From the Washington Times:
Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Sharaa erred twice in his eulogy of Interior Minister Ghazi Kanaan calling the suicide an “assassination,” said an-Nahar.
The public attorney who superintended an autopsy made the same mistake during a televised news conference.
“The ‘tongue lapses’ buttressed a worldwide conviction that Gen. Kanaan was ‘willfully eliminated’ to cover up a high-level involvement of the Assad regime in Lebanon’s ex-Premier Rafik Hariri’s assassination, refuting the official Syrian claim that the 63-year-old general had committed suicide,” reported Beirut’s an-Nahar newspaper, on its Internet Web site.
Sharaa held the Lebanese media and leakages by the U.N. commission responsible for Kanaan’s ‘assassination’ in a televised statement at his funeral on Thursday. He did not correct the first ‘slip of the tongue.’ Later in the statement Sharaa again called Kanaan’s death an ‘assassination’ with an instant correction of ‘pardon, suicide.’
Chief public attorney Muhammad al-Louji told a televised news conference in Damascus Thursday that Kanaan shot himself with a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. Al-Louji said an examination of the body and interviews with witnesses showed “Kanaan placed the tip of the revolver in his mouth and fired it.” “The act of killing, pardon, assassination, occurred at his office in the Interior Ministry at 9:15 a.m. Wednesday. He had left 45 minutes earlier, got into his car and drove home. He spent a little time there before returning to the office,” al-Louji said.
Quips Steve at Rantburg, “They better hope there’s not any spare rounds left in that gun.”
Similarly, if the Iraqi Constitutional vote goes well, the Assad regime had better hope the Bush Administration gets sidetracked by a few more hurricanes and SCOTUS nominations and outed spy scandals. Because I’m quite certain US military forces have a few spare rounds left in their weapons, and I’m quite certain that we havent’t forgotten all the assistance the Assad government has been giving the terrorists in Iraq…
(h/t Tom Pechinski)
****
update: For some, the security necessary to make this weekend’s Constitutional vote possible is already a mark of failure, and any attempts to report it otherwise by the conservative, Bush-loving US media is a dereliction of duty to TRUTH.
Preemptive defeatism. Lovely. We’ll call it the Willis Doctrine.
(h/t Allah)
Electricity has just gone out in Baghdad.
Jeff, this is a bit of a non-sequitur, but I think you’ll get a laugh out of this. Today Mohammed at Iraq the Model wrote this about the anti-Constitution literature being passed around Bagdad:
It’s like the Baathists are reading leftist websites or something…
OMFG! infidel r nubz!!!111!!!1one!!!
Allah iz teh 1337zorz!!11!!!!one!!1eleven!!!!!!
It’s like, how much more black could Oliver’s heart be?
And the answer is none.
None more black.
RACIST!
Dang. You might as well have called him “articulate.”
Oliver is a very articulate terrorist supporter.
There, how’s that?
To err is human. To forgive, not Syrian.
BECAUSE OF THE DONUTS!
I thought the Willis Doctrine involved two KFC family meal deals, three foot-long meatball Subway subs, four pints of Ben & Jerry’s Chubby Hubby ice cream and a gallon of Chic-fil-a‘s sweetened iced tea?
Only a few things in life are constants.
Death.
Taxes.
Oliver Willis looking up from cramming himself with mallow pies to shit on any good news out of the Middle East.
“None more black.”
Racist my butt! Oliver is probably bursting his buttons with pride. Somebody at Protein Wisdom FINALLY gets it!
I don’t think you people give Odub enough credit.
Anyone who can eat twinkies with one hand and pleasure himself with the other while at the same time typing this tripe with his nose can’t be all bad….
….can he?
Yes, Tom. Yes he can.
You sure he types with his nose?
Hey, we could use some of that security here. To, you know, keep people from slashing tires on party vans. Or handing out cigs to the homeless to vote. But I’d settle a different type of security–one to keep state officers from finding and recounting ballots until they get the result they want.
“Kanaan placed the tip of the revolver in his mouth and fired it.â€Â<blockquote>
From across the room…
Kanaan then went on to handcuff himself, stab himself in the back 6 times, and cut his own head off. He then crawled into the next room and called 911.
Syrian police believe he was just being thorough.
“Senor Ugati is dead, I’m afraid. I’m filling out the death certificate now. We haven’t quite decided if he comitted suicide or was shot while trying to escape…”
SB: yes
we have no bananas
“…in fact all we are sure of is he is now a registered Democrat in the great state of Chicago.”
As we say at home, “O-Dub would complain if he was hanged with a new rope.”
A .38 S&W? Classic, to be sure, but I would have thought these old Soviet puppet regimes would have gone with a Makarov.
Word: sense. “Suicide? That’s non-sense.”