Tuesday, August 01, 2006

'Qana massacre' - a hoax?

Israel Matzav has a few articles on the accumulating evidence that something is very wrong about the entire Qana tragedy. People are definately dead. But was the building collapse set up to blame Israel? Were previously dead people moved to the building before it was imploded? I know I sound a lot like loony conspiracy theorist, heck, I may even sound like the paleos, but looking at all of the evidence, things sure don't add up. My hope is, that when the IDF do figure out what really happened, they yell the truth out loud for everyone to hear...then ignore...
Last night, yesterday morning and Sunday, I posted doubts that the IDF and several bloggers have raised regarding what really happened at Qana. Those doubts related to the sudden appearance of a 30-foot high banner of US Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice just a couple of hours after the so-called massacre, and the lack of an explanation for an eight-hour gap between the time that the building was bombed and the time that it collapsed. Also on Sunday, I quoted a Lebanese blogger who implied that Hezbullah was not allowing cranes to come and pry bodies out of the building. That assertion takes on increased importance below.
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There are other mysteries. The roof of the building was intact. Journalist Ben Wedeman of CNN noted that there was a larger crater next to the building, but observed that the building appeared not to have collapsed as a result of the Israeli strike.

Why would the civilians who had supposedly taken shelter in the basement of the building not leave after the post-midnight attack? They just went back to sleep and had the bad luck to wait for the building to collapse in the morning? [Some of you may recall that I asked the same question here. CiJ]

What we do know is that sometime after dawn a call went hour to journalists and rescue workers to come to the scene. And come they did.

While Hezbollah and its apologists have been claiming that civilians could not freely flee the scene due to Israeli destruction of bridges and roads, the journalists and rescue teams from nearby Tyre had no problem getting there.

Lebanese rescue teams did not start evacuating the building until the morning and only after the camera crews came. The absence of a real rescue effort was explained by saying that equipment was lacking. There were no scenes of live or injured people being extracted. [Recall that I reported early on Sunday from a Lebanese blogger that Hezbullah was not allowing cranes to be used to pull people out of the rubble. CiJ]

There was little blood, CNN’s Wedeman noted: all the victims, he concluded, appeared to have died while as they were sleeping — sleeping, apparently, through thunderous Israeli air attacks. Rescue workers equipped with cameras were removing the bodies from the same opening in the collapsed structure. Journalists were not allowed near the collapsed building.

Rescue workers filmed as they went carried the victims on the stretchers, occasionally flipping up the blankets so that cameras could show the faces and bodies of the dead.

But Israelis steeled to scenes of carnage from Palestinian suicide bombings and Hezbollah rocket attack could not help but notice that these victims did not look like our victims. Their faces were ashen gray. Their limbs appeared to have stiffened, from rigor mortis. Neither were effects that would have resulted from an Israeli attack hours before. These were bodies that looked like they had been dead for days.

Viewers can judge for themselves. But the accumulating evidence suggests another explanation for what happened at Kana. The scenario would be a setup in which the time between the initial Israeli bombing near the building and morning reports of its collapse would have been used to "plant" bodies killed in previous fighting — reports in previous days indicated that nearby Tyre was used as a temporary morgue — place them in the basement, and then engineer a "controlled demolition" to fake another Israeli attack.

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