以色列在八八水災時送給我們200套個人攜帶式的淨水器，2套7000公升的水質輸送器，但是如果這個政府依然以暗殺的方式來解決政治上的分歧，那這個國家比布希所稱的流氓國家，與稱別人為流氓國家的美國，比起來也好不到哪兒去。
雖然現在仍沒有直接證據顯示以色列政府是這一起一月20日在杜拜暗殺案的背後主謀，但是以色列前科累累，暗殺的對象是為哈瑪斯政權建立武裝力量的人，而又遭以色列指稱涉及1989年綁架並殺害兩位以色列軍人的人－－Mahmoud al-Mabhouh。
美國的雷根總統於1981年簽署了第12,333號命令，禁止了暗殺行動，於是剷除異己的手段現在大都為軍事行動：派遣特種部隊突擊，或使用飛彈攻擊，－－好像離殺人的地點越遠，就越是高科技，也就相對的文明。但事實上無論是暗殺、伏擊、突襲、轟炸、... 都是一樣的野蠻。如果科技不能使人以和平的方式解決歧見，這就不是文明應發展的方向。
以色列情報單位Mossad前科累累、惡名昭彰，除了被史帝芬史匹柏拍成電影的慕尼黑一片所描述的－－慕尼黑事件（巴勒斯坦組織闖進奧運選手村，當場殺死兩名以色列奧運隊隊員，並挾持另外九名隊員為人質，之後全部遇害。）以及之後以色列政府對恐怖份子展開的報復，組成一個被稱為“天譴行動”的機密暗殺小組，進行近代史上最大膽及最積極的暗殺行動。近幾年還有不少。不禁讓我想到：以色列這個被神的選中人民所組成的國家，和被神選中的猶太人還真是目中無人。
2008年成功地在大馬士革殺掉一名伊斯波拉(Hizbullah)成員 Imad Mughniyeh。
1997年在約旦暗殺另一個哈瑪斯成員 Khaled Meshal, Mossad喬裝成加拿大人的殺手在下毒時被捉。
1988年派遣突擊隊在突尼斯除掉Khalil al-Wazir,巴勒斯坦的軍事領袖。
歐洲各國(英國、愛爾蘭)召見以色列大使，法國也要求以色列解釋關於冒用該國護照的事情，希望這些歐洲國家真的想破這個案子，而不是只做做樣子，對國際輿論敷衍一下就算了。
Assassinations
A time to kill
Revelations in Dubai about a well-planned assassination of a Hamas man
Feb 18th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
AFP
USING subterfuge to entrap and kill adversaries, in locations far from any battlefield, has been a feature of conflict for the past 3,000 years or so—at least since Jael, one of the warrior heroines of ancient Israel, lured the enemy commander Sisera into her tent, lulled him to sleep with a refreshing drink of milk, and then used a tent peg to smash out his brains.
subterfuge n. a secret, usually dishonest, way of behaving or doing something （通常指欺騙性的）秘密手段，招數；伎倆；花招
In modern times targeted killing is a more elaborate business, and many of the finer points—how the victim is stalked, how many people are involved—usually remain under wraps. But the plot to eliminate Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a Hamas commander who was found dead in a Dubai hotel room on January 20th, has been laid bare in stark detail by the police in that country, not normally regarded as a model of open government.
Hamas instantly blamed Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, confirming that the dead man was a founder of the movement’s military wing. Israel had fingered him in particular for the abduction and killing of two soldiers in 1989. Mr Mabhouh’s brother claimed that he had been killed by an electrical appliance that was held to his head. The local police said he had been suffocated.
The gory details of his end were not made public in Dubai, but many of the events that led up to it were starkly exposed. Indeed any amateur student of espionage and its tradecraft can now consult YouTube, the video-sharing site, to see closed-circuit television footage of some of the 11 people (all travelling on European passports) who are said by the Dubai authorities to have joined in the plot. On February 15th the country’s police chief offered a blow-by-blow account of the plotters’ doings, elucidating the images.
The key agents were “Gail” and “Kevin” who supervised the hit, and “Peter” who was in charge of preparatory logistics. In the films their appearances changed frequently. Kevin acquires glasses and a full head of hair, after going to the loo. It is clear that the plotters were expecting Mr Mabhouh’s arrival. One spotter waited at the airport; he duly tipped off a couple of colleagues, stout figures in tennis gear, who wait at the hotel and take note of the victim’s room number, 230. The plotters book room 237, which they use as a base. In later footage Gail and Kevin are seen pacing the corridor nearby. Four men in baseball caps, one also wearing gloves, are seen getting into a lift to leave; they seem to be the ones who did the job.
