The Hezbollah Connection
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
People have made a career off of this decade long witch hunt with their international kangaroo court trying people in absentia.
FTA:
"The trial judges — an Australian, an Italian, a Jamaican and two Lebanese — are distinguished by the red vests they wear over their gowns, which themselves have red sleeves. The Australian, David Re, is the presiding judge and a veteran of the special international tribunals for Bosnia and Herzegovina and the former Yugoslavia. Like Re, many of the other judges and lawyers involved in the case have made a career of serving in such international tribunals.
The tribunal’s budget makes it possible for lawyers to present their graphic exhibits in the clearest possible manner. During some hearings, prosecutors place impressively accurate before-and-after models of the scene of the bombing on an enormous table at the center of the room. The model makers, who spent weeks constructing them, put special emphasis on precisely reproducing the destruction, even the damage to trees. The proceedings are conducted in Arabic, English or French, and transcriptions are produced in all three languages. I have read thousands of pages of these records and found only two typos.
The process in The Hague is also likely to establish new precedents in murder convictions on the basis of circumstantial evidence. For all the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the investigation, the prosecution has produced no direct evidence, let alone secured cooperation from any of the defendants or their potential accomplices. Its case is largely based on the records of dozens of cellphones that it claims were used by the assassins, among them the five defendants."
No direct evidence, no defendants but a nice chunk of change to sit around and pervert justice for their personal gain.
The defendants are butchers hiding in a joke of a country. The evidence is as direct as DNA evidence was in the OJ Simpson trial. The only perversion that i detect are a bunch of humans that think their interpretation of a made up space daddy gives them license to vaporize people.
That isn't justice, it's politically motivated theater. They even rented out a basketball court, seats and all, for their production.
This is a convenient and profitable which hunt fueled by the money we decided to burn witches with.
The amount of time and resources spent on the incident are far out of proportion to crimes occurring all over the world by all sides.
You know how often we take out politically inconvenient people? So often we have a kill list.
The last times tribunals like this were held was Tokyo, Nuremburg, Cambodia then Sierra Leone.
Singling out this incident is not in sync with the esteem we usually hold towards these trials to hold powerful state level actors responsible for the mass crimes against humanity and millions of deaths incurred because of their actions.
If this was about justice people who actually have some control over the matter would be tried. It isn't, so a proxy tribunal with literally no defendants is held.
Justice is served.
>What balls are involved...an empty chair?
The chair[s] would not be empty if the regional government[s] would apprehend the accused. Getting rich? maybe... from my perspective, law enforcement, healthcare, security, and jurisprudence should all be volunteer efforts. Do you agree?
>That isn't justice...for their production.
I guess you are wishing the spent more money to build a suitable edifice for this particular case? Doesn't really jive with your consistent gripes about reckless capital waste...
>This is a convenient...burn witches with.
You are flogging the term 'witch hunt' so much even you can't keep the spelling strait. AFAIK, the WH term applies when any actor[s] is attempting to ferret out an illusory foe. Do you honestly believe that Muslim Extremists do not exist?
>The amount of time...by all sides
This is just ignorant and insulting. These motherfuckers pushed Lebanon back 15 years because of their stupid religiosity. They killed more than a politician and some bodyguards; the murdered a nation's shot at becoming self reliant and self regulated.
>You know how...a kill list.
Newsflash: lots of nation-states have a snuff list. Also, who is this we? The EU? The ICC? The US? Israel? Kind of hypocritical to paint us all with the same brush, m8. If it were up to 'we', I'd recommend a Hellfire through the front door, but thankfully the 'witch hunters' actually want to give these fucktards their day in court.
>The last time...[and] Sierra Leone.
...Kenya, Croatia, Serbia would be more recent examples, but it is a needless quibble. Are you opposed to the ICC taking on cases from the Levant because you sympathize with the folks there? Or maybe you think there should be a minimum threshhold of 'o god wat the fuck'-edness to necessitate legal proceedings? Is it gross total deaths? Do you take into account regional destabilization?
>Singling out this...of their actions.
I do not feel the need to reiterate the point that this is more than just a handful of dead people.
>If this was...Justice is served.
sigh You are butthertz, but i am struggling to see why. What is in any way defensible about what was done here on the 'crime' side? You are dead on: this is a proxy tribunal. The guilty parties for this specific event are multitudinous. When some dipshit murders a person for their watch, it would be just to throw the whole system [parents, peers, teachers] on trial, but A)that wouldn't work and B) double jeopardy standard might write a blank check for every crime after.
Please understand: i do not think this is the best case scenario. But where should the process begin? Are you like the climate shift deniers that believe because there is a measurable degree of unknown all of the other evidence should be tossed? Because we cannot state with 100% certainty who the guilty parties are we should just let it go?
I really want to know, what do you believe should happen here in this case specifically?
One thing, what does the article mean when it says
"Hezbollah has already stopped using public cell networks in favor of closed ones"? Any ideas?
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2008/05/20086142340...
I hate this because it only validates USG reasons for the belief in strictly regulated communications, but this means Hezbollah runs a block whole network they cannot easily tap or monitor at the border of its interaction with regulated national companies.
Keep in mind the Internet in Lebanon is also a joke, known as WaitNet (Unter-Net in Arabic), and everyone uses 2G and 3G phones at crazy prices to do anything of value, compounded with afternoon power outages every day (especially in Beirut and major cities). So, cell phones are the best way of doing business, and Hezbollah can run its own network with impunity.
