LCCC ENGLISH DAILY NEWS BULLETIN
March 14/2012

Bible Quotation for today/Changed Lives
01 Peter 04/01006: "Since Christ suffered physically, you too must strengthen yourselves with the same way of thinking that he had; because whoever suffers physically is no longer involved with sin. From now on, then, you must live the rest of your earthly lives controlled by God's will and not by human desires. You have spent enough time in the past doing what the heathen like to do. Your lives were spent in indecency, lust, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and the disgusting worship of idols.  And now the heathen are surprised when you do not join them in the same wild and reckless living, and so they insult you. But they will have to give an account of themselves to God, who is ready to judge the living and the dead. That is why the Good News was preached also to the dead, to those who had been judged in their physical existence as everyone is judged; it was preached to them so that in their spiritual existence they may live as God lives.

To the the Maronites in Canada: Say a big No to Bchara Al Raei and Boycott his unwanted and evil visit .
Elias Bejjani 13.03.12/This man, Patriarch Al Raei has sided with the Axis of evil and is boldly and openly supporting the Syrian butcher AlAssad and the terrorist Iranian Hezbollah. You Maronite in Canada, Say No, honor your martyrs, respect your identity, history and faith. Boycott Al Raei's visit to Canada. Tell him that he does not represent us we the Maronites and he is not the conscience of our great Lebanon like the 76 Maronite Patriarchs all through 1600 years. No he does not resemble us. No we do not know him and definitely he does not know us. There is no doubt that he has negated all his clerical vows and accordingly he must be boycotted. It is our choice either to be subservient or free people. Just remember that the Maronites has been all through their deeply rooted history courageous, patriotic, faithful and transparent. Do not deviate from these solid foundations and boycott Al Raei's visit to Canada. Boycott his visit and do not let the curse of our martyrs fall on you. SAY A BIG NO AND BOYCOTT

Latest analysis, editorials, studies, reports, letters & Releases from miscellaneous sources
Obama is bluffing on Iran/Shoula Romano Horing/Ynetnews/March 13/12
Can Israel’s ‘Dome’ work against Hezbollah/ By Nicholas Blanford/The Daily Star/March 13/12

Latest News Reports From Miscellaneous Sources for March 13/12
Daniel Bellemare: News for Shining light on Lebanon’s darkest day
Ahmadinejad dismisses Western threats against Iran
Egypt reports Gaza ceasefire. Israel: Quiet will be met with quiet
Behind the scenes, both Israel and Hamas want an end to latest violence
Massacre in Homs as world watches
Response to Syrian refugee crisis in flux
Mikati to meet with Kataeb students on history curriculum after clashes
Hariri, Jumblatt slam West for stance on Syria
Lebanese Army discovers subversive cell intent on attacking military sites
Senior Syrian army officers hospitalized in Beirut: report
Lebanon indifferent to Israeli security wall: army
Jumblatt slams West's opportunism vis-a-vis Syria
Mikati confirms arrest of subversive cell in Lebanese Army
Sleiman: Democracy is road to economic growth

Mikati confirms arrest of subversive cell in Lebanese Army
March 12, 2012/By Hasan Lakkis/The Daily Star
BEIRUT: Prime Minister Najib Mikati confirmed Monday a report that the Lebanese Army recently uncovered a subversive cell within its ranks that had planned to attack military bases.
“A cell in the Lebanese Army has been uncovered. Judicial authorities have taken care of the issue and referred the suspects to investigation. Judicial authorities are following up on the matter,” Mikati told reporters at the Grand Serail. “The cell exists, has subversive intentions, was active in the north. It has nothing to do with the situation in Syria and [the group] has branches in [Palestinian] camps [in Lebanon],” he said, adding that the cell had been discovered two days ago. Mikati was referring to the six-member cell that had been charged Friday with forming an armed ring with the aim of carrying out “terrorist attacks.” Al-Akhbar published an article Monday saying the Lebanese Army has discovered a Salafist cell in its ranks consisting of two soldiers who had planned to carry out attacks against the army.
