Free Republic

The author is a professor of law and director of the Frederick K. Cox International Law Center at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. With the simple press of a button, the pilot of an Israeli helicopter gunship unleashed three missiles, instantly killing Sheik Ahmed Yassin, founder of Hamas, as he was being driven home from prayers at his local mosque in the Gaza Strip. Yassin had not been sentenced to death by any court, nor was he on a battlefield in any conventional sense. Seven others died in the attack. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made no apologies,...

JERUSALEM — Israel's response to Palestinian violence after a pullout from the Gaza Strip would be even harsher than it is now, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Tuesday. Interviewed on Israel's Channel 10 television for Israel's independence day, Sharon defended his "unilateral disengagement" plan, including a pullout from the Gaza Strip. Members of his Likud Party vote on the plan in a referendum Sunday. After a pullout, Palestinians could no longer explain violence by saying that Israel was occupying their land, Sharon said, "and Israel's responses (to violence) would be much harsher." He refused to give specifics beyond noting...

The top figures in the militant group Hamas after the assassination Sunday of its leader, Abdel Aziz Rantisi. _Mahmoud Zahar: A Hamas spokesman, the 53-year-old Zahar is considered a hard-liner. Zahar was the personal physician of Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who was killed by the Israelis on March 22. Zahar served as Hamas' liaison with the PLO in the mid-1990s but now opposes compromise with the Palestinian Authority. Zahar has been imprisoned by Israel and has been jailed repeatedly by the Palestinian Authority. _Ismail Hanieh: A top aide to Yassin and like Zahar he is a member of Hamas'...

WASHINGTON -- The blurring of lines between active-duty U.S. soldiers and contracted security personnel is causing unease in Congress, as violence continues to rise in Iraq. Some lawmakers worry that private security forces operate too far outside U.S. military control -- and laws. And experts wonder what would happen if a contractor did something tragically wrong, like shoot an Iraqi child. Thirteen Democrats wrote Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this month to argue that providing security in a hostile area is a classic mission for the military. "It would be a dangerous precedent if the United States allowed the presence...

The current president of Iraq's U.S.-picked Governing Council, Massoud Barzani, said Monday that American mistakes helped lead to the military deadlock outside of Najaf and Fallujah because Washington allowed "an army of liberation" to become "an army of occupation." In an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, Barzani warned the United States that civilians must not be harmed during any assault on the cities, but also cautioned that the United States cannot act softly and give insurgents "the impression that they have the upper hand." Barzani, who holds the monthly rotating presidency of the council, spoke in one of the...

LONDON -- Britain will begin a pilot identification-card program tomorrow as part of the government's plan to introduce compulsory ID cards for the first time since the 1950s. Home Secretary David Blunkett has said that ID cards would help Britain combat terrorism and illegal immigration, pointing out that identity fraud costs the country more than $2.37 billion annually. But civil liberties groups have already expressed concern over privacy infringement. Some 10,000 volunteers will be involved in the program to be run from the Passport Office in London and three other sites around Britain, the Home Office said. The new...

WASHINGTON - The U.N. agency that helps Palestinian refugees said Friday it is nothing more than a humanitarian organization, with no responsibility for camps security in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Some members of Congress and the World Jewish Congress allege that the camps have become launching pads for terrorist activity against Israeli civilians. President Bush has hinted that the United States, the major donor to the U.N. Relief Works Agency, might cut the agency off. Peter Hansen, UNRWA´S commissioner general, said that under the Oslo peace accords Israel and the Palestinian Authority have clearly defined security responsibilities...

BRUSSELS, Belgium - European Union lawmakers voted Wednesday to release $17.7 million in aid to the Palestinians that had been held up over accusations some of the money was going to fund terrorism. The vote included a demand for disclosure about how the money is spent. It came after EU external affairs commissioner Chris Patten defended efforts to track the more than $1.3 billion spent in the past decade on projects in the occupied territories.   "We have found no evidence of EU funds being used for any purposes other than that for which they were intended," Patten told the...

Any deal between Saddam Hussein and the United Nations carried a grave element of risk. On the one hand, you had an amoral dictator concerned only with saving his skin; on the other, an international body notorious for its lack of public accountability. The decision to ease economic sanctions against Iraq, allowing the sale of oil in order to generate funds for humanitarian relief, was taken soon after the Gulf war. For years, Saddam simply ignored it. It was only at the end of 1996 that the oil-for-food programme was finally implemented. As might be expected, the dictator exploited the...

TEL AVIV - Even though he had been targeted for death since last fall, Israeli defense officials say the assassination of Abdel Aziz Rantisi became an urgent priority only in the last month, after he became the head of Hamas and began upgrading Iranian involvement in the organization. Rantisi, 54, was killed April 17 by an Israeli helicopter gunship near his Gaza home, just 26 days after he took over Hamas following the assassination of his predecessor, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. During the few weeks that he headed the organization, defense officials say Rantisi invited the Iranians and their Lebanese...

