July 31, 2006
Were the Qana Bodies Staged?
These questions and others are beginning to mount as the discrepancies in Hezbollah’s versions of events start to fall apart:
On the morning of July 30, according to the IDF, the air force came in three waves. In the first, between midnight and one in the morning, there was a strike at or near the building that eventually collapsed. There was a second strike at other targets far from the collapse building several hours later, and a third strike at around 7:30 in the morning. There too the nearest hit was some 460 meters away, according to the IDF. But first reports of a building collapse came only around 8 am.
Thus there was an unexplained 7 to 8 hour gap between the time of the helicopter strike and the building collapse. Brigadier General Amir Eshel, Head of the Air Force Headquarters, in a press briefing, told journalists that "the attack on the structure in the Qana village took place between midnight and one in the morning. The gap between the timing of the collapse of the building and the time of the strike on it is unclear."
Gen. Eshel appeared genuinely mystified by the gap in time. He "I’m saying this very carefully, because at this time I don’t have a clue as to what the explanation could be for this gap," he added.
The army’s only explanation was that somehow there was unexploded Hezbollah ordnance in the building that only detonated much later.
"It could be that inside the building, things that could eventually cause an explosion were being housed, things that we could not blow up in the attack, and maybe remained there, Brigadier General Eshel said.
Eshel reported that as recently as two days ago, military intelligence reported the building area had been used by the terrorists for storage or firing of weapons. It was a bad place to cram dozens of women and children.
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?
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.
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.
The well-documented use by Palestinians of this kind of faked footage — from the alleged shooting of Mohammed Dura in Gaza, scenes from Jenin of "dead" victims falling off gurneys and then climbing back on — have merited the creation of a new film genre called "Palliwood."
Assuredly, Hezbollah's supporters will accuse those questioning the Qana attacks as conspiracy theorists, so I simply advise that viewers view the evidence with their own eyes, and draw their own conclusions from there.
The photographic evidence below the fold includes images of the dead, and is not for the squeamish.
The child in the photo reputedly died when a concrete building weighting thousands of pounds collapsed upon her. There no visible blood or abrasions consistent with a building collapse. Neither the child nor the man carrying her show any signs of dust or debris one would expect in a building collapse. As a nation that watched the World Trade Center towers fall, beleive me, we know something about concrete dust.
The child in this photo also shows no signs of injuries—no blood, no disfigurement or crushing wounds consistent with a building collapse. The two men, one of which has been thoroughly reported on—show no signs of having been digging in rubble. Their clothes are unbelievably clean, especially the black fatigues that would so easily shown concrete dust. The sole role of the second man, "The Baby Carrier" in other photos captured by the assembled media has been to hold up dead children for the television cameras over a multi-hour period.
In a picture that hits the wires just one hour (9:06 AM) after the building collapse, a Lebanese Red cross member sits with bodies already displaying significant rigor mortis. According to Wikipedia:
Assuming mild temperatures, rigour usually sets in about 3-4 hours after clinical death, with full rigour being in effect at about 12 hours, and eventually subsiding to relaxation at about 36 hours.
About.com puts the timing of maximum stiffness at about 12-24 hours after death. These people were supposed to have died with one hour of these photos being taken.
A later photo of the bodies above, now under sheets. Again, no blood seeps through the sheets as one might expect from the crushing wounds of a building collapse, and the exposed bodies show no signs of appreciable dust. Note in particular the body on the far left, which has its hands thrust in the air, presumably because of the severe rigor mortis mentioned above.
Perhaps the most damning evidence of Hezbollah staging this event with bodies from a morgue. This young victim is again relatively clean and displays no evidence of the expected crush injuries. In fact, he displays no injuries at all, and no blood. Note there is no sign of dust whatsoever in his hair. Note the discoloration of the lower face and arm. This would seem to be consistent with the natural affect of decomposition on a body several days after death. Once more, the rescuers are clean as a whistle, not even having dust on their gloves.
"The Baby Carrier" with the only victim that actually appears authentic. Not that the child is heavily coated in concrete dust, unlike all the other victims shown. He is also the only victim in any photo that has concrete dust in his hair.
So, who do you trust? Do you trust the accounts of what happened as journalists parrot them from Hezbollah's statement of what happened, or do your eyes tell you something different.
I, for one, see clear evidence of a most revolting Hezbollah fraud.