According to the paper, the two, part of a larger group of four Lebanese and one Palestinian, are affiliated with the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, an affiliate of Al-Qaeda.Military Prosecutor Saqr Saqr Friday pressed charges against the six Lebanese suspects “for setting up an armed gang and conducting training exercises with the aim of carrying out terrorist acts and operations against the [Lebanese] military establishment.” Judicial sources told The Daily Star Monday that all six suspects were members of a “fundamentalist group.” Two of the six are Lebanese Army soldiers.

Can Israel’s ‘Dome’ work against Hezbollah?
March 13, 2012/By Nicholas Blanford /The Daily Star
BEIRUT: The escalation in rocket fire from the Gaza Strip in recent days is presenting Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system with its most critical challenge since being deployed in southern Israel a year ago.
So far, Israeli military and government officials claim that Iron Dome has destroyed some 90 percent of the 122 mm Katyusha rockets targeted by the system since the latest flare-up began Friday.
“The system has proven itself very well,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Israeli Cabinet Sunday. He added that the Israeli government “will do everything in its power” to procure more batteries in the coming years.
But it remains far from certain that Iron Dome is capable of handling the mass rocket barrages it could face in a future war with Hezbollah. Furthermore, Iron Dome cannot reverse the strategic problem posed even by the relatively unsophisticated Qassem and Katyusha rockets from Gaza – the disruption of normal life in Israel.
Iron Dome is a mobile defense system designed to intercept rockets with ranges of up to 70 kilometers and is one of a planned three-tier anti-missile defense system employed by Israel. The other two systems are David’s Sling, which is designed to shoot down larger caliber rockets such as the Zelzal and M600 short-range ballistic missiles believed to be in Hezbollah’s arsenal, and Arrow, intended to intercept ballistic missiles such as Iran’s Shehab-3.
The first three Iron Dome batteries were deployed in March 2011 at Ashkelon, Ashdod and Beersheba, towns vulnerable to rocket fire from the Gaza Strip. A fourth battery is scheduled to be deployed in the area in the coming months along with another five by the middle of next year.
The Iron Dome’s radar detects a rocket and calculates its projected trajectory. If the rocket is judged to fall in an open unpopulated area, it is left alone. But if it appears to be heading for an urban area or strategic site, an interceptor missile is fired to destroy the rocket in the air.
Since Israel assassinated Zahir Qaisi, a leader of the Popular Resistance Committees in Gaza Friday, some 130 rockets have been fired into Israel in retaliation. Around a third of the 133 were targeted by Iron Dome with the majority being successfully destroyed in the air.
Despite its apparent success in dealing with the flow of rockets from the Gaza Strip, the value of Iron Dome remains open to question against the more formidable threat posed by Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal.
In the month-long July 2006 war, Hezbollah fired some 4,000 rockets toward Israel, an average rate of 125 rockets a day, four times the rate of the latest Gaza escalation. The bulk of the rockets fired in 2006 were 122mm Katyushas and Syrian 220mm Uragans.
Since then, Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal is believed to have increased significantly not only in size but also variety. Iron Dome would struggle to defeat the larger Zelzal-2s and M600 missiles, which could strike targets in Tel Aviv and beyond. The David’s Sling system which is supposed to deal with larger caliber rockets is not yet operational.
It can be expected that in the event of another war with Israel, Hezbollah will attempt to overwhelm the Iron Dome system with heavy barrages of shorter-range Katyushas and Uragans, allowing the larger Zelzals and M600s to slip through and strike strategic targets such as military and infrastructure sites. Israel would require a considerable number of Iron Dome batteries to cover the Lebanon front, an expensive undertaking particularly as each nterceptor missile costs around $52,000.
