The official U.S. mafia, masquerading as a legitimate government, has again exposed its dirty, itchy trigger finger in the February assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Harari.

Harari, 61, was killed in a powerful Beirut explosion, rocking his heavily guarded car caravan as it traveled near a seaside resort area, the shocking murder immediately plunging the country into a state of shock and hysteria.

Although specific trigger-men cannot yet being squarely identified or nabbed, reports are starting to circulate eight months after the incident that a joint U.S. and Israeli hit squad killed the popular Lebanese political figure.

But quickly after Harari was killed to cover any American-Israeli shenanigans, U.S. intelligence reports pointed the finger squarely on Syria in an attempt to further inflame relations between the two countries as well as give the U.S. another reason, albeit a misguided and wrong one, to justify a future Syrian invasion, a plan reportedly being concocted by the maniacal U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and his band of neo-con thugs.

The U.S. charges, filtering through the Lebanese-controlled media, of course, outraged Syrian leaders, even leading to the reported recent suicide of Syrian Interior Minister, Ghazi Kanaan, who just hours prior to killing himself left a statement categorically denying his involvement, despite repeated media reports pointing the finger at him and his country’s leaders.

In a live state broadcast startling listeners, Kanaan made these statements just before killing himself:

"This is going to be the final declaration that I can make.

"We have affection and mutual respect for Lebanon ... We have served the interests of Lebanon with dignity," he said in the dramatic intervention.

"I will let the people of Lebanon pronounce their verdict. Our action allowed us to reunify Lebanon, while this unity ... would have been impossible without Syria.

"I am calling you to give a declaration concerning what was broadcast [on] Tuesday on NTV, which has not ceased to broadcast lies aimed at fooling public opinion especially concerning what happened when I met the UN commission of enquiry and Syria's assistance to come to the truth as Syria has an interest that the truth comes out."

"As for my testimony, light was shed on the period when I served in Lebanon and I spoke about everything that I was asked," he said, adding that the commission had a transcript of the interview that backed his own account.

"I wonder if the motivation of this station was its hatred of Hariri that is known to everyone or if someone fed them the poison and they fell into the trap. If we had benefited so much from Rafiq Hariri, I don't understand how we could have killed him.”

Besides Syrian leaders denying the assassination charge, chairman of Lebanon’s own Najada Party this week publicly called on the U.N. investigation team looking into Harari’s killing not to discount U.S./Israeli involvement.

"Israel has numerous interest in the assassination act, on top of which is hitting and harming the Syrian-Lebanese relations, as well as imposing siege on Syria because she is the last fortified citadel in the face of the Israeli project in the region," Hakim said in a statement.

However, pressured by U.S. influence, the present UN investigation seems to be tilted only in Syria’s direction as the internal UN dossier on the Harari assassination prepared by Detlev Mehlis, the German prosecutor appointed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, quite possibly might even include the names of high-ranking Syrian officials including the president's brother Maher.

Upon completion of his investigation, sources close to the Syrian regime fear Mehlis may include on the suspects list Brig. Gen. Rustum Ghazaleh, former chief of Syrian intelligence in Lebanon who recently retired as well as Maher Assad.

Right after the February 14 car bombing killed Harari, eight in his caravan and wounded about 100 others, Qatar's al-Jazeera television broadcast a tape showing a bearded man claiming to speak on behalf of an unknown Muslim fundamentalist group, "Jamaat al-Nasrat wal-Jihad-Bilad al-Sham" (Al Jihad's Partisans for Greater Syria). The group reportedly is believed to be linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network.

As of today, the man identified as Ahmed Abu Adas has been linked as a “Saudi agent” but what organization and the covert operatives that orchestrated and planned the killing have not been uncovered.

And as noted in a recent Lebanese broadcast, many serious questions remain. Was Abu Adas the real suicide bomber? And if so, was Adas used by some intelligence service other than Syria’s that had close U.S./Israeli ties?

Although speculation and name throwing abounds in overseas espionage and assassination stories, here at home credible information has surfaced on numerous fronts, pinning U.S. covert operatives with the killing of the former president of the American University in Beirut.

Besides this assassination being carried out by a group of covert U.S. Marines, it is well known that as far back as the 1953 coup in Guatemala, the military has been involved in Mafia-style hits, even publishing an official “Assassin’s Killers Manual” as solid evidence.

Concerning the Harari killing, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) recently received correspondence from a source trying to get to the bottom of the killing, alerting him to the possible U.S./Israeli connection.

First, the correspondence alerted Sen. Byrd of a statement made by Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief Aid to Colin Powell, warning of a secret cabal within our government operating above the law.

“What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.

“Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences,” said Col Wilkerson.

Specifically regarding the Harari assassination, Sen. Byrd was alerted of the possibility of the former Lebanese leader being killed “by a small group of professional assassins,” headed by a man with dual Israeli/American citizenship and with close ties to “the U.S. Pentagon, in specific, a secret Pentagon committee, set up by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in October 2001.”