“an accusation that makes everybody’s life more difficult”

Qifa Nabki on the inconvenience of Wissam El Hassan’s inclusion in the CBC report

Given al-Hassan’s close ties to Saad Hariri, no one in March 14 is going to be happy with these claims, and the Americans were apparently very uncomfortable with them. It also causes problems for Hizbullah and its allies: how can the opposition embrace the revelation about Al-Hassan’s alleged culpability while disavowing the rest of the report? Finally, the Syrians, too, will not be happy with this leak, as Wissam al-Hassan was Hariri Sr.’s main channel to Rustom Ghazzali (former Syrian head of intelligence and de facto viceroy in Lebanon), which puts Damascus back under the spotlight. My guess is that what we’re likely to see is a lot of tiptoeing by Lebanese politicians with respect to this new story.

Precisely. Nobody is happy about this detail. I think the CBC made a huge tactical error by divulging this detail so early on. Had the network left this detail out in the report’s first iteration, it would have gotten much more Lebanese and international press coverage.