Yet the real flaw in Israel’s anti-missile systems is that they are a tactical solution to a strategic problem. The rockets fired by Hezbollah and Palestinian groups have always had a limited impact in terms of inflicting casualties.
One reason is that the short-range rockets fired by Hezbollah and the Palestinians in Gaza are inherently inaccurate. More often than not the rockets explode harmlessly in open land. In urban areas of northern Israel and around the Gaza Strip, residents have access to public bomb shelters or protected rooms in their homes which help reduce casualties.
Indeed, the estimated 37 Katyusha barrages between February 1992 (when Hezbollah rocketed Israel for the first time in retaliation for the assassination of party leader Sayyed Abbas Musawi) until the May 2000 Israeli troop withdrawal from Lebanon, left only eight civilians in Israel dead with some 182 wounded (one-third of them during Israel’s two-week Grapes of Wrath offensive in 1996).
The real impact of the rocket attacks was the disruption of normal life. During times of heightened tension in south Lebanon, Israeli civilians were ordered into bomb shelters sometimes for days at a time and life in northern Israel ground to a halt even if no rockets were fired.
During an escalation in February 2000, when Hezbollah killed seven Israeli soldiers in three weeks, the threat alone of Katyusha barrages crippled life in northern Israel. Israelis were kept confined to bomb shelters for 48 hours at a cost of $2.4 million a day in lost business, yet not one rocket was fired across the border.
In the 2006 war, some 100,000 to 250,000 Israelis fled to the safety of areas further south. The rest of the population in the north stayed in or close to shelters for the duration of the conflict.
In the next war, the entire northern half of Israel where most of Israel’s population lives potentially will be vulnerable to Hezbollah’s rockets and guided missiles and therefore effectively on the front line for the first time since the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Residents of Tel Aviv could come under sustained and accurate rocket fire, dwarfing the Iraqi Scud crisis of 1991.
Even if Iron Dome and David’s Sling (if they are operational by then) are able to shoot down a significant number of incoming rockets, normal life for the bulk of Israel’s population will be completely disrupted, leading to panic, mass evacuations and population displacement.

Obama is bluffing on Iran
Shoula Romano Horing/Ynetnews
Op-ed: Israel should realize by now that US president will never attack Iran or support Israeli attack
While Israel fears a new Holocaust from a nuclear armed Iran, President Barack Obama seems to only be worried about a preemptive attack on Iran or the talk of war raising oil prices and thereby harming the US economy and his re-election campaign.
Despite his reassurances at the AIPAC conference that he “won’t hesitate to use force to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” he is in fact bluffing to woo Jewish voters and stop an Israeli unilateral attack on Iran. Less than two days after his AIPAC campaign speech, he already backtracked from his commitment. When asked what he meant by his comments that “we have Israel’s back,” the president answered that “it was not a military doctrine that we were laying out for any particular military action.”
Israel should realize by now that Obama will never attack Iran or support an Israeli attack before the elections because a war in the oil-rich region would send gasoline prices even higher than they are now, exacerbating the economic situation and hurting his chance for reelection. The price of gasoline has been rising daily in the past month, averaging $3.79 a gallon. Since 1976, there has been a correlation between rising oil prices and falling presidential approval ratings in the US. Jimmy Carter lost the presidency when gas averaged $3.37 per gallon when adjusted to the current value of the dollar.
Although Obama has been taking credit for the “crippling” sanctions against Iran and asking the Israelis to wait a few months to allow them to take effect, he has in fact tried to weaken the sanctions. In December 2011, the Kirk-Menendez amendment passed by a rare 100-0 vote in the Senate directed the Administration to take punitive measures against foreign entities that do business with Iran. However, the Administration tried to pressure top ranking Democrats, thankfully to no avail, to delay the implementation of the sanctions by a few months, arguing that the amendment could raise oil prices and hurt the US economy.
Israel alone in this fight?
