“We Want Neither Their Truth Nor Their Justice”

Below are two criticisms of the actions of the STL’s investigators.

First, a section of Ibrahim Al Amin’s column in Al-Akhbar today. It adequately represents the picture Hezbollah supporters have of the STL. It paints a sinister portrait of anonymous men scheming behind closed doors gathering reams and reams of personal information about almost everyone in the south. (Hover on text below to see Arabic original):

Are the people aware of what the spies of Daniel Bellemare -who spend their times between beirut night clubs and security corridors- are working on?

Are the people aware that those are working — with official warrants — on gathering hundreds of thousands of documents of personal, institutional and official nature, documents which include personal records, university records, school records, hospital records and private clinic records, in addition to records of tens of thousands of photographs of political and popular festivals? Those records are all then gathered to be analyzed by a special team tasked with producing detailed files on “persons of interest” who number more than 1000 Lebanese citizens

In the same spirit, this is a comment someone made in this blog (which was copied from an Angry Arab post):

[The actions of these investigators] would not fly in the USA. One cannot just come in, even with legal sanction, and check wholesale on the FILES (containing sensitive personal information) of ALL those that come through (they claimed to start with 17 names but it was made obvious that it was to be an open ended investigation with a free hand to investigate any file in the clinic). Such a act would constitute a serious violation of Medical Privacy laws, unnecessarily exposing not only their names of a large number of individuals but also the details of their medical conditions as well as other private information. This is ILLEGAL under any of a number of medical privacy laws. One is usually presented with a court order to obtain information on a SPECIFIC person, and no other subjects so as to safe guard people’s privacy. I am amazed the Physician in question even let them in. She should have been the first to kick them out of the clinic, court order notwithstanding. Shame on the Lebanese government and the Lebanese Order of Physicians for providing cover for such a travesty to take place.”