Hezbollah operatives are unreliable sources.

I wish people like the Syrians would have called for a ceasefire when Hezbollah was intermittantly attacking Israeli towns from South Lebanon all of these years. It seems hypocritical for the Hezbollah operatives to talk in the article as if they were the victims.

Israel's thought police are working overtime these days. Their problem is that Israel has completely blown its victim image by its viciousness over the past weeks and they are afraid that Americans are starting to realize what a load of crap they have been sold by the American media and AIPAC. If you have noticed, the thought police parrot the same talking points and recycle some old ones. Here's hoping they soon become incapcitated by extreme carpal tunnel pain because their posts are getting really boring.

A Berger poses one question and also offers several mistakes.

1) While I have taken the "Hizbollah dog and pony show" once in the past, which is the only way CNN has ever entered their areas, I have also made repeated trips into these areas without an official invite or permission. Sometimes an escort attaches himself to your group unprompted, as any military or political group would do so with the media, other times I have been left unbothered. And occassionally, I have been arrested and kicked out. I have always detailed in my filing when reporting or photographs sprang from one of these official trips because they are manipulation of the media, but perhaps far less sophisticated than CNN describes them as.

2) The "truthiness" of the quotes from the UN officials I do not dispute. Many Hizbollah offices, homes and other facitilities are located in civilian areas so I don't dispute that quote, except for the "hiding" part should be considered in light of the fact that most such places had signs and Hizbollah flags on them. As for the extreme tragedy of the UN monitors, I did not address it at all because there are questions about whether Hizbollah fighters were using the area to launch and the UN guys as shields. Currently we don't know for sure, I though I certainly am willing to belive Hizbollah fighters would do anything they think would work. What we do know for sure is that the slain observers were in a bunker that had been in use by the UN since 1948 and had made a reported 10 panicked phone calls to their IDF liason that day over a six hour period to say that shells were falling on their position. But as I was dealing with the question of whether Hizbollah launches attacks from close proximity to Lebanese civilians, and not the UN, due to their penchant for extreme secrecy, I decided to pass on including it. In part because it might be seen as an unfair shot at the IDF when we really don't know what Hizbollah was doing nearby when it happened. I also have a hard time imagining the IDF didn't know what they were hitting, and an equally difficult time envisioning they would intentionally kill four UN observers. So I didn't touch that one but think it is well worthy of further investigation.

3) I'm not claiming Hizbollah has any great moral qualms about using civilians as shields, to use their own rhetoric, any killed would be considered "martyrs" and go directly to heaven if they did. I just pointed out that the south is mostly deserted and that Hizbollah tends towards extreme paranoia towards civilians in terms of military operations. I'd also point out that it still seems weird to shell civilian cars fleeing from areas they were ordered to flee for their safety. But in war, not meaning to be flip, these things happen all the time.

4) Your expert source on the operations of Hizbollah from CNN is named Nic Robertson, not "Cliff." And he has rarely worked here before.

Mitchell Prothero

Beirut

I think you are thinking of Cliff Robertson the actor. Very good he was too if I remember and I think he might have died but not in Beirut.

Wait a second, aren't Arabs semites too?

Time to renew my Salon subscription.

I would point out that the "skeptics" here are full of crap, but all they would do is scream "Anti-Semite! Anti-Semite!," or pretend to be reasonable with reasonable-seeming crap like Xanthro does.

CNN is not reliable, nor is Fox. If you read reporting from other countries, you can discover how biased and dishonest the American mainstream media is. It's too bad so many self-appointed experts swallow it.

This story is completely believable. 'domini', on the other hand, is not.

Arabs and Israelis are Semitic. Iranians are Persian. These ethnic and religious groups have been historic rivals. The interplay of ethnicity and religion is volatile. Shia and Sunni traditionally are religious enemies; Arab and Persian traditionally are power rivals. Some Arabs are Shia (in Iraq, there are Persian and Arab Shia), Kurds are Sunni but hated for their ethnicity in some countries (Turkey, Iraq, are examples). If not for common enemies Israel and the US, the groups would have blown each other up by now.

Iran is Persian and Shia. Syria is nominally Shia (actually Baathist- communism with heavy geographic influence). The areas bombed in Lebanon are Shia enclaves. This leads to conflicting stories- Christian and Sunni applauding the bombings and bad mouthing Syria and Hezbollah, or pictures of them sunning themselves (on MSNBC.com, for instance), next to stories of pro-Syrian Shia refugees or Shia joining Hezbollah from the shelling. The population is diverse, and for now the shelling has been quite tight by military standards. So to some Lebanese, the shelling is popular; to some it is horrible.

Shia did give tactic support to Hezbollah and call them resistance fighters for years. Hezbollah in many ways resembles Sinn Fein/IRA- the residents don't necessarily know details, but they tactically support the rebels. Hezbollah has been known to run the targeted areas for years. These are legitimate targets. There is no rear in total war (Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Tet, Hue, Algiers, etc are examples). This is total war.