Moreover, Obama failed to begin enforcement of the sanctions on February 29 as the law intended. The nightmare scenario for the president would be the revelation, in the midst of economic recovery, would be an Iranian nuclear breakthrough in the next eight months, forcing him to either act or back down and then be judged by the voters. The only scenario under which Obama will attack Iran is if he believes he has a chance of losing the election because the economy deteriorates, unemployment rises and the chosen Republican presidential candidate is gaining in popularity.
If re-elected, President Obama, in his second term, will not attack Iran even as a last resort. Not needing Jewish votes or reelection and true to his ideology of appeasement, he will re-adopt his “containment policy” of useless diplomacy, eventually leading to a nuclear Iran. By then, the Middle East will be an explosive powder keg, waiting for the Iranian trigger.
Israel‘s only deterrence option to stop Iran from attacking would be the threat of retaliation through total annihilation using the Jewish state’s nuclear weapons arsenal. Watching Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s AIPAC speech, it seems clear that he realized after talking to Obama that Israel is alone in this fight.
Israel’s only remaining hope is that Obama will lose the election and be replaced by the Republicans. The only time when the extremist Iranian leadership decided to suspend its nuclear program was 2003, after the US invaded Iraq, because Tehran truly believed a Republican president‘s warnings that it will be attacked next.
**Shoula Romano Horing was born and raised in Israel. She is an attorney in Kansas City and a national speaker. Her blog: www.shoularomanohoring.com

Egypt reports Gaza ceasefire. Israel: Quiet will be met with quiet
DEBKAfile Exclusive Report March 13, 2012/A high-ranking Egyptian official reported before dawn Tuesday, March 13, that Israel and the Palestinian organizations in Gaza, including Jihad Islami and the Popular Resistance Committees, had agreed to a ceasefire which went into effect at one o’clock a.m. Neither Israel nor Jihad Islami released statements of a truce. And shortly after 0400 missile warnings sounded in Ashkelon. The initial Egyptian statement remains to be clarified. It interprets the Israeli position as having accepted Jihad’s condition for halting its missile barrage and agreed to halt targeted killings of high-profile terrorists. All Israeli defense officials affirmed in backdoor negotiations with Egyptian intelligence officials, debkafile’s sources report, was its standard position: If the Palestinians halt cross-border attacks from the Gaza Strip and Egyptian Sinai, there will be no need for targeted killings. And if the Palestinians stop shooting missiles from the Gaza Strip, the Israeli Air Force will have no reason to strike terrorist targets.
An Egyptian delegation has reportedly arrived in Gaza to discuss with the strip’s Hamas rulers terms for restoring fuel supplies, shortages of which have forced them to severely ration power to the population. Cairo has kept Gaza short in order to squeeze Hamas into pulling the military facilities and units it deployed in northern Sinai back into the Gaza Strip.
Egyptian officials deny their delegates offered to resupply Gaza as part of the still-shadowy ceasefire deal. It is possible, say our sources, that Cairo used it as leverage to make Hamas to force the pro-Iranian Jihad Islami to stop firing missiles and slow – if not abandon - its four-day offensive on Israel’s towns and villages.
debkafile: For the Cairo-Hamas truce maneuver to work, all the parties involved must give ground: Israel must tacitly leave Jihad with the unspoken prerogative for deciding when Israel has violated the “deal” and responding with a fresh missile offensive; Jihad undertake to halt its terrorist operations against Israel from Sinai – albeit shrugging off responsibility if its networks go into action to duplicate former attacks on Israel. Because Egypt must give up for now its most pressing demand to recover control of northern and central Sinai from the Hamas and Jihad Islami forces which have overrun parts of the peninsula.
