Politics, Compassion, and Justice

Great article. I never thought of it this way.
ANALYSIS: The war Hezbollah couldn’t lose - and might - Haaretz - Israel News

So how could Hezbollah lose?

They still might. And not only because its gunners have yet to make good on Nasrallah’s probably ill-advised (and reminiscent of Israeli blunders) vow to send missiles crashing into Tel Aviv.

The answer lies in the nature of the cease-fire now under debate at the United Nations and across the Arab world. The answer lies, no less, in the one phenomenon that Israelis planners could not have foreseen, and which they are still at a loss to explain:

The world’s silence.

For all the name-calling and hand-wringing - much of it perfectly valid, others drearily, predictably one-sided - Israel has been for a solid month operating under no real international pressure.

The reason this time may have little to do with Israel, and everything to do with Iran.

The world is scared of Hezbollah. Because the whole world is scared of Iran. Especially large swaths of the Arab world.

If, for the first time, Hezbollah is forced by international pressure to pull back its fighters in favor of the Lebanese army and a multi-national force, even at the cost of a large prisoner exchange.

Bush sure loves Freedom, Freedom from his Constitutional duties that is.
Crooks and Liars » At least Blair has his priorities straight:

Did I mention that Bush broke the record for most time off for a two-term president — with three years to spare?

I’m sure we’ll hear more about this as people read it.
Iraq Report 109th Congress:

The following are Adobe pdf links to the Final Investigative Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff

The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution,
and Coverups in the Iraq War, and Illegal Domestic Surveillance (This Report is over 350 pages.)

In brief, we have found that there is substantial evidence the President, the Vice-President and other high ranking members of the Bush Administration misled Congress and the American people regarding the decision to go to war in Iraq; misstated and manipulated intelligence information regarding the justification for such war; countenanced torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in Iraq; permitted inappropriate retaliation against critics of their Administration; and approved domestic surveillance that is both illegal and unconstitutional. As further detailed in the Report, there is evidence that these actions violate a number of federal laws, including:

· Making False Statements to Congress, for example, saying you have learned Iraq is attempting to buy uranium from Niger, when you have been warned by the CIA that this is not the case.

· The War Powers Resolution and Misuse of Government Funds, for example, redeploying troops and initiating bombing raids before receiving congressional authorization.

· Federal laws and international treaties prohibiting torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, for example, ordering detainees to be ghosted and removed, and tolerating and laying the legal ground work for their torture and mistreatment.

· Federal laws concerning retaliating against witnesses and other individuals, for example, demoting Bunnatine Greenhouse, the chief contracting officer at the Army Corps of Engineers, because she exposed contracting abuses involving Halliburton.

· Federal requirements concerning leaking and other misuse of intelligence, for example, failing to enforce the executive order requiring disciplining those who leak classified information, whether intentional or not.

· Federal regulations and ethical requirements governing conflicts of interest, for example, then Attorney General John Aschcroft’s being personally briefed on FBI interviews concerning possible misconduct by Karl Rove even though Mr. Rove had previously received nearly $750,000 in fees for political work on Mr. Ashcroft’s campaigns.

· Violating FISA and the Fourth Amendment, for example intercepting thousands of communications “to or from any person within the United States,” without obtaining a warrant.

· The Stored Communications Act of 1986 and the Communications Act of 1934, for example, obtaining millions of U.S. customer telephone records without obtaining a subpoena or warrant, without customer consent, and outside of any applicable “emergency exceptions.”

· The National Security Act, for example, failing to keep all Members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees “fully and currently informed” of intelligence activities, such as the warrantless surveillance programs.

With regard to the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs, we have also found that members of the Bush Administration made a number of misleading statements regarding its operation and scope; the legal justifications proffered by the Bush Administration are constitutionally destabilizing; there is little evidence the programs have been beneficial in combating terrorism and may have affirmatively placed terrorism prosecutions at risk; and the programs appear to have designed and implemented in a manner designed to stifle legitimate concerns.

The Report rejects the frequent contention by the Bush Administration that their pre-war conduct has been reviewed and they have been exonerated. No entity has ever considered whether the Administration misled Americans about the decision to go to war. The Senate Intelligence Committee has not yet conducted a review of pre-war intelligence distortion and manipulation, while the presidentially appointed Silberman-Robb Commission Report specifically cautioned that intelligence manipulation “was not part of our inquiry.” There has also not been any independent inquiry concerning torture and other legal violations in Iraq; nor has there been an independent review of the pattern of cover-ups and political retribution by the Bush Administration against its critics, other than the very narrow and still ongoing inquiry of Special Counsel Fitzgerald into the outing of Valerie Plame.

