The Mehlis Mess: What Lebanon's press is not allowed to report: "Doubts had been cast on the veracity of a key witness, identified as "Zuhir Ibn Mohamed Said Saddik" in the Mehlis report, as early as September, when it transpired that he was a colorful con artist. Since then, Saddik was arrested in Paris as a possible source of disinformation, but his testimony was cited in the U.N. report nonetheless. The remaining certainty regarding Syrian culpability hinged solely on the man who became known in press jargon as "the masked witness"; first identified by a Lebanese satellite channel on November 23 as Hosam Taher Hosam: a 30 year-old Syrian Kurd, living in Lebanon. If Saddik's unreliability had frayed confidence in Mehlis's judgments, the emergence of this second witness led to the unraveling of the report's badly knit fabric." (thanks Fadi)