It is therefore hard to see how this loose patchwork of deals – if they are indeed finalized – can hold up for long.
debkafile reported earlier Monday, March 12:
The combined Egyptian-Israeli-Hamas effort to negotiate an early ceasefire in the current round of Palestinian-Israeli violence struck several major obstacles Monday, March 12: debkafile’s intelligence sources report a Cairo demand for any truce deal to embody a Palestinian Hamas and Jihad Islami commitment to withdraw their forces from Sinai and stop using the peninsula for terrorist operations against Israel. Egypt’s military rulers are resolved to use this opportunity to chase the terrorists out and restore their control over Sinai.
However, Palestinian leaders, including Hamas, are playing innocent, claiming to the Egyptian mediator Intelligence chief Gen. Murad Muwafi that they have no armed presence in Sinai and would never impair Egyptian sovereignty.
Four days into the Gaza violence, this impasse has brought the mediation effort to a close.
debkafile’s military sources report that acceding to Cairo’s demand would oblige the Palestinian terrorist organizations to dismantle the logistic, operational and military infrastructure they have built in Sinai. Hamas has even transferred all its weapons manufacturing, including missiles, from the Gaza Strip where it was vulnerable to Israeli attack to safe locations in northern Sinai, along with its training facilities.
This tactic has worked: Most of Hamas’ military facilities were out of reach of Israeli Air Force bombings in the current round of violence because none remained in the Gaza Strip, except for a forward position.
The Egyptian ultimatum would require Hamas to pull its military machine and weapons production back into the Gaza Strip and Jihad Islami to evacuate its terrorist networks which carried out a cross-border attack last August killing 8 Israelis and were preparing a follow-up.
Another obstacle on the road to a ceasefire is Egypt’s refusal to hold direct, or even indirect, talks with Jihad Islami, Tehran’s Palestinian surrogate. Gen. Muwafi addressed his mediation effort to Hamas, a fairly useless exercise since it is the Jihad Islami which has been shooting the missiles.
The breakdown of negotiations, such as they were, has led Israel to escalate its military pressure on Gaza and intensify its air strikes, in the hope of forcing Jihad Islami to stop the missile assaults on its cities.
But for now, its leaders show no sign of being beaten into accepting a truce and are unlikely to do so, so long as Tehran wants the violence to go on.
The Gaza confrontation is therefore evolving into a military clash between Israel and Iran.
Hamas, finding it increasingly difficult to stay on the sidelines, called on all Palestinian organizations Monday to unite and close ranks against “Zionist aggression.” Hamas lined up with the Jihad sine qua non that a truce be conditional on an Israeli guarantee to discontinue targeted killings of wanted terror chiefs.
For now, the Hamas is still trying to pressure Egypt and Israel into coming to terms on a ceasefire. Failure would inevitably bring Gaza’s ruling faction into the battle against Israel.
Unless these circumstances undergo a radical shift, the million Israelis confined to shelters have no reason to look forward to relief from the missile attacks on their homes and schools – quite the opposite: The conflict looks like escalating.

Shining light on Lebanon’s darkest day
By Don Butler, The Ottawa Citizen
March 9, 2012
Lebanese mourners hold up a sign saying ‘Hey Syria — Who’s next’ during funeral procession of former Levanese prime minister Rafik al-Hariri in Beirut, February 16, 2005. Tens of thousands of Lebanese ,some chanting anti-Syria
Photograph by: JAMAL SAIDI, REUTERS
Daniel Bellemare arrives for the interview with two plainclothes RCMP officers in tow. Given that this is Canada’s peaceable capital, the security might seem surprising — unless you know the 60-year-old Ottawa resident has spent the past four-and-a-half years heading up one of the world’s most perilous and incendiary murder investigations.
Bellemare has grown accustomed to what he calls “James Bond kind of stuff.” He had to. His life depended on it. In November 2007, following a brief flirtation with Freedom 55, Bellemare accepted a daunting assignment: find out who killed former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri on Feb. 14, 2005, and prosecute the assassins.
Until health concerns prompted him to step down as chief prosecutor of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon 10 days ago, that imperative dominated his life.
