Saturday, August 05, 2006
HRW Report
Breaking news from the Middle East: The US and France have agreed to a peace plan for the Middle East crisis. This will be the draft of a new UN Security Council resolution.
Human Rights Watch has just released a report castigating the Israeli government for “a systematic failure by the IDF to distinguish between combatants and civilians” caused by strikes with “limited or dubious military gain” targeted using questionable intelligence. HRW’s description of these strikes ranges from “the IDF consistently tolerated a high level of civilian casualties for questionable military gain” all the way to describing Israel striking civilian areas “with no apparent military target” and “return strikes on rescuers” that suggests “war crimes.”
The report is excellent and worth reading. Some pithy sentences: “To date, the chief cause of civilian deaths from the Israeli campaign is targeted strikes on civilian homes in villages of Lebanon’s South… According to the Lebanese Ministry of Social Affairs, the IDF destroyed or damaged up to 5,000 civilian homes in air strikes during the first two weeks of the war.” Oh, but, you must understand, Israel is doing its best to avoid civilian casualties.
Kenneth Roth, the director of Human Rights Watch, writes an excellent article on the subject. The obligations to respect international humanitarian law, including to refrain from deliberate or indiscriminate attacks on civilians and to take all feasible precautions against civilian casualties, persist regardless of the conduct of one's opponent.
HRW also criticizes the Israeli government for their “investigation” of the Qana Massacre. I honestly am not aware of a developed nation that conducts so many whitewashes of its own behavior.
News from Orange County: a man found babbling and rolling around naked on a neighborhood street eventually led police to a massive marijuana stash, including “Five pounds of the weed packaged for sale, $10,000 in cash, a 3-foot-tall hookah and a cache of martial arts weapons were found at the house.” Boo-yah! That’s pretty much all you need, baby.
An article about the administration’s shallow efforts to foster democracy in Lebanon.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 11:52 AM 
