L'Ombre de l'Olivier

The Shadow of the Olive Tree

being the maunderings of an Englishman on the Côte d'Azur

02 August 2006 Blog Home : August 2006 : Permalink

Fisk Provides Confirmation of Qana Photo Problems

This is definitely a first, but Robert Fisk is one of the sources that can be used to help bolster us bloggers as we question the photos taken at Qana. The MSM, as noted by Richard at the EU Referendum blog, seems to prefer to concentrate merely on one of the aspects of the case - namely the timestamps:

And, while majoring on the "time stamps" (ignoring the other evidence), Greenslade (like others of this blog's critics) has not noticed that none of the agencies have declared that the "time stamps" are actually wrong... merely that time stamps in general could be misleading. Nor have any of the agencies volunteered their own time lines.

 However the timestamps were just one of the problems. One of the other problems, clearly expressed at Confederate Yankee, was to do with concrete dust - or rather the lack of such. Fisk, in an interview with the US Democracy Now channel which otherwise sounds like a Hezbollah puff piece, says:

The children were put in the truck first. Pretty grim. As I said, the children's hair, when you could see the bodies, were matted with dust and mud. And most of them appear to have been bleeding from the nose. I assume that’s because their lungs were crushed by the bomb, and therefore they naturally hemorrhaged as they died.

Other journalists such as Kevin Sites and the Grauniad ones also report the same thing. Interestingly the Grauniad piece not only includes one of the suspicious photos but it's 2nd paragraph has a number of oddities:

[...] At about one in the morning, as some of the men were making late night tea, an Israeli bomb smashed into the house. Witnesses describe two explosions a few minutes apart, with survivors desperately moving from one side of the building to the other before being hit by the second blast. By last night, more than 60 bodies had been pulled from the rubble, said Lebanese authorities, 34 of them children. There were eight known survivors.

  1. 60 bodies? death tolls reported elsewhere are 56/58 and 28
  2. The men were making late night tea? really? are you sure they weren't outside shooting off rockets?
  3. So two explosions? I thought one bomb was dropped


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