It hasn’t been easy. The investigation is complex — the most complex in the world, some say. Powerful and dangerous forces are arrayed against it. Bellemare himself became a target, requiring massive, even oppressive, security for his own protection. Instead of enjoying retirement together as planned, he and his wife, Cathy, have spent most of the past few years apart.
“To tell you the truth,” Bellemare confesses in his first media interview since returning to Ottawa at the end of February, “I didn’t really know what I was getting into. I knew it was quite a challenge, but I had no idea of how intense, how challenging it would be, both professionally and personally. Frankly, maybe it was better that I didn’t know.”
Like everyone, Bellemare says, he was there by choice. It certainly wasn’t the money. “Whatever rumours there are, there’s not that much money to be made.” Nor was he there to advance his career. “As I kept telling people, my career is behind me, it’s not ahead of me.
“The reason that I chose to go there is because I believed in what was being done. Once you meet the Lebanese people, you fall in love with them. They deserve an end to impunity. So I thought I could bring a little bit of Canadian justice to the process.”
At first glance, Bellemare, burly and round of face, is an unlikely personification of Canadian justice. Though he rarely grants interviews, he is genial and down-to-earth in conversation, nibbling on toast smeared with peanut butter as he recounts his experiences.
But there are signs of inner steel. “The first thing I told my staff when I got there,” he says of the Hariri assignment, “was I did not come out of retirement to be associated with a failure.”
His credentials were sterling. Among many other roles, he served 14 years as head of the Federal Prosecution Service of Canada, the longest tenure in Canadian history. He was responsible for all criminal prosecutions launched by the attorney general and worked with 800 prosecutors across Canada.
Within days of his retirement in 2007, the United Nations was in touch, asking if he’d be interested in leading the investigation into Hariri’s death and serving as the new tribunal’s chief prosecutor.
Bellemare agreed to an interview. “It was a free trip to New York City,” he says with a laugh. UN officials asked what he knew about the Hariri case. “Absolutely nothing,” he told them.
“I was sure that I’d just killed my chances of getting the job,” he says. But the UN wanted someone untainted by preconceptions. “That was just what they wanted to hear.”
The more Bellemare learned about the case, the more intrigued he became. “When I came back home, my wife told me, ‘Just the way you’re talking about it, you’re hooked.’”
In the end, Bellemare got two jobs. The first was as head of the United Nations International Independent Investigation Commission (UNIIIC), which had been investigating Hariri’s assassination since April 2005. The second was as chief prosecutor of the new tribunal, based in The Hague and due to begin its work on March 1, 2009.
His UNIIIC role meant living and working in Lebanon, a nation where Hezbollah — considered a terrorist organization by Canada — is part of the ruling government coalition and maintains a militia more powerful than Lebanon’s army.
Hezbollah was belligerently hostile to the investigation. At one point, Sayyad Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, announced that his party would “cut off the hand” of anyone who tried to arrest one of its members in connection with Hariri’s assassination.
In a speech last March, Nasrallah attacked Bellemare by name. “Basically, I was a puppet of the U.S. and of Israel,” Bellemare says. “The way the argument went is that Israel could not defeat Lebanon militarily, so now they were trying, through the tribunal, to defeat Lebanon.”
The accusation the tribunal was politically motivated was “so insulting,” Bellemare says. “We were always driven by one thing: to find the truth.”
Bellemare spent his time in Lebanon in what amounted to an armed camp. UNIIIC staff took over the Monteverde Hotel, a mountainside resort overlooking Beirut that became both their residence and their office. The hotel was surrounded by the Lebanese military around the clock. Residents and visitors had to pass through four military checkpoints to gain access.
For security reasons, Bellemare rarely left the compound. “The few times that I had to go to town,” he says, “the deployment of resources required was just mind-boggling.” At least 85 people were mobilized to secure the route and travel in a convoy of a dozen SUVs that “swarmed like bees” through traffic.
Bellemare would sit in the back seat, with guards wearing helmets and bulletproof vests on either side. Soldiers armed with machine guns occupied the front seat.
