After failing to anticipate Hamas\u2019s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, David Rose reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.<\/p>\n
by David Rose | April 2008<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cA Dirty War\u201d<\/font><\/p>\n The Al Deira Hotel, in Gaza City, is a haven of calm in a land beset by poverty, fear, and violence. In the middle of December 2007, I sit in the hotel\u2019s airy restaurant, its windows open to the Mediterranean, and listen to a slight, bearded man named Mazen Asad abu Dan describe the suffering he endured 11 months before at the hands of his fellow Palestinians. Abu Dan, 28, is a member of Hamas, the Iranian-backed Islamist organization that has been designated a terrorist group by the United States, but I have a good reason for taking him at his word: I\u2019ve seen the video.<\/p>\n It shows abu Dan kneeling, his hands bound behind his back, and screaming as his captors pummel him with a black iron rod. \u201cI lost all the skin on my back from the beatings,\u201d he says. \u201cInstead of medicine, they poured perfume on my wounds. It felt as if they had taken a sword to my injuries.\u201d<\/p>\n On January 26, 2007, abu Dan, a student at the Islamic University of Gaza, had gone to a local cemetery with his father and five others to erect a headstone for his grandmother. When they arrived, however, they found themselves surrounded by 30 armed men from Hamas\u2019s rival, Fatah, the party of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. \u201cThey took us to a house in north Gaza,\u201d abu Dan says. \u201cThey covered our eyes and took us to a room on the sixth floor.\u201d<\/p>\n The video reveals a bare room with white walls and a black-and-white tiled floor, where abu Dan\u2019s father is forced to sit and listen to his son\u2019s shrieks of pain. Afterward, abu Dan says, he and two of the others were driven to a market square. \u201cThey told us they were going to kill us. They made us sit on the ground.\u201d He rolls up the legs of his trousers to display the circular scars that are evidence of what happened next: \u201cThey shot our knees and feet\u2014five bullets each. I spent four months in a wheelchair.\u201d<\/p>\n Abu Dan had no way of knowing it, but his tormentors had a secret ally: the administration of President George W. Bush.<\/p>\n [Read the report<\/a>]\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After failing to anticipate Hamas\u2019s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former … Continue reading