Steve Emerson broke the shocking news last night that the Saudi national, Abdul al-Harbi, who was first questioned in the Boston bombing, is going to be deported on ”national security grounds.” He is from a very powerful Saudi family with many terrorist ties. Abdul al-Harbi is a devout Muslim from Medina.

I said that it takes longer than 15 hours to investigate all of Abdul al-Harbi’s relatives, friends, acquaintances, and business and school friends.

Perhaps a quick look at the Arabic sources should raise the eyebrows of every American relative to the extent of the problem at hand. Many from Al-Harbi’s clan are steeped in terrorism and are members of Al-Qaeda. Out of a list of 85 terrorists listed by the Saudi government shows several of Al-Harbi clan to have been active fighters in Al-Qaeda[.]

When I heard he was from a very powerful Saudi family, I worried about this kind of thing happening.

Secretary of State Kerry’s meeting with the Saudi Foreign Minister Saud Al-Faisal was abruptly closedto the press the day Abdul al-Harbi was being questioned. There is no doubt in my mind that this was discussed.

Today’s embarassing display of rolling incompetence and badly mangled leaks led to numerous cancellations of press conferences, mis-identified suspects, promises of imminent arrest, walking back the arrest announcement, and more. They said they would release a statement and then said they wouldn’t.

Very smelly.

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Most of my Jewish Press columns deal with Israel’s most urgent national security problems, especially those that have, or have had, a real or prospective nuclear component. What I have never dealt with on these pages, however, are the important and corollary issues of how Israel actually makes its national security policy.

Now, auspiciously, Charles D. Freilich, a senior fellow at the Belfer Center at Harvard and a professor at Tel Aviv University, has written Zion’s Dilemmas: How Israel Makes National Security Policy (Cornell University Press), an authoritative and authentically magisterial answer to this vital question. There is much here for the reader to learn.

Let me start with the author’s conclusion, because, paradoxically, it represents an ideal place for me to begin. “The Lord is my shepherd,” quotes Freilich from the Book of Psalms, “and fortunate this is, for the decision-making process in Israel is deeply flawed.” Following 256 pages of meticulous and systematic investigation – an investigation that proceeds with all of the best architecture of modern social science, including appropriately careful delineations of “‘independent” and “dependent” variables – Freilich is intent to call all things by their correct names.

This is no narrowly partisan exegesis. This is no attempt to present a uniformly positive or contrived picture of Israel’s national security establishment. To the contrary, the author offers an entirely honest and open consideration that is often conspicuously less than visceral praise. To be sure, there is also a good deal of praise in Freilich’s book for the Israeli DMP, or decision-making process, but it is correctly based on a dispassionate and detached assessment.

What we learn is that needed changes in the DMP have simply not kept up with the growing complexities and synergies of Israel’s always-hostile external environment:

“Nearly sixty-five years after independence, the same basic political processes, which so successfully gave rise to the nation in its formative years, are still largely intact.”

Especially troubling to the author, the reader will discover, is that Israel’s DMP is more “chaotic” and “politicized” than in other countries, not by any means an intrinsically fatal disadvantage, but one, nonetheless, that has still managed to generate injurious “pathologies.”

Worth noting, at this point, is that Freilich has served as a senior analyst in the Israeli Ministry of Defense, and also as Israel’s deputy national security adviser. His assessments, therefore, are not simply an expression of outstanding academic scholarship, but the well-reasoned product of a distinguished and astute observer, one who has already had an important seat at the government table.

As a political scientist, I can admire the graceful way the author moves effortlessly between fashioning general theory and tendering elucidations of pertinent history. Combining the perceptual strengths of Isaiah Berlin’s “hedgehog” and “fox,” Freilich helps us see both one big decisional canvas and also many smaller, constituent elements.

Shaping a consciously nuanced model of national security decision-making in Israel, he applies it to assorted and carefully selected events of the past thirty years, ranging from Camp David I to the “disengagement” from Gaza in 2005 to the Second Lebanon War one year later.

The result is plainly disconcerting, as these seven cases reveal many critically lost opportunities, flagrantly unpardonable decisional errors, and an always highly politicized decisional context. While Freilich underscores the liabilities of Israel’s too-informal planning process, he also notes that this flawed process has allowed a relatively high degree of latitude or flexible response, as well as a gainfully self-serving sensitivity to pragmatic solutions.

Particularly helpful to the serious reader is the author’s continuous emphasis on “existential decision-making” as a critical component of Israel’s national security environment. Undoubtedly, this particular component is indispensable to understanding what drives the country’s DMP at its very core. In this connection, however, I would have liked to see greater attention paid to important details of Menachem Begin’s decision to attack Iraq’s nuclear reactor on June 7, 1981.

Of course, each reader will choose to assess the author’s selection of case studies differently according to his or her own personal hierarchy of concerns. But the connections between Operation Opera and the current threat of a nuclear Iran are unambiguously of the very highest urgency. Jurisprudentially, the attack on the Iraqi reactor was treated by Israel as a permissible expression of “anticipatory self-defense.” One may surmise that any future Israeli preemption against Iranian nuclear assets and infrastructures would have to be cast in very similar legal terms.

Published in the print edition under the title, “Iran’s Unhidden Plan For Genocide: A Legal Assessment (Third of Three Parts).” Click here for part one and here for part two.