“The first time that I saw machine guns, that was really a reminder of what you’re into,” Bellemare says. “My philosophy was that when your number is up, your number is up. If you’re always worried about what will happen, then you become paralysed. And if you’re paralysed, you cannot do anything.
“Of course, you don’t tempt fate. But at the end of the day, you can have a whole army of people protecting you, and if they want to get to you, they will.”
After accepting the UN jobs, Bellemare spent a few weeks in Lebanon in late 2007 scoping out the situation. What he found must have been dispiriting.
The UNIIIC had been investigating Hariri’s death for more than two years, but had made very little progress. Unaccountably, his predecessor, Belgian prosecutor Serge Brammertz, wouldn’t let his staff use telecommunications analysis — an important intelligence-gathering technique that ultimately was key to identifying the alleged culprits — until almost the end of his term.
Bellemare is too diplomatic criticize Brammertz directly. But when asked about the state of the investigation when he arrived, he pauses, smiles tightly and says, “Let’s say there was a lot of work to do.”
Bellemare was dealing with a multiple murder investigation. For that, he says, he needed experienced police officers. “So what I had to do was basically to turn around the way the investigation was being conducted.”
He drew on his personal contacts to recruit top investigators — some retired, some on secondment — from Canada, the United Kingdom and other countries. He also had to work around the UN’s notoriously sclerotic bureaucracy.
“It normally takes about four months to staff a position at the UN,” he observes. “Well, I needed the people the day before yesterday. I had to bend every policy to get the people. I have to say that people in New York were very supportive. They understood that we needed to do that.”
Within weeks of his arrival, the investigation suffered a blow when Wissam Eid, a Lebanese police investigator, died in a bomb blast.
The intrepid Eid had obtained cellphone call records and, rather miraculously, had been able to identify the interconnected cellphone networks involved in Hariri’s assassination.
Each network consisted of a group of phones, usually registered under false names, that had frequent contact with one another. One, dubbed the red network, was used by the assassination team. Two phones in another group, called the green network, were used to control and co-ordinate the attack.
Blue phones were used by the assassination team for surveillance of Hariri and to prepare for the attack. And purple phones were used to co-ordinate a false claim of responsibility by a fictional fundamentalist group. Moreover, Eid found the cellphone networks all led back, in one way or another, to land lines inside a Hezbollah-run hospital.
Eid reported his finding to his UN partners. Astonishingly, the UNIIIC officials either buried his report, misplaced it or didn’t understand its significance. It didn’t resurface until December 2007, and the following month, with Bellemare now in charge of the investigation, Eid met with the commission’s telecom experts to discuss his findings. He was, he told them, willing to help.
Eight days after his initial meeting with the UN investigators, Eid was killed by a bomb that destroyed his vehicle.
For a time, Eid’s death had a chilling effect on the investigation, Bellemare says. “My colleagues were working closely with him, and they felt really targeted.” But they redid Eid’s telecom work and confirmed that it was accurate. “It was a very, very key starting point for us.”
On March 1, 2009, Bellemare assumed his new role as chief prosecutor for the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, based in The Hague. The shift to the Netherlands eased security concerns, but only slightly.
Bellemare moved into an apartment with a lovely view of a beach. But tribunal officials had spent two months fortifying it. “You could have shot a cannon at the door,” he says. “It was steel plates all over.”
If he wanted to go for a walk, “I had to call the cavalry. You can imagine the scene. You want to walk on the beach and you have six people around you. It’s not an incentive to go out. You feel that you have to apply for bail every time you want to go out.”
As the investigation continued without apparent results, pressure mounted for indictments. “A lot of people wanted a quick indictment,” Bellemare says. “I resisted that all along. This is not the way we have been trained. This is not the way it should be done.”
