TRANSLATED: As-Safir daily details US-Lebanese roles in massive July 2012 bombing of Assad inner circle

An interesting – Ronen Bergman-esque – report on the July 2012 bombing of Assad’s inner circle of security men… a bombing which had all the indications that some party was attempting to orchestrate a tipping point to finally collapse the regime. It is an interesting side of the story for all those folks who argue that the Obama administration should have assassinated or covertly killed its way to regime change in Syria. This report says essentially that the US did in fact lead just such an effort. But even after wiping out so many of Assad’s major security figures, still the army and regime…. stayed… until this day.

More details of this part of the story will come out and will be vital for better understanding the problems inherent in the dominant argument that says the US should have been more militarily and covertly involved and aggressive in Syria:

http://assafir.com/Article/407650

Translated today by our Mideastwire.com (for a free trial email info@mideastwire.com): but only the first three paragraphs here:

On March 17, the independent, leftist As-Safir daily carried the following report: “The mystery of the bombing that targeted the bureau of national security in Damascus where the “crisis management cell” used to meet on a daily basis remained hanging between different and sometimes conflicting stories… When a French diplomat stopped two journalists, a French and an Arab, in early July 2012, near a café adjacent to the French foreign ministry, the lights of the Friends of Syria conference had grown dim at the conference center following two exhausting days of debate that provided the impression to the meeting participants that the toppling of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is now a fait accompli.

“Contrary to the reigning rules of the wooden language at the Quai d’Orsay, the diplomat revealed what he had in mind and advised the journalists to slow down with their packing because a major event was going to take place in July. The bets to topple Al-Assad in Paris and between the “Friends of Syria” had turned into a mere matter of time. The defection of Brig. Gen. Manaf Tlass, the commander of Unit 105 at the Revolutionary Guards, on the day following the conference, i.e. July 7, turned the bets to a quasi-certainty. French Foreign Minister, Laurent Fabius, was even whispering the name of Tlass as being the next president of Syria before he even set foot on the French lands.

“The Qatari Foreign Minister, Hamad Ben Jassem, did not argue then with the conference participants who asked him to be flexible when it comes to the language used in the final statement vis-à-vis Al-Assad… A prominent French official quoted Ben Jassem as telling the participants: “For us, there is no difference neither with the language used in the statement nor with its content because President Al-Assad will not be at the presidential palace by September anyway…”