In the post-Holocaust and post-Nuremberg international system, the right of individual states to defend themselves against genocide is overriding, and thoroughly beyond legal question.

This right does not stem directly from the language of the Genocide Convention, which does not explicitly link genocide to aggressive war, but it can still be extrapolated from (1) the precise legal language of anticipatory self-defense, including an 1837 case known as The Caroline; and (2) all subsequent authoritative reaffirmations of law identifiable at Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice. The right of anticipatory self-defense to prevent genocide can also be deduced from certain basic principles of self-protection codified at the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, and, more generally, from the confluence of persistently anarchic international relations with now-obligatory norms of basic human rights.

Should Israeli decision-makers finally determine they do have a compelling right to act first against Iran to prevent genocidal aggression, any resultant Israeli resorts to preemptive force would still have to be consistent with the laws of war of international law, or the law of armed conflict. In detail, this would mean, for Israel, respecting the always indisputable primary belligerent requirements of “distinction” (avoiding injury to noncombatants), “proportionality,” and “military necessity.”

What about the future? What happens next concerning a steadily nuclearizing Iran? What about anticipatory self-defense in this particular case?

International custom is one of several proper sources of international law listed at Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice. Where it is understood as anticipatory self-defense, the customary right to preempt has its modern origins in an incident known in appropriate jurisprudence as The Caroline. During the unsuccessful rebellion of 1837 in Upper Canada against British rule, The Caroline had established that even a serious threat of armed attack may justify militarily defensive action.

In an exchange of diplomatic notes between the governments of the United States and Great Britain, then-U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster outlined a framework for self‑defense which did not require a prior attack. Here, military response to a threat was judged permissible, but only so long as the danger posed was “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means and no moment of deliberation.”

Strategic circumstances and the consequences of strategic surprise have changed a great deal since The Caroline, thereby greatly (and sensibly) expanding legal grounds for anticipatory self-defense. Today, in an age of chemical/biological/nuclear weaponry, the time available to any vulnerable state under attack could be only a matter of minutes. From the special standpoint of Israel, soon to face an Iran armed with nuclear weapons, an appropriately hard-target resort to anticipatory self-defense could be both lawful and law-enforcing.

Before the start of the Atomic Age, any justification of anticipatory self-defense would have to have been limited to expected threats of aggression from other states, not genocide. Today, however, the conceivable fusion of nuclear weapons capacity with aggression could transform war into genocide. Although there are no true precedents of resorting to preemption as a law-enforcing means of preventing genocide or “conspiracy to commit genocide” by one state against another, the pertinent right to such pre-attack self-defense is rooted, inter alia, in The Caroline.

After all, if it was already legal, long before nuclear weapons, to strike preemptively in order to prevent entirely conventional aggressions, how much more permissible must it be to strike preemptively to defend against a potentially genocidal nuclear war?

Nonetheless, some legal scholars argue that the right of anticipatory self‑defense expressed by The Caroline has been overridden by the more limiting language of the United Nations Charter. In this view, Article 51 of the Charter offers a far more restrictive statement on self‑defense, one that relies on the strict qualification of a prior armed attack. This very narrowly technical interpretation ignores the larger antecedent point, that international law is never a suicide pact.

Sensibly, law can never compel a state to wait until it has absorbed a devastating or even genocidal first strike before acting to protect itself. Both the Security Council and the General Assembly correctly refused to condemn Israel for its 1967 preemptive attacks. Incorrectly, however, whether or not it had then accepted the existence of a formal state of war between Israel and Iraq – a condition of belligerency openly insisted on by Baghdad – the UN did condemn Israel for Operation Opera in 1981. Of course, this legally incorrect condemnation was the direct result of regionally recurrent circumstances, conditions wherein an exterminatory power politics or geopolitics trumps law.

Prime Minister Netanyahu on Sunday responded for the first time to the scandal that shook up Israel and Australia, over the suicide of former Mossad member Ben Zygier in an isolation cell in Israel, as Netanyahu’s own office was futilely attempting to block its publication.

Netanyahu emphasized the importance of security – even at the expense of freedom of expression. “Over-exposure of security and intelligence activities may seriously harm state security,” Netanyahu said.

Netanyahu chose to refer mainly to the public debate that surrounded the attempt to silence the story at first, and the sweeping gag order imposed on the entire affair.

“I would like to say that I completely trust the security forces of the State of Israel,” he said. “They are completely dedicated and committed to ensure that we can live in this country. I also trust absolutely the legal authorities in Israel.”

The Prime Minister said that “the security and intelligence forces of Israel operate under the full supervision of the legal authorities, which are completely independent. This combination of maintaining security and maintaining the law, also preserves the freedom of expression.”

He emphasized the special security conditions of the state of Israel, saying: “We are not like all the other countries. We an exemplary democracy and maintain the rights of detainees and human rights not less than any other country, but we are also more threatened and challenged, and so we must take care to maintain the proper operation of our security forces.”

He concluded: “And so I ask everyone, do let the security forces continue to work quietly, so that we can continue to live in security and peace in Israel.”

Meanwhile, Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr said he was seeking answers from Israel over the 2010 death of “Prisoner X” in an Israeli jail, as part of its own probe into the case.

“We have asked the Israeli government for a contribution to that report,” Carr told reporters. “We want to give them an opportunity to submit to us an explanation of how this tragic death came about.”