There were even calls to pull the plug because the tribunal wasn’t getting anywhere, Bellemare says. “The pressure we had was unbelievable. Donor countries wanted to see results. But when you can’t discuss the investigation, you have to tell them, trust me, it’s moving along.”
Those who complained that the work was taking too long weren’t familiar with criminal investigations, Bellemare says. “Criminal investigation takes time. You lay an indictment if you have the evidence to support it. And basically, there were pieces missing.”
While investigators knew the cellphone numbers used by the Hariri conspirators, they had to link them to individuals. That took a long time, Bellemare says. “The work that my staff has done is fantastic, when you think that you start from a tabula rasa. Nobody thought that we would be able to build that.”
The investigators’ work became even more difficult after there was a reference to the communications data in a UN report, he says. “Hezbollah didn’t know at the time that the cellphones were leaving traces. After that, the line went dead.”
Eventually, Bellemare was satisfied that he’d gathered enough circumstantial evidence to lay charges, though investigations continue. He submitted an indictment for review by the tribunal’s pre-trial judge on Jan. 17, 2011. Five days earlier, the Lebanese government, headed by Hariri’s son Saad, had collapsed when Hezbollah, angered by Saad Hariri’s refusal to renounce the tribunal, withdrew its support.
His successor as prime minister, Najib Mikati, was effectively chosen by Hezbollah. But Bellemare says all Lebanese governments, including Mikati’s, have been very supportive of the tribunal’s work. “They all want to find the truth,” he insists.
After the pre-trial judge confirmed the indictments, Bellemare issued arrest warrants for four Hezbollah members last summer, charging them with intentional homicide, terrorism and conspiracy. Perhaps not surprisingly, efforts to apprehend them have failed.
About a month ago, the tribunal’s Trial Chamber concluded that all reasonable steps had been taken to arrest the men and decided to try them in absentia. The Lebanon tribunal is the only international tribunal with that power.
Bellemare remains optimistic that the perpetrators will eventually be found and brought to justice. “I never despair,” he says. “Look at the Balkans. Some of them took 12 or 15 years before they were found.”
Even a conviction in absentia would do much to end the corrosive culture of impunity that has dominated Lebanon for decades, Bellemare says. Because of the tribunal’s work, he believes that has already begun to happen.
Lebanon’s history is rife with horrific terrorist attacks, such as the 1983 bombing of the Beirut barracks that killed 299 American and French servicemen. Until now, though, no one had ever been charged with a terrorism crime.
“Now, what people want is to send a clear message: nobody’s above the law. If you commit a crime, you will pay. This, to me, is a huge, huge step forward.”
After Eid’s killing, Bellemare went to the murder scene and spoke with Lebanon’s military prosecutor general. The Lebanese official’s mood was grim.
“Mr. Commissioner,” he told Bellemare, “you know, professionals have done this.” Bellemare paused. “Mr. Prosecutor General,” he replied, “we too are professionals.” Suddenly, “it was like hope had come back. There was a big smile on his face.”
Sadly, Bellemare won’t be there to see the process through. After giving a speech in Ottawa last August, he spent two months in hospital with a serious bacterial infection. Though he’s now recovering, his doctor strongly advised him not to seek renewal of his three-year term, which expired Feb. 29.
It was hard for him to write his letter of resignation, he says. “I’m very happy to be back and to be with my wife, but professionally, I wish I was still there. It’s unique in a lifetime to have the privilege of serving for the UN on the international scene.”
It’s not yet clear what lies ahead, though Bellemare would like to share some of the experience he has gained. “We in Canada don’t have much knowledge of the Arabic world,” he says. “There’s so much richness … the people, the culture. It would be to everybody’s advantage to know more.”
One thing is certain. His wife has a veto over what he does next. “She’s been very, very patient and very supportive.”
The RCMP security will continue for now, but Bellemare’s optimistic it will soon be scaled back. “Hopefully,” he says, “in the summer, I’ll be on parole.”
dbutler@ottawacitizen.com
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
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