Who links to me?
Jefferson Morley has an article titled The Qana Conspiracy Theory in the Washington Post today where he casts doubts on many of the theories and reporting coming from the blogosphere.While full of generalities and comparisons to insane 9/11 conspiracy theories Morely’s piece is short on facts.
He has a couple of follow up questions for bloggers which I will address but first I have a couple of questions for Mr. Morley to answer about his own piece.
Let’s address the death toll reported by Morley in his first paragraph:
As Hezbollah wins support throughout the Middle East in the aftermath of the Israeli airstrike that killed at least 57 Lebanese civilians over the weekend, an alternative view of the attack is emerging in blogs — that the incident was actually staged by Hezbollah.
Emphasis mine
Can you tell me who your source is for the death toll you are reporting Mr. Morley?
The Red Cross has the death toll at 28. Human Rights Watch (an organization not known for minimizing body counts) also reports 28 dead from the attack.
From HRW website:
The initial estimate of 54 persons killed was based on a register of 63 persons who had sought shelter in the basement of the building that was struck, and rescue teams having located nine survivors. It now appears that at least 22 people escaped the basement, and 28 are confirmed dead, according to records from the Lebanese Red Cross and the government hospital in Tyre.
So can you please explain why your number is almost double that of the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch?Perhaps you are citing Lebanese security officials like this ABC report?
Can you tell me why they are more credible than the Red Cross or Human Rights Watch?
Are you prepared to correct your report yet?
Before you answer you should know that HRW further reports:
The initial estimate of 54 persons killed was based on a register of 63 persons who had sought shelter in the basement of the building that was struck, and rescue teams having located nine survivors. It now appears that at least 22 people escaped the basement, and 28 are confirmed dead
Again I ask are you prepared to correct your report?
Which page will that correction run on?
Next you mention EU Referendum’s post in your article but you don’t actually address the facts or questions raised in story.
The American Thinker, a popular conservative site, says unnamed major media photographers were “willing” tools of Hezbollah.
I will repeat the relevant facts for you. EU referendum provides several photographs with their time stamps and asks a legitimate question. Why are “aid workers†carrying around the bodies of dead children for hours?
Why are they seen “posing†for several different photographers from different news organizations?
I know you are a busy man and don’t have time to read a bunch of well explained facts from bloggers so I have condensed the information contained in EU Referendums report.
In this first of the two sequences, we see a shot by Reuters and taken by Adnan Hajj, timed at 2:21 pm
The next shot in this sequence is credited to AP’s Kevin Frayer. Timed at 4.09 pm
Just in case you missed it, however, we get another view, courtesy of Reuter’s Adnan Hajj, with a time given of 4:30 pm
To be clear we now have the same aid worker posing for pictures with the same dead child for two hours. Who is this man aiding?
Here is the best part:
timed at 12:45 pm, an hour and twenty minutes before the child’s body is pictured being pulled from the ruins, we get a picture from AP’s Kevin Frayer
Again for the MSM journalists amongst us I will explain the obvious. First this man has now been carrying the same dead child around since 12:45. At one point he takes the body back to the rubble and places it back on the ground to pose for a picture to make it appear he is pulling the child from the rubble for the first time.
The photo taken at 12:45 proves the photo taken at 2:21 pm is staged for shock value. Some might call it propaganda. Can you explain Mr. Morley why an aid worker would take a dead child’s body back into the rubble, and lay it down, only to pick it up again?
To sum up; this aid worker has carried the same child for nearly 4 hours! What is your explanation for this Mr. Morley?
Do you seriously wish to argue that this man was doing anything other than posing for propaganda photos?
I strongly urge to you visit EU Referendum’s site again, or possibly for the first time and actually view the photographs and the timeline.
You will also notice this same man also removed another child’s body from an ambulance to pose for pictures before this whole sequence began.
Now let’s address your questions:
Who killed the Hashems and Shalhoubs, if it wasn’t an Israel bomb?
I am perfectly willing to accept the news reports, apologies offered by the Israeli Prime Minister,acknowledments offered by the IDF, and the names listed on Human Rights Watch’s website as proof that the Israelis did in fact bomb this building and that 28 people were tragically killed. You on the other hand are still missing 29 bodies.
How did Hezbollah truck in bodies to the Qana site without the pervasive Israeli aerial surveillance catching it on film?
They may or may not have trucked in bodies. I have no idea. The fact that the same refrigerated trucks containing 32 bodies from Tyre the day before arrived in Qana the morning after the attack is widely reported.
The supposition made by Riehl World View that Hezbollah may have used the very same trucks to transport the very same bodies which coincidentally adds up to the widely misreported death toll is a sound one, and deserves a thorough investigation not out of hand dismissals from journalist’s who can’t get their basic facts right.
Again I have no idea if Hezbollah brought additional bodies to the scene or not but neither do you. I am also well aware that terrorist organizations like Hezbollah are not above faking death tolls, or planting bodies and so are you.