In Israel the initial reaction to the killing was of telling smirks, plus leaks to the effect that the victim was buying arms from Iran. But this gave way to embarrassment as the Dubai authorities produced their evidence, and as protests came from countries—Britain, France, Germany and Ireland—whose passports had apparently been faked or abused; and from individuals whose identities were “borrowed”.
The Israeli security services have never voiced any moral doubts about targeted assassinations (whether in the neighbourhood or farther afield) but there was a concern that the latest killing might go down on a list of plots that have misfired in unforeseen ways. In 1997, for instance, Mossad agents tried to eliminate Khaled Meshal, a senior Hamas official, in Jordan. Two agents posing as Canadians were caught trying to poison him and Israel, under threat that its agents would be executed, agreed to send an antidote. In 1973 Israeli agents murdered a Moroccan waiter in Lillehammer in Norway, mistaking him for the leader of Black September, the group blamed for a massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.
These bungles contrast with operations that Israeli spooks recall with defiant pride: the killing of Imad Mughniyeh, a top member of Hizbullah, in Damascus in 2008 (a particular coup since Syria is hostile territory for Israel); and the dispatch of Abu Jihad, a senior Palestinian official and founder of the Fatah movement, by a squad that swooped into Tunis in 1988.
The not-so-cold war
Israel has no monopoly on killing its foes far from home. European countries, including Britain (since the 1950s, anyway) claim to eschew such methods. But during the cold war both superpowers conspired eagerly to eliminate people they deemed undesirable. In America there was a rethink after a committee, under Senator Frank Church, disclosed that it was probing a web of plots to kill senior figures in countries like Congo, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Vietnam. This led to a series of presidential decisions—most famously order number 12,333, signed by Ronald Reagan in 1981—which barred assassinations.
eschew v. to deliberately avoid or keep away from something （有意地）避開，迴避，避免
The real force of such orders was to squelch rogue plots hatched in the lower levels of the security services; procedures still exist for the president, in consultation with congressional leaders, to authorise the killing of a perceived adversary. In 1998, three years before the 9/11 attacks, Bill Clinton mandated the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden, after bombs at American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
squelch v. 1. to make a wet sucking sound 發吧唧聲，發撲哧聲（如走在泥濘中似的） V often VN + adv./prep.
2. to stop something from growing, increasing or developing 制止；壓制；遏制；限制
rogue n. adj. 1. a person who behaves badly, but in a harmless way 無賴；搗蛋鬼 humorous
2. a man who is dishonest and immoral 騙子；惡棍；流氓
Since the start of the “war on terror”, the boundaries in American thinking between legitimate military action and cold-blooded assassination have become fuzzier still. Among America’s foreign-policy pundits there were serious discussions, back in 2003, as to whether simply killing Saddam Hussein would be a humane alternative to waging war against Iraq. More recently, as the fronts in the battle with al-Qaeda have broadened from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Somalia and Yemen, so too has the scope of American actions to eliminate perceived foes. Last September, for example, American helicopters fired on a convoy of trucks in Somalia and killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, who was blamed for an attack on an Israeli hotel in Kenya in 2002, and for the embassy bombs of 1998.
On February 3rd Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, told Congress that American forces might sometimes seek permission to kill a citizen of the United States, if he was a terrorist. This followed a report that Barack Obama had authorised an attack on Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical American imam, in Yemen.
The operation in Somalia earned Mr Obama a rebuke in the Harvard law faculty, where he first shone as a progressive young legal scholar. Such actions were counterproductive and of dubious legitimacy, a columnist in the Harvard Law Record argued. But defenders of the right to kill selectively cite the shooting down of Japan’s Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto in the second world war, which was quite a cold-blooded business—though he was clearly an enemy combatant.
In truth, the factor that has changed the tactics of the American administration is less legal than mechanical: the advent of drones that can be directed with lethal accuracy (most of the time) from offices in Virginia. The best-known target was Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban, who was blown up at his home in Waziristan last August. A study by the New America Foundation, a think-tank, points out that CIA drone attacks have become far more frequent since Mr Obama took office, with more strikes being ordered in his first ten months than in George Bush’s last three years.
advent n. the coming of an important event, person, invention, etc. （重要事件、人物、發明等的）出現，到來
drone 1. If something drones, it makes a low, continuous, dull noise.
2. If you say that someone drones, you mean that they keep talking about something in a boring way.
3. People who do not contribute anything to society or to an organization are sometimes described as drones.
In a world where Western voters demand maximum results for minimum expenditure of blood and treasure, assassination by machine has an obvious appeal to political leaders. Although they cost more “enemy” lives (including civilian ones) than old-time stabbing or poisoning, they also arouse less controversy. But for how long? Legal watchdogs say it makes unlawful killing more likely by dehumanising the process; and Pakistani officials, even those committed to fighting the Taliban, say the ruthless use of drones is alienating local people.
