Khaddam's Bombshell: Assad Threatened to "Crush" Hariri Many Times Abdel-Halim Khaddam, Syria's former vice president and long-time point man in Lebanon, confirmed Friday that Syrian President Bashar Assad and his intelligence officers had openly and repeatedly threatened to "crush" ex-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri well before the latter's assassination Feb. 14.In a bombshell television interview on the Al Arabiya satellite channel, Khaddam stopped short of openly accusing Syria of the murder, but said President Lahoud and his top aide, Maj. Gen. Jamil Sayyed, had turned Assad against Hariri.Khaddam disclosed that he advised Hariri in August 2004, days before the extension of Lahoud's presidential term, that the mood in Damascus was unfavorable and he should quit as premier and leave Lebanon. "But it never occurred to me that Syria would assassinate Premier Hariri," he added – the closest he came to implicating Syria.He repeatedly said he did not wish to preempt the international investigation into Hariri's murder, but signaled he believed the actual perpetrators were Lahoud's "inner circle," a reference to Sayyed and other officers that formed the backbone of the Lebanese president's reign. Sayyed, Maj. Gen. Mustapha Hamdan, commander of the presidential guard, Maj. Gen. Ali Hajj, commander of the Internal Security Forces and Brig. Raymond Azar have been in jail for more than three months, since an international investigation implicated them in Hariri's assassination.Khaddam dismissed as "imbeciles" the authors of the tale that a Muslim extremist named Ahmad Abu Adas had killed Hariri in a suicide bombing. He questioned how Abu Adas, who never was a prominent figure on any political or security scene, could possess 1,000 kilograms of sophisticated explosives and not be detected by Syrian and Lebanese intelligence operatives, who effectively ruled the country."Yes, many threats were directed against the late Premier Hariri," said Khaddam. During one encounter, he recalled, Assad told Hariri "I will crush you, if you defy our wishes." The late Gen. Maj. Ghazi Kenaan, then Syrian interior minister, and Maj. Gen Rustom Ghazaleh, who had succeeded Kenaan as Syria's military intelligence in Lebanon, attended the meeting, and Khaddam said he heard the same version of the threat from "three sources," including Assad himself.After the confrontation, Hariri developed hypertension and began to bleed from the nose. Kenaan took him to his office to call him down.Asked if he thought a Syrian security unit could have been behind the assassination without Assad's knowledge, Khaddam said this was not possible in Syria, because the Syrian president is an "absolute authoritarian."