The Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) held its first public meetings ten years after the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

Until the last moment, Syrians questioned whether the STL would not be used in extremis by Washington to sabotage the Geneva 2 peace conference. All it had to do was reactivate the charges against President al -Assad. Fortunately such was not the case .

The STL is not an international tribunal and does not follow the rules of International Justice. Indeed, it was founded not by the General Assembly of the United Nations and the Lebanese Parliament, but by an agreement between the two Executives. It has adopted its own rules, borrowing from International Justice or Lebanese Justice, or according to its own needs. As pointed out by the Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan: "It is not a subsidiary organ of the UN, nor an element of the Lebanese judiciary."

The court of exception had as its primary mission to condemn the Lebanese and Syrian presidents Emile Lahoud and Bashar al -Assad to justify international intervention against Lebanon and Syria. The behavior of its first fact-finding mission is remembered as a series of conspiracies and manipulations concluding with scandals of paid false witnesses, the withdrawal of the charge and the resignation of the shameful commission head, Detlev Mehlis.

The assassination of Rafik Hariri and the STL itself are, in reality, two episodes of the war that the U.S. has waged against Lebanon and Syria since they decided to destroy them, September 15 2001, as they have publicly announced by adopting the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act (SALSRA) of 2003, which is still in force.

Among the victims of this plot, four Lebanese generals, Mustafa Hamdan, Jamil Sayye, Ali Hajj and Raymond Azar, were arrested and imprisoned on the basis of false testimony. Globally accused of murdering Rafik Hariri, their prolonged detention greatly facilitated the Israeli aggression of 2006.

These maneuvers having failed, the United States and Israel tried again to break Lebanese resistance and provoke war with Syria by asking, in 2008, that Prime Minister Fouad Siniora prohibit the supply of Iranian weapons to Hezbollah and cut the landline phone of the Resistance. Again it was a failure. Ultimately, Washington and Tel Aviv changed strategy and rather than confront the Lebanese and Syrian people directly, they chose to foment a fourth generation war on Syrian territory.

First fallen asleep, the TSL transformed itself into a sinecure for lawyers of luxury. Then, Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman, the current political leader of the United Nations, got the idea of using it against Hezbollah and Iran. The idea was to accuse the Lebanese resistance and pretend they got their orders not from Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, but from General Qassem Suleiman (commander of the Al-Quds Force) and the Iranian Revolution guide, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

To do this, Judge Antonio Cassese, Legal Adviser of the anti-Iranian terrorist organization, the Mujahideen of the People, was appointed President of the STL. However, unmasked, the corrupt judge was forced in turn to resign. Following the rapprochement of Washington with Tehran, this part of the plan was abandoned and there only remains the charge against Hezbollah.

The STL was funded by 28 states to the tune of 60 million euros annually. Mainly by Saudi Arabia , the United States, France , the UK and Lebanon. But not by Russia. Indeed, Vladimir Putin considers it a trap that could be used as before to establish an ad hoc tribunal against him and make him take responsibility for the war against the Islamic Emirate of Ichkeria (Chechnya). Confirming Russian concerns, President Barack Obama had even proposed to support Medvedev against Putin if he undertook to deliver him to a tribunal of circumstance.

The STL has indicted five members of the Lebanese resistance, Moustafa Badreddine, Salim Ayyash, Hassan Habib Merhi, Assad Sabra and Hussein Oneissi, who it judges in absentia in violation of the principles of international justice .

On the first day of hearings, the Tribunal heard the summary of facts . There are two theories about how the attack was committed. The first highlights the explosion of a truck, while the second - as I explained in the Russian press in 2010 - emphasizes that the forensic findings and moving cars in the explosion are not compatible with a conventional explosive, but only with an ultra-modern weapon of nanotechnology.

Ignoring my objections , the prosecutor has long presented the first version even though the STL failed to reconstitute it. In 2010, he had indeed tried to confuse me by investing huge sums to rebuild identically, on a French military base, the Marina district and there test the consequences of the explosion of 2.5 tons of TNT equivalent. The result showed the impossibility of the official theory and was therefore sent to the trash.

Regardless, it is on a basic misconception that everyone knows to be false that the STL works today.

The thing is that this second theory changes perspectives: in 2005, this weapon was exclusively in the hands of Germany. And it is hard to imagine Berlin providing it to Syria or Hezbollah. It is conceivable however that Germany, a NATO member, provided it to the United States.

It is out of the question for Washington that the TSL address this issue because the same method was used by the CIA in other parts of the world, including in Islamabad (20 September 2008). Even in Pakistan, an incident occurred which modified the scenario of the attack : a control barrier for too long retained a truck loaded with conventional explosives which was a diversion. It detonated a distance from the crater formed by the German weapon. So there were two interwoven craters for one official explosion.

For its part, Hezbollah has denied the charges against its members. To defend itself, it revealed its long-run interceptions of signals from Israeli drones. It has published videos shot by these drones to spy on Rafik Hariri in the weeks before his murder and on the crime scene for its preparation.

In addition, the Lebanese Army showed that the day of the crime, the United States had an AWACS observation device over Lebanon and that they had scrambled all signals of Lebanese origin. Asked to explain this strangeness and to provide a copy of their data, which would confirm or deny the suspicions of Hezbollah and my theory, the United States refused to do so. They had, up until then, called on the international community to cooperate in the investigation.

Thus, contrary to its claims, the TSL is no better than the pitiful Commission of Inquiry that preceded it. While Detlev Mehlis, who was denounced by his former German colleagues as a Mossad agent, himself bribed witnesses and falsified documents, the STL kept four Lebanese generals in prison and refused to judge Detlev Mehlis and his false witnesses, obscured the evidence submitted by Hezbollah and myself and ultimately judged suspects in absentia.

Translation
Roger Lagassé