In front of the "refrigerator truck" holding a dead girl (not shown). Later he appears with the same girl in his helmet and flak jacket. (AP)
The "man in the green helmet" holds up the toddler (not shown) with the blue pacifier. (AP)
Posted on 08/03/2006 4:19:52 PM PDT by Republican Red
It was the shot seen round the world: shocking, disturbing, heartrending and intentionally so. [Graphic content appears below and in links.] A man dressed up as a rescue worker held up a dead infant, purportedly killed in the basement of a building that supposedly collapsed after it was allegedly hit by Israeli ordnance.
The AP wire story begins: "Abu Shadi Jradi pulled bodies out of wreckage for hours - two toddler girls wearing tiny gold earrings, a small boy whose pale blue pacifier still hung from his neck [sic]. Somewhere in the middle, Jradi slumped beneath a tree and wept." Since we have a picture of this man pulling the small boy out, it is quite clear that Mr. Jradi is the "Man with the Green Helmet."
Remarkably, although the child was caked the thick dirt, the pacifier -- which in fact was attached to his shirt -- was immaculately clean.
"'There are so many children, so many children," the veteran civil defense worker said Sunday, barely able to get out the words.'"
Certainly the man called Abu Shadi Jradi is a veteran. In April 1996, after a misguided Israeli airstrike which really did kill scores of civilians, he appears in a similar pose [Extremely graphic image], holding up a child's bloodied headless body for the press to photograph. But is he a civil defense worker? http://resistance.jeeran.com/massacres/qana/001.jpg
Some problematic facts surrounding the Qana incident are already well known. A senior Israel Air Force general said that helicopters fired two rockets -- one of which turned out to be a dud -- just after midnight but the collapse of the house was only reported after 7. Brent Sadler of CNN reported that the only visible crater was 20 or 30 meters from the building. The Israeli general was baffled why the house would have collapsed six or seven hours after the airstrike. It's also possible that, if the crater was up to 100 feet away, the Israeli target was not even the building where the people died.
Other inconsistencies with earlier reports have also appeared in the local press. Rather than a four-story completed apartment building, the Lebanese Star reported on July 31, "The half-finished three-story house belonged to Abbas Hashem and lay at the end of a narrow lane that winds down a hillside flanked by olive groves and small tobacco patches. The Hashem family and their close neighbors, the Shalhoubs, had moved onto the ground floor 10 days earlier, hoping that a large pile of dirt and sand for construction would help protect them."
The fact that it was a building under construction might explain the otherwise inexplicable collapse. But if in fact they sheltered on the first floor, how to explain the fact that the bodies were being pulled from the basement?
Despite extensive coverage in the blogosphere, one key fact has been missing: the identity of the person prominently posing many of the corpses for the international press. Against the powerful images of dead children, facts and reason don't stand a chance. Later in the AP report we learn about the circumstances by which Jradi said he was summoned to the scene. "Jradi said he got the call to rush to Qana from Tyre. But he couldn't go immediately, with Israeli warplanes still overhead. 'It was too dangerous,' he said." Abu Shadi, it turns out, has a very distinctive form of transportation.
He was also photographed in Qana holding a dead child while in full rescue worker gear in one picture. But in another he is holding the same child dressed just in a black t-shirt, without his flak jacket, flourescent vest, radio and helmet. In the widely distributed blog entry Milking It, EUReferendum exhaustively examines the photographic evidence and time-stamps of the "rescue" operation.
The man and his refrigerator truck But here's something new, which may explain a great deal:
Mark MacKinnon of The Globe and Mail reported from nearby Tyre, Lebanon on July 26, describing the many difficulties caused by the rising death toll in that city. "Abu Shadi, the mortician at the government hospital in the city, agrees. He's processed 100 bodies -- many of them grotesquely mangled and burned -- and on his pickup runs has been forced to leave behind many more that he can't recover from cars and destroyed buildings.
"It's much more [than the official count]," he says. "There are many trapped under the rubble. The death toll will reach 1,000."
"Mr. Shadi was standing in front of a refrigeration truck that was packed with 20 bodies, days after he helped bury 74 bodies in a mass grave. When he opened the door to show the black body bags haphazardly piled on top of each other, a staggering stench came out, despite the refrigeration. Next to the truck stood 40 empty wooden caskets, waiting for new arrivals."
Based on these descriptions, it seems highly likely that Abu Shadi the mortician and Abu Shadi the green-helmeted "civil defense worker" are one and the same. And, in the double role, Abu Shadi was among the first to arrive, before the media did, with his refrigerated truck that in recent days had been carrying around corpses.
"The refrigerated truck that bodies are stored in had just emptied the day before with a mass burial. It is already filling up again, with the bodies of children. "
We have pictures of Abu Shadi Jradi standing by the refrigerator truck, corpse in hand, and then, in different dress, posing with the same corpse in a different location.
Complicating the naming issue is a video which shows him at Qana, addressed in Arabic by a journalist by the named of "Abdel Qader" although -- as in the case of Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), Yasser Arafat (Abu Amar) and many others -- the "Abu" may be a nom de guerre.
The tantalizing question, which may never be answered, is this: was Abu Shadi's refrigerated truck empty when he arrived at Qana that morning?
