Interim Winograd report to include personal conclusions about Olmert, Peretz and Halutz

The Winograd Committee's interim report will be published in the second half of April and will include personal conclusions regarding Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Amir Peretz and former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Dan Halutz, the committee announced yesterday in a press statement.

It also said that the interim report would be confined to the first five days of the war.

The committee decided to issue the press statement - its first since it began work in September - in order to dispel uncertainty over its timetable and intentions, compounded by a spate of what it termed "baseless" media "conjectures [and] guesses." Among others, these included media reports that the interim document would be published in late March.

The interim report will include both a classified section, to be given only to the prime and defense ministers, and an unclassified section, which will be available to the public. It will include four chapters.

The first will discuss the general principles guiding the committee's work, and the second will explain why the committee believes it is possible to publish personal conclusions regarding Olmert, Peretz and Halutz without sending them warning letters. The third will analyze the period leading up to the war, starting with the IDF's withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. It will include general conclusions about the behavior of the army and successive governments during this period, and may criticize Israel's responses to periodic Hezbollah attacks during those years.

The last, and most important, chapter will analyze the decision to go to war and the first five days of the fighting, through Olmert's speech to the Knesset on July 17. The committee evidently views this speech as the moment when the final decision was made to conduct a large-scale operation rather than a limited reprisal. In it, Olmert defined the war's goals as the return of the two soldiers kidnapped by Hezbollah on July 12, Hezbollah's removal from the border region and the Lebanese army's deployment in south Lebanon. He then declared: "We will continue without hesitation, without concessions and without fear until we achieve our goals."

The interim report will not address anything that happened after July 17, meaning that most of the war's main events - military tactics, diplomatic moves, home front defense and the large-scale ground offensive of the final two days - will not be included. It will therefore presumably not include personal conclusions about any senior army officers except Halutz.

In addition to analyzing what happened, this chapter will also include recommendations for solving the systemic problems identified by the committee and personal conclusions regarding "the responsibility of the prime minister, the defense minister and the former chief of staff for the decisions leading up to the beginning of the campaign and the manner in which they were made," in the statement's words.

The committee said that it decided to devote the interim report to the start of the war for two reasons. First, a decision to go to war is extremely important, and this decision to a large extent determined what followed. Second, it attaches great importance to speedy implementation of its recommendations regarding these first few days.

However, it added, its conclusions about this early period do not necessarily reflect its view of the entire campaign.

The statement did not reveal when the final report would be published, but did outline its contents: an analysis of the war's various stages, including the cease-fire agreement and the major offensive of the last two days; the IDF's preparedness for war; the training of army officers; relations between the army and the government, and the handling of the home front. The latter section will be coordinated with the state comptroller, who is currently preparing a major report on this issue.

The final report will also include a chapter on "the general ethos of Israeli society and how it is connected to the challenges the state faces."

The statement also announced that the committee would soon launch a Web site on which protocols of its hearings will be published, and urged anyone with information about the war to give it to the committee.