Whether death is by computer or by more old-fashioned methods, the antecedents and details of assassination are easier to hide in rough, remote locations than in rich, westernised ones. And even in wild places, awkward facts can come out—as they obviously did in Dubai.
antecedent n.
1. a thing or an event that exists or comes before another, and may have influenced it 前事；前情 countable formal
2. the people in somebody's family who lived a long time ago 祖先；先人
http://www.economist.com/world/international/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15542868&source=features_box_main
Europeans Summon Israeli Envoys in Dubai Murder Probe
By ALAN COWELL and ROBERT F. WORTH
Published: February 18, 2010
LONDON — Britain and Ireland called on the Israeli ambassadors to their countries on Thursday to explain what they knew about the use last month of false British and Irish passports by the suspected assassins of a leading Hamas figure who was in Dubai.
France also said it was demanding an explanation from the Israeli Embassy in Paris about the use of a false French passport, suggesting that the diplomatic fallout from the episode was widening.
Interpol issued an international alert notice on Thursday for the 11 suspects identified by the Dubai police, posting their photographs on its Web site. The agency noted that the names issued were aliases and that it had “reason to believe that the suspects linked to this murder have stolen the identities of real people.”
aliases n. 化名;別名
Israel has not confirmed widely voiced suspicions in Britain and Israel that the Mossad intelligence agency was involved in the killing of the Hamas official, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.Israel’s ambassador in London, Ron Prosor, met at the Foreign Office on Thursday morning for around 30 minutes with Sir Peter Ricketts, the head of the diplomatic service, a Foreign Office spokesman said.Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Mr. Prosor was told that “we wanted to give Israel every opportunity to share with us what it knows about this incident.”“We hope and expect that they will cooperate fully with” British investigations, he said. The tone of his remarks suggested that Britain wanted to avoid a full-blown diplomatic crisis.Mr. Prosor said he had been “unable to add additional information to Sir Peter Ricketts’s request.”As Dubai police officers investigated the killing, they discovered that 6 of a total 17 suspects had used false British passports. Some of the rightful owners of the passports have dual British-Israeli citizenship and live in Israel. Three more suspects had carried fake Irish passports with numbers taken from genuine passports.Dubai police officials are investigating at least four United States-issued credit card accounts, which they say the suspects obtained with the passports they used to travel to Dubai. The police say the suspects used the accounts to purchase plane tickets and other items related to the assassination, according to a person familiar with the investigation. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he was not authorized to discuss the matter.In Dublin, the Israeli ambassador, Zion Evrony, said he held an hourlong meeting with a senior Irish official, David Cooney, and “told him I don’t know anything about the event,” the Press Association news agency reported.But, like Mr. Prosor in London, he said he was under no obligation to discuss the meeting publicly. “It is not customary to share the content of diplomatic meetings,” he was quoted as saying.The Irish foreign minister, Micheal Martin, said earlier that the use of Irish passports was “an extremely serious incident and puts the security of Irish citizens at risk, there is no question of that.”Britain’s Serious Organized Crime Agency said in a statement that the photographs and signatures on the six British passports used in Dubai “do not match those of the passports issued” by British authorities to their owners.The British Foreign Office said in a statement that the “defrauding of British passports is a very serious issue.”“The government will continue to take all the action that is necessary to protect British nationals from identity fraud,” it said.Prime Minister Gordon Brown has also called for a full investigation of the matter.Israel had wanted Mr. Mabhouh for his role in the capture and killing of two Israeli soldiers in 1989 and for smuggling weapons to Hamas, which controls Gaza. On Jan. 19, he was killed in a Dubai hotel room.The fallout from the killing, and the extensive evidence made public by the Dubai authorities, suggest that a significant increase in the number of surveillance cameras and new passport technology have made such assassinations more difficult than they were in previous decades, said Mustafa Alani, a security analyst at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai. Years ago, operatives could use fake passports that correlated to no real people, but now passports are checked against global databases for authenticity.If Israel is behind the killing, Mr. Alani added, it will be one of only a few cases of notably poor tradecraft by its agents during a period in which Israeli intelligence is thought to have carried out more than 40 assassinations. In 1997, Israel acknowledged responsibility for a failed effort to kill the Hamas leader Khaled Meshal. And in the 1970s, Israel paid compensation to the family of a man it had killed in a case of mistaken identity in Norway, Mr. Alani said.In the latest case, the killing went off smoothly, but the assassins failed to escape undetected.“It looks unprofessional to me,” Mr. Alani said.Alan Cowell reported from London, and Robert F. Worth from Beirut, Lebanon.http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/world/europe/19britain.html?scp=2&sq=dubai&st=cse
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