One might also ask: why was a "mortician" was among the first to be called to a presumed rescue situation, the very same "mortician" who ten years ago was posing headless child corpses?
Mr. Shadi had claimed much numbers twice as high, repeated -- even to this day. "Green Helmet" says in the video that fifteen bodies have been pulled from the wreckage, and he estimates that there were 210 (!) total victims.
The Red Cross and Human Rights Watch now confirm that the quantity of deaths has been greatly exaggerated, nearly double what was claimed by Lebanese officials. There were not "dozens" of children killed, as early reports have claimed.
And there really is no way to know by how much the deaths have been "padded" with refrigerated and transplanted corpses from Tyre or other locations.
And there remains the horrific possibility, as reported in a Lebanese publication but not confirmed, that Hezbollah placed rocket launchers on the roof and brought disabled children and the aged to be sacrificial victims, precisely as they became, possibly after a detonation of explosively charges long after the Israeli attack.
Calm, morning light shines on AP photographers AP headquarters was thrilled by the results of their team at Qana. An internal memo leaked to the LGF blog not only celebrated their excellent work but awarded them a munificent cash prize of $500 to share among them for their accomplishment:
"Nasser's most haunting image showed a man emerging from the rubble carrying the lifeless and dust-covered body of a child. Calm, morning light shone down on man and child, highlighting them against an almost monochrome background of pure rubble. ... Nasser's image ran on the front pages of at least 33 newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Post. It also won a double-page center spread in The Guardian of London. Lefteris's image of a resident weeping next to a row of bodies made the front of The Washington Post, among many others."
For days AP repeated the inflated figures, which continue to be parroted by supposedly reputable news organizations. They don't question or don't worry that the photographs were not staged or posed, even when it becomes clear that the person doing the staging and posing is not a rescue worker but the local mortician, with at least a decade experience specializing in atrocity shots.
Much attention has been focused on the timing of the photographs in an attempt to determine how long Abu Shadi Jradi was parading around the bodies. That would be inappropriate, even ghoulish, if Mr. Shadi Jradi was only a civil defense worker. But it would make perfect sense if his day job is mortician.
A mortician, after all, has the job of making corpses presentable, dressing them and posing them for public viewing. Abu Shadi Jradi is good at his job, so the media can do theirs.
That's Hezbollywood.
In front of the "refrigerator truck" holding a dead girl (not shown). Later he appears with the same girl in his helmet and flak jacket. (AP)
The "man in the green helmet" holds up the toddler (not shown) with the blue pacifier. (AP)
It looks like standard operating procedure:
Friday, 21 June, 2002
Saddam Hussein blames western sanctions for the dying children of Iraq. (excerpt)
"They used to collect children's bodies and put them in freezers for two, three or even six or seven months - God knows - till the smell gets so unbearable. Then, they arrange the mass funerals."
The logic being, the more dead babies, the better for Saddam. That way, he can weaken public support in the west for sanctions. That means that parents who have lost a baby can't bury it until the regime says so.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/correspondent/2056376.stm
Thanks for the post. This sheds even more light on this sub-human. Can't wait until he's riding in the back of that refrigerated truck.
Ditto - What you said
Hezbo`s and the dominant media,
BUSTED !
Someone could really win a prize by interviewing the people of that town unitl he knew what really happened. shows the weakness of rushing strangers into a situation and thinking their pics and reports represent reality. Probably only phone cameras are real, now.
Yeah, the townspeople know. But, they can't talk now. There are going to be a lot of amazing stories some day when all this is over with.
Another Jenin "massacre", same old same old but the world falls for it.
But the Washington Post assured me that this was on the up and up, and that anyone that doubted it was a conspiracy nut. I'm shocked!
An email was sent out to Associated Press staffers that praised the work of its photographers during the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. There's even a cash prize of $500 dollars that apparently will get split eight ways. The photographers who took the pictures of dead children in Qana will take part in the reward.
Is this what it takes? If we paid them $500 dollars, maybe photographers in the region would take pictures of terrorists hiding behind human shields.
For a day of outstanding a memorable photos, taken in conditions of substantial danger, the Lebanon photo team of:
Nasser Nasser,
Lefteris Pitarakis,
Kevin Frayer,
Mohammed Zaatari,
Ben Curtis,
Hussein Malla,
Kevork Djansezian
Dalia Khamissy
Each will share this week’s $500 Beat of the Week award.
Green Helmet Guy gets to harvest the organs as his payment / sarc.
Bingo!
Green Helmet Guy will never go hungry.
Talk about blood money...
Progressives/Liberals will say this doesn't matter -- as in Dan Rather's little problem with forged documents. Israel's evil, blah, blah, blah, so Hezbollah's justified in anything they do.
Red
I think I've got evidence of some of the clear plastic body wrap in the picture of Mr. Green Helmet digging up the baby. Let me know what you think or if my tinfoil is too snug this AM...
http://chickenhawkexpress.blogspot.com/2006/08/more-on-mr-green-helmet-in-qana.html
High volume. Articles on Israel can also be found by clicking on the Topic or Keyword Israel. also
2006israelwar or WOT
..................
Take a look at the latest from the EU guys. I sent them a link to your blog.
Qana - the director's cut
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/
Thanks for the link! EUreferendum's latest summary on Qana is quite interesting and really highlights the problems with the media's "story".
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