A “Profound Disconnect”

In a post for Now Lebanon, Michael Young explores the inconsistencies of Hezbollah’s arguments against the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) and methodically exposes them as contradictory. Here’s one such inconsistency:

Mehlis, like his predecessor Peter Fitzgerald, explicitly took his investigation in a Syrian direction. Yet Hezbollah is now accusing Bellemare of using the false testimony garnered by Mehlis to indict not Syria, but Hezbollah. There is a profound disconnect here. If Mehlis fabricated his reports, and by some superhuman effort managed to induce his many witnesses to sign statements against Syria, how is it that Daniel Bellemare, the prosecutor of the Special Tribunal, apparently will not be accusing Syrians in his first round of indictments?

Mr Young makes very good points and I encourage you to read the article, but unfortunately he misses the point. Hezbollah is not making an “intellectual” case against the tribunal, it’s conducting a political and emotional attack on it. Hezbollah is following a “spaghetti on the wall” strategy to see what sticks and what doesn’t, and it doesn’t care very much about consistency.

Their campaign is not to “prove” that the STL is flawed. It’s to plant doubt and fear in the hearts of the Lebanese. The main insight of the STL’s detractors being: Details don’t matter to many if the STL can be shown to be “dangerous” and “tainted”.