syria>lebonan

[clubalien]

anyone see last night charlie rose where they talked about the UN report on syrias involvment the assination. I came here and didn't see anything and was wanting peoples thoughts on it.

[clubalien]

Syria refutes U.N. Hariri report

(CNN) -- Syria's foreign minister has said his country was an easy target for U.N. investigators examining who was behind the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

Speaking at a news conference Saturday to refute a U.N. report on Hariri's killing, Foreign Minister Farouk al-Shara said just because Syria had a strong military presence in Lebanon did not mean it was involved in the former prime minister's assassination.

"There's a presumption taken by the (U.N.) commission that the very presence of Syrian troops and the Syrian security organs in Lebanon is something which should imply so and so and so," said al-Shara, speaking in English.

"You cannot put any weight on the idea (that) because you are present in Lebanon, everything happening in Lebanon ... should be done according to your knowledge and you know about it," al-Shara said.

"The report has a conclusion that this operation, the assassination of late Prime Minister Hariri, cannot be done without a means, a very sophisticated means which belongs to a highly-equipped security organ. And you just look around you, who is very very well equipped?" al-Shara said.

The U.N. report concluded there was "converging evidence" of Lebanese and Syrian involvement in Hariri's February 14 assassination. (Full story)

The report's author, German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, would not say if the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was cooperative during the investigation, telling a Friday news conference: "That's something we should leave for later."

Also Saturday, a Syrian Foreign Ministry official denied that Damascus failed to cooperate in the U.N. investigation and said it might allow U.N. investigators to quiz Syrian officials.

"Everything that was mentioned in the report with regard to Syria's noncooperation is baseless," Riad al-Daoudi told a packed news conference in Damascus.

"We cooperated but this cooperation was misunderstood. I hope that (misunderstanding) was not intentional," he said.

Asked whether Syria would allow further questioning of officials, al-Daoudi said, "If there is any demand coming from the commission we will discuss it with the commission and we might agree."

"We will cooperate but we'll see what are the boundaries of this cooperation and its elements," he said.

Al-Daoudi repeated Syrian denials of involvement in Hariri's killing and said the report's findings were politicized and aimed at targeting Syria rather than finding the truth.

"All that was contained in the report is based on presumptions and allegations ... . There's no proof," he said.

"The (U.N.) committee until now has not provided any worthy evidence ... but rather has opened the door to debate on points it still is trying to prove," he said. "This report could not be used in court."

Hariri's assassination sparked a wave of protests in Beirut that helped lead to Syria's announced withdrawal from the country in April.

Saad Hariri -- Rafik Hariri's son and a Lebanese parliament member -- on Saturday said he agreed with many of the U.N. report's findings and called for an international court to exact justice on the assassins. (Full story)

[ChumpDumper]

Well, this is a good enough excuse to invade as any other.

[Dos]

yes chump.. lets not worry about other countries.. lets not be part of the world body.. lets just become isolationist.. and worry about ourselves... seems that is the new policy of the once proud defenders of the down trodden liberal left....

[ChumpDumper]

worry about = invade

Understood.

[Nbadan]

I guess you missed this (http://www.spurstalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=27291)...


As I suspected six months ago, U.S. military and Bush administration civilian officials confirmed last week that U.S. forces have invaded Syria and engaged in combat with Syrian forces.

An unknown number of Syrians are acknowledged to have been killed; the number of Americans -- if any -- who have died in Syria so far has not yet been revealed by the U.S. sources, who by the way insist on remaining faceless and nameless.

The parallel with the Vietnam War, where a Nixon administration deeply involved in a losing war expanded the conflict -- fruitlessly in the event -- to neighboring Cambodia, is obvious. The end result was not changed in Vietnam; Cambodia itself was plunged into dangerous chaos, which climaxed in the killing fields, where an estimated 1 million Cambodians died as a result of internal conflict.

On the U.S. side, no declaration of war preceded the invasion of Syria, in spite of the requirements of the War Powers Act of 1973. There is no indication that the Congress was involved in the decision to go in. If members were briefed, none of them have chosen to share that important information with the American people. Presumably, the Bush administration's intention is simply to add any casualties of the Syrian conflict to those of the war in Iraq, which now stand at more than 1,970. The financial cost of expanding the war to Syria would also presumably be added to the cost of the Iraq war, now estimated at $201 billion.

Post-Gazette (http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05292/590727.stm)

[boutons]

Lebanon was Europeanized/Christianized/civilized/modernized enough under French influence, which remains strong (there is also a large Lebanese Christian community in France), that if the Lebanese Muslims, aided/provoked/financed by Assad/Syria and Iran, had not had that incredibly desrtructive, retrogressive, inconclusive civil war, Lebanon would be one of the huge ME success stories, especially with the Lebanese being agressive businessmen, and as naturally entrepreneurial as the Israelis and Palestinians.

But, no, the fucking Muslims had to go fuck up Lebanon, too. And now the civil war is looking totally negative, since the Lebanese have been kicked the Syrian army out, at least nominally. If there is any country where the US should be fostering democracy and peace, it's Lebanon, which would remove Lebanon as a enemy of the Isaeli/Palestinian peace efforts, and diminish the influence of Iran.