Or it gets pissy and shuts down an airport with a shit fit. Read my other post in this thread.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-15266851
Even Egypt (EGYPT!) has had better stories than this, largely based to the early 2000's Zaki technocrat regime, so there is a great deal of resentment at how these telco regimes have fucked it up.
When we did mange to get one the Directors PA used to keep the line open so that every one who needed to talk to head office could use the line.
There is a bunch of information on Hezbollah communication networks and COMSEC on wikileaks:
>"This is a secondary communication system to be used in the event of war and to guide officials, commanders and partisans to their point of duty, which Hizbullah does not determine in advance."
- https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/91/91224_-insight-insight...
>"The government has no real means of dismantling Hezbollah's communication network, which is critical to the group's defense. Much of Hezbollah's communication network is strategically intertwined with Lebanon's national networks. It heavily exploits the existing infrastructure of fiber-optic cables and standard telephone wires. Simultaneously, the organization maintains its own independent networks. The most important of these is it mobile phone network which was instrumental in its combat operations against Israeli forces in the summer of 2006."
- https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/91/911136_lebanon-violenc...
See also word doc: "Hezbollah’s Tactical Communications Network" at https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/16/167079_final-draft-.ht...
> Assad, an Alawite Muslim, took a different and somewhat surprising tack: He withdrew his opposition to a plan, proposed by clerics loyal to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran, to establish a Shiite political party in Lebanon.
I know at least one PhD writing his thesis on the formation of political Shi'ism, starting with organized groups like Amal[1] immiedately prior and going as far back as possible with first and second hand sources in Lebanon, which many would argue was the socio-political movements demanding better representation and rights for the Shi'a started. They might not have been militants or terrorists, but keep in mind Hezbollah do not seem themselves as anything more than a political movement. We are speaking to their foundations.
I am tired of Western fly-by-night MENA researchers: to give all the credit to Asad for Hezbollah is akin in the computer industry for saying Microsoft invented DOS and the personal computer. Just stop it already.
In the minuscule piece of the article you quoted (as well as the preceding paragraph left unquoted) the OG author states that religious leaders in Iran, not Syria, spearheaded the effort that later became Hezbollah.
So where is your gripe, specifically? Or do you feel it is in poor test for people of country [X] to write/discuss country [Y] under any circumstance?
I myself grow weary of poorly researched articles about the Levant, the Gulf Countries, Northern Africa, etc as they IMO foster more misunderstanding, but this article is not one of them. I love polisci and historical articles, but i was wondering the relevance of it being posted to HN. Then i got to the section documenting Wissam Eid's analysis of the cell network used to carry out the intel and implementation of the assassination documented herein. Fucking awesome. I only wish this young man had been able to escape the religion regulated shithole that is the Levant and come to North America so he could have played with network analysis and other nerd stuff instead of being smeared across the pavement by monotheist psychos.
I am just annoyed because, despite being one sentence, shows even painstaiking detail to important events by journalists who spend months or years covering MENA stuff, but to do not do anything but reading, not in Arabic, that shows truly ignorant biases. It is very common. and why I gave up on regional studies after college.
The impression I get away with is that the political/religious/economical landscape in the middle east is way more complex than most media reports lead one to think.
The part about cellphone metadata was highly interesting, too. It shows how this metadata can be used for investigating crimes, but it does not take much creativity to imagine how an oppressive government can use such data for building profiles of opposition movements.
I'm a firm believer of universal civil liberties and if we justify or ban warrantless bulk metadata collection anywhere it must apply (either ban or justification) everywhere.
They run their own secret cellphone network. It is so important to them, when Sunni-aligned, anti-Shia intelligence services shut it down, Hezbollah blocked the road to the airport for a week with armed militias. This messed up travel plans for some co-workers. They made a video game about the Israeli war in 2006 (not a single person will by it for me, since I want to inspect it for malware and other fun goodies), and the proudly admit they invented the IED, slughtly before the Iraq War, and with showmanship destroyed very powerful Israeli (not American bought, the Israeli-built ones, forget the name) which were previously a pebble in their tactical shoes. These are not the stereotyped cave-dwelling terrorists. These are educated nutbag technocrats who put a crazy amount of detail into their operations. And the racial hate of the Israeli Army cannot surpress them. So you know they are willing to throw down for a fight.
These tiny anecdotes I compile show a dangerous pattern of very sophisticated loons who believe their own agenda. If you read around, they say will say they are sticking around to fight the Israelis bc they are a true enemy and the Lebanese Armed Forces are cuckolded by Western influences to not engage. Now, you will notice there has been no discussion of disarmament or rhetoric about the stage where they vanquish them, and have to allow the State of Lebanon to function less like the state of Lebanon (see that capitalization joke I did there? Lebanon is not a failed state, but an awesome place where this bullshit drags everyone and everything down). They are a self-justifying state within a state and they a lot of influence that cannot be curtailed.
Current Western counter-terrorist need to study people like this in depth, becuase ISIS and newer groups of the Sunni persuasion clearly are edging towards this new level of hyper-organized, society within society operations that no one has successfully stopped yet. Good help us when ISIS a-holes learn to Node (allow a joke, no one has a sense of humor anymore).
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/islamic-state-file...
And if anti-Hezbollah Lebanese, of which I know many, cannot stop them on their own turf to save their own people from sideways bigots (I do not want to get into wholesale, but needless to say all these groups repulse me), USG and friends in Iraq and Syria are utterly fucked.
As I said, we need to leave yesterday.
Click here: https://www.google.com/search?q=the+hezbollah+connection and then on to the first link.
Instead, it points to the NYT article as the source.
"Avoid gratuitous negativity."