Say Anything Blog

All of you who have been following the news coming out of the Israel/Hezbollah conflict have by now heard of the controversy over Israel's attack on a rocket site near a building in Qana, Lebanon. Since that attack occurred there has been a seemingly endless string of images showing wreckage and dead bodies, all purportedly caused by the Israeli attacks.

In the past there has been some suggestive, though not conclusive, evidence that would seem to indicate that some of the wreckage and dead bodies may have been caused by Hezbollah for propaganda purposes.

Today Israel Insider has more evidence, this time suggesting that the bodies in question weren't necessarily of people who were in the building when Israel attacked.

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.

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.

Read the whole thing.

Just to sum up, the guy who is photographed holding up dead and dirty bodies (some of the bodies wearing different clothes in different pictures) which he supposedly dug out of the rubble of the building in Qana (all while not having any dirt on his own clothes) also just happens to be a "roving mortician" with access to lots and lots of dead bodies.

All that, combined with our knowledge about Hezbollah's efforts to manipulate the media in their favor, adds up to a significant pile of evidence.

Not conclusive evidence, but certainly compelling evidence.

What has puzzled me is this (awful) picture:

Supposedly that child's body has been pulled out of the rubble just 7 or 8 hours after the building collapsed.

Now I've worked on some murder defense cases and have seen more than a few pictures of dead bodies. To my experienced (though admittedly a layman's) eyes that body looks like it's been dead for days. Dead and perhaps stored in the sort of refrigerator truck referenced in the above article.

Again, that's not conclusive evidence, but it sure makes me wonder.