Posted by
The Dave Perkins Brothers on Wednesday, August 30, 2006 1:17:27 PM
Looks like at least one Aussie newspaper is launching a
counteroffensive against Alexander Downer, the foreign minister who has publicly said that the Israeli attack on Hezbollah ambulances is a hoax.
Lots of interesting info here in Andrew Bolt's Herald-Sun column and blog, including two differing versions of the story told by one of the men in the ambulance convoy, and his mysterious injuries which required huge face-sized bandages but left not a scab or a scar on him when he was photographed less than a week later.
But worst of all is the possibility that sensible people can look at the photo on the link above and
dispute that it is the hole left behind when something large and round was unbolted and removed from it. Like the red plastic domed air vent that is attached to almost every other ambulance in the region. Coincidentally.
But the Hezbollah guys say an explosive missile punched this hole in the roof of the ambulance but by some miracle didn't blow out all the windows and burn/melt all the upholstery. Even allowing that the explosive charge did not detonate at all, LOOK AT THE HOLE!
It's NOT a puncture wound in the steel roof. Its a
manufactured flange. Even the paint is absent where the rim of the domed vent would have prevented paint from being applied to the metal!
To these jaundiced eyes it looks like they took out the circular vent, struck the roof several times with axes, shot lots of holes in the roof with various rifles and shotguns and then used crowbars to stretch and distort the vent hole so it wouldn't be SO OBVIOUS.
UPDATE/EXPANSION-- in that story in the Australian, their Beirut reporter Chalov describes the injured man's story.
Ambulance driver Qassem Shalim was closing the doors of the ambulance when the vehicle was hit. "I am sure the missile was fired from a drone. The blue light was flashing on our roof, the red cross was clear and there was a light on the Lebanese Red Cross flag above me. Everything I said happened did happen," he told The Australian in Beirut.
But did it? Here is the same reporter's account of the same man's story, printed in the same newspaper on July 26th--
Qasin Shalin, the driver of the first ambulance, and the only one of six people to have escaped with light injuries, sat upright in bed, surrounded by the orange-clad men of Lebanon’s Red Cross, who have come to be known as the country’s bravest civil servants... Mr Shalin was spared more serious injuries by the armoured vest he was wearing and the driver’s canopy that protected him from a direct hit.
So in the first story back in July, he was driving the ambulance and was protected by the canopy over the driver's cabin.
But in his second account, in which he's defending his honor by insisting "everything I said happened did happen!", he says he was at the back of the ambulance closing the doors.
Also, in the new version it was a helicopter that fired missiles and in the original it was an Israeli pilotless airplane, a drone.
Maybe the guy's brain was still rattled from the severe heavily bandaged head injuries that amazingly left no scars or scabs a few days later.
Or, like Anderson Cooper says in a CNN appearance that now is a part of
this video,
they're just making it up.
Here is some other text from that original story July 26th in the Australian--
The UN yesterday stopped short of accusing Hezbollah of using ambulances as transport vehicles. However, it suggested that the cowardly tactic of blending in with civilians had contributed to the terrible toll taken on communities in the south, where most of the 391 Lebanese have been killed.
"Consistently, from the Hezbollah heartland, my message was that Hezbollah must stop this cowardly blending ... among women and children," UN humanitarian affairs chief Jan Egeland said.
"I heard they were proud because they lost very few fighters and that it was the civilians bearing the brunt of this. I don't think anyone should be proud of having many more children and women dead than armed men."
Amen to that. Thank you Mr. Egeland, a UN official who seems to know what is actually going on. But if you'll click the link called "this video" a few paragraphs back in this post, you'll see a video that positively proves that Hezbollah and Hamas regularly use ambulances as explosive and weapons transports and to move armed militants to and from attacks.
HT Powerline.