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.
This is incredible information.
I hope Michelle Malkin, David Horowitz, Sean Hannity talk about this.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3286966,00.html
8/6/06
US Blogs: Reuters doctored Beirut photo
I happened upon Austin American-Statesman's 7/31 front page (can't seem to find it on the web). The reason it caught my attention was the huge picture of Green Helmet Guy carrying the child with the oddly bent arm. It's a new pose I hadn't seen before. Helmet guy, in profile, seems to be crying to the heavens about the atrocities with the poor child in his arms and rubble in the background. Guess who took the picture? Yep, you guessed it. Nassar Nassar himself. Seems they've been together for at least 10 years. Wonder how much they get paid for these scams.
Within that article, in the comment section is a link to yet another picture of a bloody scene of an Israeli attack on Aug. 5 in Tyre. You get one guess who is the subject in the photo.
Adjusting my tin foil hat, but Green Helmet might warrant some investigation in any unsolved deaths in that area, and even solved murder cases if he was the government coroner who did the autopsies.
http://editorial.gettyimages.com/source/search/details_pop.aspx?iid=71589463&cdi=0
bttt
I've seen enough of paliwood to be disgusted by it's constant appearance as news.
That said - there are a couple points in your analysis that you need to revise.
1) How did the victims end up in the basement? This is basic. When a building collapses inwards (from above), no matter what floor you are on - you will end up in the basement buried in rubble from the collapse above and around you. On this point, the Qana building collapse is realistic.
2) The Mortician theory - dressing bodies for funerals:
Funerals in the Middle east are very different from what you may be used to. The practise of decorating a body with makeup and nice clothes is common for "open casket funerals". These are soooo rare in the Middle east as to be almost non-existant. They are forbidden by both Muslim and Jewish law and outside of eastern orthodox Christian practises. Generally, bodies are cleaned with water, wrapped in cloth and placed either directly into the earth or first into a simple wooden coffin. There is no "viewing". If Green hat is indeed a mortician (and I would highly doubt the calling a mortician to a rescue in another town) - he is most likely unfamiliar with tecniques for making a body attractive for viewing.
As he is so many photos for such a long period of time it is more likely that he is either in the employ of a photographer/news agency, or part of a local rescue unit - taking on whatever title makes his media appearance seem more believable. Basically - not a mortician.
1) If the victims were on the first floor during the collapse, there would be rubble underneath them. It would be easy enough to tell whether they were in the basement or not.
2) The comment was an analogy to western morticians, not meant to describe what this green hat guy does. Maybe he clipped on a binkie to make it look more tragic, maybe someone else did. The point is it's perfectly clean while the child is covered in dirt.
He calls himself a mortician, and has access to a vanload of corpses. He also has connections to Hezbollah. It ain't his first time at the dance. Not too hard to connect the dots.
Sisku,
Thanks for the welcome.
I really don't dispute that GREEN HAT is not the character he claims to be. I've been looking over Hajj's photos and so many of them are obviously staged. I would tend to believe at this point that both Hajj and his GREEN HAT actor are applying for unemployment.
On your points:
1) the building collapse
A couple years ago a local building collapsed here from the 3rd floor during a wedding reception. Hundreds of guests were seriously injured and several died. Rescue workers went through the night trying to pull out the survivors while they were still "survivors".
It's very difficult to analyze how the rubble sits after such an event - it really depends on where the collapse began (from the walls, the ceiling or the floor). If the collapse was from the center - the amount of rubble beneath the victims would indeed be much less than the amount above. And all the victims would end up at the lowest possible level of the building.
I really do believe that a building collapsed and that victims were caught inside.
Using them for "staging" though is unethical and untenable. Reviewing all Hajj's shots from this day clearly show "staging". Many of the children's corpses were used over and over in photo shoots throughout the day. No doubt the greatly exaggerated numbers also originated from the "stagers"
2) the "Binkie" - another staging give-away. Yes - way too clean and obviously NOT part of the childs original attire.
Oversights like this are very common among Palestinian "staging" photographers. It is what it is.
I personally think the real problem lies with News agencies - who will always pay top dollar for the most dramatized - attention gaining pic or headline. They are partly responsible for the creation of men like Hajj.
You could be right - that the children died of other causes. After closely screening the pics available though (not Hajj's of course) - there is no evidence to show that the event itself was staged.
1) The children appear to be in a state of rigor mortis. This occurs shortly after death and doesn't last very long.
2) We do not have photos of all the victims (and the Red Cross did not order autopsies) - so it's difficult to assess trauma damage. If the children were caught in a collapse some would have died via suffocation (dust and debris) and some from head trauma (common in small children) and some from other, more visible traumas. So far, the visuals are quite similar to victims of building collapses during earthquakes.
3) We have absolutely no way of knowing what caused the building collapse (bomb from above, explosion from below or within, structural damage???). Damages and trauma are different depending on the collapse origin and direction.
4) The International media seem little interested in the truth. They are looking for the "shocking" headlines to grab their audiences. In this race for ratings the means to reach the truth is now permanently buried.
5) The theory that the bodies were planted is not one I would be willing at this point to entertain. It simply raises more questions than can be answered (ie: rigor mortis = recent death; difficult to plant bodies deeply underneath existing rubble; too many non-hizbullah personnel involved in rescue efforts; some of the people buried in the building actually survived).
The fact that it is being discussed and analysed, though, is a good sign. Shows that some people still believe the truth matters. As an Israeli on the receiving end of Hizbullah's daily madness - that's good to know.
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