There also has been no independent review of the circumstances surrounding the Bush Administration’s domestic spying scandals. The Administration summarily rejected all requests for special counsels, as well as reviews by the Department of Justice and Department of Defense Inspector Generals. When the DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility opened an investigation, the Bush Administration effectively squashed it by denying the investigators security clearances. Neither the House nor Senate Intelligence Committee have undertaken any sort of comprehensive investigation, and the Bush Administration has sought to cut off any court review of the NSA programs by repeatedly invoking the state secrets doctrine.

As a result of our findings, we have made a number of recommendations to help prevent the recurrence of these events in the future, including:

· obtaining enhanced investigatory authority to access documentary information and testimony regarding the various allegations set forth in this Report.

· reaffirming that FISA and the criminal code contain the exclusive means for conducting domestic warrantless surveillance and, to the extent that more personnel are needed to process FISA requests, increasing available resources.

· requiring the President to report on the pardon of any former or current officials who could implicate the President or other Administration officials implicated by pending investigations.

· requiring the President to notify Congress upon the declassification of intelligence information.

· providing for enhanced protection for national security whistle-blowers.

· strengthening the authority of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.

We also make a number of additional recommendations within the jurisdiction of the House Judiciary Committee to help respond to the ongoing threat of terrorism, including:

· increasing funding and resources for local law enforcement and first responders and insuring that anti-terrorism funds are distributed based on risk, not politics.

· implementing the 9-11 Commission Recommendations, including providing for enhanced port, infrastructure, and chemical plant security and ensuring that all loose nuclear materials are secured.

· banning corporate trade with state sponsors of terrorism and eliminating sovereign immunity protections for state sponsors of terrorism.

· enhancing laws against wartime fraud

Brilliant article by one of my favorite authors. Doesn’t absolve the Israelis of killing civilians, but puts to rest the argument that the large number of Lebanese civlian deaths makes Israel the de facto bad guy.

Recently I was reminded of this story when I came across two articles written by Americans about the Israel-Hezbollah war. One is “Arithmetic of Pain,” by Alan Dershowitz, in the Jewish World Review; the other, “And Then They Paid Dearly,” from the blog written for the Huffington Post by Tom McCarthy in Beirut. Although these articles approach the conflict from opposite ends of the spectrum, it seems to me, they approach it with a similarly passionate self-assurance.

Dershowitz is well known. So, perhaps, are his views on the conflict. Dershowitz likes to compare Hezbollah to a bank robber, the Lebanese to hostages and the IDF to cops–good guys who stay good guys even if they’ll shoot five hundred hostages dead.

If the argument is familiar, so are the objections . They may be too obvious to rehash here. But I was surprised to find equally blind fervor on the on the other side of the debate. McCarthy cites the numbers of casualties as if they contained–in a self-explanatory way–their own indictment of the Israeli air strikes. According to McCarthy, the ratio of Lebanese civilian casualties to Israeli civilian casualties on a given day (fifty to two). says something fundamental and inarguable about the morality of the war.

But what exactly does it say?

That on that day, Israel was twenty-five times more evil than the Hezbollah? If Israel had settled on killing two civilians that day–two babies for example, deliberately destroyed by an Apache at close range–would the Israeli government be blameless because it maintained the principle of proportionality?

Should we weigh it in the balance that Hezbollah operates consistently out of densely-populated neighborhoods? Does this change the calculus of blame? Should we consider the possibility that the large number of attacks and Lebanese casualties on that day may in fact have disrupted Hezbollah’s own attacks, thus reducing the number of Israeli casualties? If Hezbollah had managed to kill more Israelis that day, would it have somehow made the killing of fifty Lebanese civilians more justified? Finally, is the fact that the Hezbollah killed so many fewer Israelis that day an indication of moral scruples, or does it simply mean that they tried to kill hundreds and failed?

I don’t raise all these questions in order to absolve Israel from the responsibility of needlessly killing Lebanese civilians (the Dershowitz view). Nor am I writing here in order to deny speakers like Dershowitz and McCarthy the right to fight it out ideologically in Brooklyn, Beirut or on the Happy Hunting Grounds of the Internet. And I’m not saying we don’t have boundless cruelty here, or that we don’t sacrifice innocent lives on the altar of national honor and other, equally hazy ideals on a daily basis. I simply wish they would try to understand that the tragedy of the Middle East cannot be ended with a calculator and a highly developed moral sense.

— Translated from the original Hebrew