I am perfectly willing to accept 28 people were tragically killed by the Israeli attack that night. But 54 or 57 or 60 call me a crazy blogger, but I will first need proof from a credible source.
It may not be the way you do things over at the Washington Post but some of us have standards.
***Update***
A Tyre hospital on Thursday revised the number of casualties resulting from Israel’s air strike on the south Lebanese village of Qana from 52 down to 28.
Others blogging: Euphoric Reality has Hoax Fatigue, Blue Crab Boulevard still has lots of questions about what happened in Qana,
**Upate**
Thomas Lifson from the American Thinker has also answered Morley’s post and it isn’t kind.
Linking Posts
The timestamps are not that fishy, they are set when the pictures are picked up by the wire services and not when they were taken.
Comment by Anon � August 3, 2006 @ 11:51 am
The issue isn’t quibbling over numbers of dead. Don’t get me wrong, one dead is a lot if it’s a non-combatant. But first, how do you tell? Hezbollah doesn’t wear uniforms; this probably has something to do with their main tactic of jumping out of a crowd to take a shot at the Israelie military and then jumping back in.
The real issue is whose fault is it when non-combatants die in the kinds of exchanges we see, both in Lebanon and Iraq? The vaunted Geneva conventions clearly places blame on those that use civilians as human shields but, increasingly, the worlds media places the blame on the West.
The fascists are clearly counting on the media to act in their interests. Who are they expecting to win over in this gambit and why? Why does it matter what the man on the street in, say Luxemburg, thinks? Why is the media front in this global war so valued?
The most important front of any war is the battle for public opinion. Armed conflict is the embodiment of the public will to fight. Public opinion can pull whole armies off the battlefield. Walter Cronkite declared our victory in the Tet offensive a defeat. President Johnson, seeing that he could not win a war with CBS, backed out of the presidential campaign and the United States went on to lose Vietnam. They won on the media front (thanks to people like John Kerry and Jane Fonda) and the military, having won on the battlefield was pulled back leaving the North Vietnamese as victors by default.
In Lebanon the news reports identify Hezbollah as a militia. Hezbollah’s leader, Nasrallah, declared himself president of Lebanon when he said: “If Israel attacks our capital we will attack theirs.” The capitals he is referring to are Beirut and Tel Aviv. By co-opting Lebanon he turns the battle into one of repulsing an invasion and by displaying civilian dead he places his own army as morally superior to the invaders. He has made himself David to Israel’s goliath.
The mistake that the public makes is the same one that was made in Vietnam and Korea. We assume that the particular war we are involved in or that we are watching unfold is mono-dimensional. We only started to win in Vietnam when Nixon saw that the war was more than just Vietnam. We could not win in Vietnam unless we won in the whole of Southeast Asia (we were then actually fighting a proxy war between us and the Communist block). We are now fighting an “insurgency†in Iraq and the Israelis are fighting “militias in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. These insurgencies and militias are proxy armies of Islamic-fascists led by Iran but the wider war is one between the fascists and the West. In this fight the fascists have been joined by the enemies of the Classical Liberalist West: the modern Liberal. For this reason the Media, American Liberals and European Liberals hold that the defeat of what president Bush represents is more important that an alliance with the devil and a military defeat in Iraq.
Comment by Brad � August 3, 2006 @ 1:46 pm
I don’t disagree with anything you have said Brad. American journalists who one would assume want the United States and its allies to win this war continually offer our enemies perpsective under the umbrella of being “objective”.
While journalists who presumably want the Islamofascists to win paint a clear picture of America and its allies as the enemy.
As I have said before, there is no such thing as an objective disinterested journalist.
They may only wish to bash George Bush, or get Democrats elected but the effect of their reporting is helping our enemies.
Comment by The Ugly American � August 3, 2006 @ 2:13 pm
Qana : WaPo Defends Hizb’Allah’s Honor…
The Washington Post’s Jefferson Morley comments on the bloggers questioning Hizb’Allah’s Qana story:I think some combination of cynicism, complacency and insulation has stifled the instincts of very good reporters. I also think there is also a failu…
Trackback by The Jawa Report � August 3, 2006 @ 2:45 pm
Bloggers Versus Journalists…
My friend Rick over at The Real Ugly American has a few questions to ask Jefferson Morley at the Washington Post on accuracy in reporting. The fact is that there are some serious questions about Qana and Morley just wants to discredit the que…
Trackback by Blue Crab Boulevard � August 3, 2006 @ 2:52 pm
“The timestamps are not that fishy, they are set when the pictures are picked up by the wire services and not when they were taken.”
That may or may not be true, but it is easily investigated as the originals have an internal time stamp which is difficult to forge. Wouldn’t a decent journalist check these things? Wouldn’t a credible news agency completely dispell these questions with releasing this kind of nearly incontrovertible evidence? Doesn’t the failure of either or both to happen say anything about those subjects?
