Reply #42: Clearly, Sir, We Take Different Views [View All]

[The Magistrate]

There is, after all, no requirement we agree.

The newspaper gets its casualty reports from the Lebanese government, which is the origin for U.N. reports on the question as well. There is no independent means of examining their characterization of casualties, or of any close enquiry into their circumstances. Any government being necessarily staffed in the main by skilled and practiced liars, my custom is to reserve judgement on their statements of fact, particuklarly where a lie might be of bnenefit to them.

You may choose to view the normal practice of partisan and guerrilla operations as "propaganda", and so disregard it as a factor in the current hostilities in Lebanon, but it seems unsound to do so, to me. The Geneva Accords, by the way, state specifically that reservists not on active duty are non-combatants, and so that line can carry no weight at all. If there were to be, however, an incident in which, say, an Arab militant group knew that a Shin-Bet major always took his breakfast at a certain restaurant at eight A.M., and arranged to blow it up one morning as he sat down to his eggs, my view would be that the deaths any other diners unfortunate enough to be there at the time were no crime.