Last update - 00:00 26/10/2007
Some of PM's defense talks before last year's war went unrecorded
By Yuval Azoulay, Haaretz Correspondent
Some of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's conversations with senior defense officials shortly before last year's war in Lebanon were not recorded due to a "malfunction," and certain others were intentionally unrecorded, Olmert's bureau chief Yoram Turbowicz told the Winograd Committee.
His testimony last December to the committee investigating the Second Lebanon War was released for publication only yesterday.
Turbowicz said that shortly after the incident that sparked the war - Hezbollah's abduction of two Israeli soldiers - Olmert spoke by phone with then defense minister Amir Peretz and then Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Dan Halutz.
When the committee noted that it had no transcripts of these calls, Turbowicz replied: "Not everything is recorded because there are malfunctions, as with everything in this country. So important things are suddenly not recorded."
In addition, he said, some of Olmert's conversations were intentionally not recorded, to facilitate free discussion.
Turbowicz said that Olmert insisted on a massive response to the cross-border raid; he nixed the idea of a "routine response" in which "we'd shoot a little and they'd shoot a bit and the affair would soon die down.
"We were furious that they [Hezbollah] managed to kidnap [the soldiers]," he explained.
"Did we understand then that we were talking about a large-scale military operation of the kind we in fact launched? The answer is yes," he said, adding that it was equally clear that Hezbollah would attack the home front in response.
He said that "it was clear that the army was prepared, ready and willing to open another front. From the first moment, the chief of staff said there was no problem dealing with this. These things were said explicitly. The army said: 'We train for this all the time.'"
Asked whether Halutz had warned the cabinet that the reserves had not trained for years, or that there were shortages of equipment, Turbowicz replied: "We were told nothing.
"There was nothing from which we could have understood that the army wasn't ready."