Comment by Mark E. � August 3, 2006 @ 3:26 pm
It occurred to me, similar to others, that the time-stamps, imprinted at time of TAKING the picture, could still be skewed when reporters come in WITH CAMERAS SET to different timezones…
More importantly, no matter WHAT the final ’cause’ of timestamp discrepancy, it is clear in viewing the photos en masse, that Abdel Qader, “Mr Green Helmet”, paraded around with a dead baby, posing and reposing and positioning it, for propaganda effect, because it was NOT part of any ‘pull bodies from wreckage’ reality!
And yet MORE IMPORTANTLY, why were those live people forced by Hizb’ullah to STAY in a targetted building? Why did some “escape” in the nick of time, with others doomed by Hizb’ollah to their deaths?
When Hizb’ullah publicly and repeatedly declares that it will NOT honor the Geneva Conventions; will NOT put uniforms on its fighters to distinguish them from unarmed/innocent civilians; will NOT separate attackable military targets from civilian populations…
Hizb’ullah, BY HIZB’ULLAH’S CHOICES, damns the Lebanese civilians to suffering and death as a result of legitimate, proportional and morally-defensible defensive measures taken by Hizb’ullah’s enemies, the Free World!
Read the Geneva Conventions sometime, Israel is justified in striking ANYWHERE around Hizb’ollah, civilian or no, babes and children and pregnant women or not… because of Hizb’ollah!
Comment by Karridine � August 3, 2006 @ 4:38 pm
Great analysis!Morely’s a real piece of work, isn’t he?
Biggest question I’ve got for him is — why don’t MSM reporters check their frickin’ sources?
I weighed in on it here.
Comment by FrauBudgie � August 3, 2006 @ 5:09 pm
Plese check out Swashblogger for some more information about Qana. I have looked at possibly a hundred photographs and four or five videos from Qana. Some salient points:
1. The building was built in the crotch of a canyon, like homes are built in Malibu and Ventura. Not a wise place to be using after a bomb shelter — especially hours after it’s been bombed.
2. An image posted on my site depicts a building in the process of collapse. The image can be found in numerous places on the internet interspersed among images of the Qana “massacre” (2006, not 1996). I have been trying to verify whether or not this image is the building in quesiton, because it was obviously taken well after sunrise; not between 1:00 and 1:30 a.m., which is the time witnesses report.
3. IDF infrared videos appear to show rockets being launched from the exact location of the building, further down the crotch of the canyon. I am in the process of converting the pdf captures of these images into something usable for comparison to the few images of the crossroads area surrounding the building which collapsed.
4. Some interviews of villagers available at YouTube.com and translated into English reveal that the two families who were hiding in the basement of the building had not evacuated Qana because they were poor and had nowhere else to go; not because the roads were blocked.
5. In another interview linked at my site, Chris Matthews is told by a reporter that there were no men available as rescuers in Qana at the time of the collapse because they were all out fighting with Hizbollah.
6. Villagers claim the roads were impassable and that the Israelis would have bombed them if they tried to leave. Yet, the media was able to get to Qana from Tyre within the hour once the collapse was reported.
7. Villagers also claim that the emergency call never went out to the Red Cross in Tyre until 7 or 8:00 a.m. because the phone lines were down, their dog ate the homework, etc. Tyre is less than four miles from Qana. To believe that nobody in Tyre would have learned about what had occurred until six or seven hours later simply defies credulity.
Comment by John � August 3, 2006 @ 6:31 pm
FYI, Morley’s column is online-only (though I’ve read it’s among the most popular). Also, to get a feel for the guy, understand that he’s an alum of The Nation, the left-wing periodical.
Now here’s a weird one for you–earlier this evening, he’d added a graph at the end of his column saying there was now a “dispute” about how many died at Qana, citing the lower figure of 28. And now, that’s gone.
Comment by Christopher Fotos � August 3, 2006 @ 8:52 pm
Color Me Shocked!…
Shocked, I say! Shocked…
…that Arianna never responded to my open letter…
…the the death toll in Qana is less than half of what was initially reported, just as some crazy bloggers suggested…
…that Ned Lamont, who kno…
Trackback by Decision '08 � August 3, 2006 @ 8:54 pm
Thanks for that info Chris.
Comment by The Ugly American � August 3, 2006 @ 9:04 pm
TUA,
Morley is NOT the one you should be going after. His post is dated 8/2, the same as the HRW post.
However, you should have no trouble finding the inflated number on more recent stories in larger Media sources.
Comment by EdMcGon � August 4, 2006 @ 5:27 am
[…] The Real Ugly American says Morley doesn't meet standards. […]
Pingback by basil's blog » Blog Archive » Picnic 2006-08-07 � August 7, 2006 @ 3:31 am