in 1997 for
lack of evidence.
As
for Salah, Abu Marzook added, he spent five years in Israeli jails for
the same charges and when he went to the United States, he was retried,
stripped of his civil rights and deemed terrorist to find himself at the
end of the day jobless and penniless.
“Now,
they want to try him for the third time. Isn’t it arbitrary?” Said
Abu Marzook.
On
the charges against Ashqar, Abu Marzook said the US administration in
1993 saw that he was not guilty, but even the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) offered its help to protect him from any Israeli
harassment.
Asked
about the Syrian position on the US move, Abu Marzook, who resides now
in Damascus, said that the Syrian government would pay no heed to such a
decision.