SEOUL, South Korea - A self-proclaimed "anti-American" group is threatening new terrorist attacks against eight U.S. allies in Iraq by the end of the month, including South Korea, Japan, Australia and the Philippines, a South Korean official said Thursday. (Image-South Korean officials were wearing gas masks as they came out of their office at the government building in Seoul during a civil defence drill against terrorist attacks.-) The group, called the "Yello-Red Overseas Organization," warned in a one-page letter sent to the South Korean embassy in Thailand that it will launch the attacks through April 30, embassy spokesman Ryoo Jung-young...

--In addition to all of our other problems - terror, international delegitimization, disagreement over disengagement, Iranian nuclear weapons, socio-economic gaps, religious-secular tensions, etc. - Israel is also in the midst of a leadership crisis. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon may be indicted for allegedly using his influence, while serving as foreign minister in 1999, to advance shady business deals, including a crony’s attempt to buy a Greek island for development. The evidence is not entirely clear, and even if he stands trial, he might not be found guilty, but if the attorney general issues an indictment, Sharon may be forced to...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Wednesday, April 21 Three car bombs exploded in front of Iraqi police stations in the southern city of Basra on Wednesday morning, killing more than three dozen people and wounding more than 70, according to initial reports from the police and witnesses. A fourth explosion hit a police station in the nearby town of Zubeir, according to a witness in one of Basras main hospitals, who was speaking to medics as they brought in people wounded in the blast. One of the blasts in Basra hit a school bus during the morning rush hour, when school buses are...

CAIRO - An Israeli attempt to assassinate Yasser Arafat is "only a matter of time", the Palestinian leader's national security adviser Jibril Rajoub said in an interview published here yesterday. "An attack on Arafat's life is only a matter of time because Arafat symbolises the freedom" of the Palestinian people, General Rajoub told the Egyptian weekly magazine Nahdat Mir. On March 22, the leader of the Palestinian radical Islamic movement Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, was killed in an Israeli helicopter raid in Gaza City. And Israel assassinated his successor, Abdelaziz Rantissi, less than a month later. Israeli Prime Minister...

It was never much of a secret that Saddam Hussein was a crooked dictator. But there are allegations that the former leader of Iraq wasn't the only one who was corrupt. The United Nations has agreed to an independent probe of the program it set up to let Saddam sell oil-- to feed his hungry people. The investigation could uncover the dirty truth about a humanitarian program-- polluted by greed. For years there have been allegations of corruption in the U.N.'s Iraqi oil-for-food program. Now it's bubbling over into a full-fledged scandal. The corruption charges first surfaced last January--...

In 1996, after brutal sanctions had wreaked enormous hardship on the Iraqi people, the international community found a better way. Under the watchful eye of the United Nations, it launched the oil-for-food program, which would allow Iraq to sell limited amounts of oil, as long as the proceeds were used to buy food and medicine for the Iraqi people. The oil money would flow through the UN, which would monitor the spending. It was to be the largest humanitarian-aid effort ever undertaken. So much for theory.  In reality, the oil-for-food program was one of the larger rip-offs of all...

<p>In a remarkable shift for formal American policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict and morass, an American president has actually recognized reality. Out loud.</p> <p>George W. Bush has acknowledged the Israelis can't be expected to retreat to the vulnerable armistice lines of 1949, the old borders that invited one war after another in the years since. All the invaders had to do was cut a wasp-waisted Israel in two, then roll up each half. Not for nothing did the late Abba Eban refer to the old borders as "the Auschwitz lines."</p>

When Mordechai Vanunu ends his 18 years of mostly solitary confinement Wednesday morning, he will likely be greeted with complete silence from all four of his parents. Mr. Vanunu, 50, became an international cause célèbre in 1986, when he was kidnapped by Israel's Mossad intelligence agency and imprisoned for treason after telling the world about Israel's secret nuclear-weapons program. Israeli officials believe Mr. Vanunu is one of the most dangerous men in the country, and have ordered him not to leave his town in Israel, to speak to foreigners, to use a cellphone or the Internet, or to come within...

<p>How is it, sir, that you still have your job?</p> <p>As if presiding over the deadliest domestic intelligence failure in the history of the nation wasn't enough to relieve the top spook of his duties, Tenet's appearance before the commission on Thursday provided more reason.</p>

<p>April 19, 2004 -- JERUSALEM -  Defiant Hamas leaders yesterday said they've already picked a new chief to replace assassinated Gaza Strip head Abdel Aziz Rantisi - but refused to publicly identify him.</p> <p>The move came as hundreds of thousands of frenzied Palestinians rampaged through Gaza, vowing to start a bloody "earthquake" against Israel for killing Rantisi less than a month after assassinating his predecessor, Sheik Ahmed Yassin.</p>