SubscribeMore Media Overkill - From The AP In Baalbek
From the DNC’s Associated Press:
Heavy Equipment Used to Bury the Dead
By NASSER NASSER, Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, August 2, 2006(08-02) 08:59 PDT BAALBEK, Lebanon (AP) — People in a village outside this Hezbollah stronghold used a front-end loader’s scoop to carry away some of the dead Wednesday after a night of Israeli airstrikes and a commando raid inside Baalbek that residents said killed at least 15 civilians.
It was the deepest thrust into Lebanon by Israeli troops since fighting broke out between Israel and Hezbollah on July 12. Israel said its soldiers killed at least 10 Hezbollah guerrillas and captured five.
A crowd of about 50 people from the village of Al Jamaliyeh carried pictures of Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, during a funeral procession through the hamlet, which was hit by bombs overnight as Israeli commandos stormed a Hezbollah hospital in Baalbek a half-mile away.
The village’s dead were shrouded in white cloth and carried to the cemetery in the bucket of a yellow front-end loader. The mayor, Hussein Jamaleddin, lost his son, brother and five other relatives. He broke down crying and pulled at the limbs of the dead hanging out of the scoop.
“This is the leg of my son. He was a sportsman, he did tae kwan do,” Jamaleddin wailed.
People around Baalbek said the Dar Al-Hikma hospital was partially destroyed in overnight fighting, but an Associated Press photographer said the building appeared intact. Guards prevented journalists from entering.
The building’s entrance was riddled with bullet holes and the door appeared to have been broken down. Two burned cars sat outside the three-story building and a minivan with shattered windows stood nearby, riddled with shrapnel and bullet holes.
A sign draped across the top floor read “Dar Al-Hikma, Imam Khomeini’s Charity Organization,” and residents said it was financed by an Iranian charity with close ties to Hezbollah. Israel disputed the building was a hospital, saying it was used as a Hezbollah base.
Hezbollah fighters armed with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades fought Israeli troops at the building overnight, Hezbollah’s chief spokesman, Hussein Rahal, said early Wednesday.
Another Hezbollah official said the building was empty, having been evacuated of patients and staff several days ago after Israelis attempted a similar helicopter raid.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give statements to the media, said Israelis captured “four or five” people in Baalbek, but not at the hospital. He said the captives were not Hezbollah fighters, but civilians, including a 60-year-old grocery store owner and construction workers.
People said airstrikes on villages within a half mile of the hospital killed at least 15 people, including a family of seven — a mother, father and their five children — in an area near Al Jamaliyeh.
Outside the family’s house, two unexploded rockets lay on the ground. Neighbors said the family was sheltering under a tree when they were hit.
“I saw everything. They were sitting outside when the rockets fell. They stopped staying at home after they saw what happened in Qana,” one neighbor said, referring to an Israeli airstrike in southern Lebanon that killed up to 60 civilians Sunday.
Here are some photos from this event:
These deaths are tragic, of course. (Unless they are Hezbollah terrorists.)
But what is shown is nothing like what the AP described, which made it sound like there were so many dead they had to call in the "heavy equipment" to bury them all.
The village’s dead were shrouded in white cloth and carried to the cemetery in the bucket of a yellow front-end loader.
What funeral was the AP talking about?
The photos look more like another staged photo op rather than a mass burial.
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24 Responses to “More Media Overkill - From The AP In Baalbek”
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August 2nd, 2006 at 4:22 pm
All I can say is, these photographs do NOT capture the image I had when I first read the story. I guess a picture really IS worth a thousand words - the first two being “media bias”.
August 2nd, 2006 at 4:42 pm
Fortunately, anyone who looks past the propaganda machine that the media has become, this or any other staged event won’t stand up to scrutiny. Unfortunately, there is no media outlet that will allow anyone to point out the errors, instead deciding to serve the enemy’s common good at the cost of our society.
There hasnt been a mass burial, and there wont be one either. Cameras are needed by Hezbollah to continue to fan the hatred for Israel in the Arab world, otherwise, they would let the people rot in the sun. They could care less that they died, because they have a useful purpose, and that is to get the less intelligent amongst us to be “offended”.
August 2nd, 2006 at 4:46 pm
Why would they use a skip loader to transport the dead? It makes no sense. And it appears from the article’s quote: “The village’s dead were shrouded in white cloth and carried to the cemetery in the bucket of a yellow front-end loader.” that the folks staging the photos misunderstood their instructions…(Yellow skip loader: check. Dead: check–even tho it’s only ONE dead. White cloth: well, we ran out of white cloths, so how about a brown plaid one? check)
August 2nd, 2006 at 4:51 pm
Oh, just how easy can a photo like this be arranged? I don’t know anything about gravedigging, but there might be machinery involved. Do I think that even in a small Lebanon village the dead are disposed of by just dumping them off with a loader? No.
August 2nd, 2006 at 5:00 pm
From CNN:
August 2nd, 2006 at 5:03 pm
Note too that the “skip loader” doesn’t move. It’s in the same position in all of the photos.
The guy at the controls probably didn’t know how to run it, and they just put the body in the scoop for a dramatic photo.
August 2nd, 2006 at 5:08 pm
I think the locals screwed up the scene, probably done ad hoc without a hezbollah “director” there to arrange things to match the piece. They did try though, even though they werent told what to do to fit the “outrage” text our media trumpets. This is a set up. And so is Qana….Israel needs to start a counter propaganda campaign asap….oh, that’s right. No media will carry Israeli footageor statements.
August 2nd, 2006 at 5:09 pm
My dad always told me not to trust a journalist with the same first and last name.
Curse you, Nasser Nasser, for your evil propaganda!!!
August 2nd, 2006 at 5:50 pm
I saw photos of the hospital this morning on Fox. The building was in tact and only had a couple of windows blown out. The news produced by the Hezzbos is actually starting to look comedic.
August 2nd, 2006 at 6:32 pm
“The village’s dead were shrouded in white cloth and carried to the cemetery in the bucket of a yellow front-end loader. ”
Well, duh! Last thing I would want to do is drive around the Bekaa valley in a truck with what could look from the air like bundles of missiles in the back!
Seriously. You couldn’t pay me enough to drive a truck around that area. I would use a loader too. But I just don’t get why they think the idea of using a loader is somehow more terrible than a truck. A truck would handle several scoops of bodies from a loader. I don’t imagine you could get a dozen bodies in a loader scoop.
They have been watching too much Soylent Green.
August 2nd, 2006 at 7:49 pm
SG - Powerline has a video from youtube that clearly shows Hezbollah (terrorists) firing rockets from a civilian home at Israel.
It also clearly shows the Israeli Air Force subsequently annihilating the terrorist “rocket launcher”, and everything else in the nearby vicinity. If there were civilians in the house while terrorists launched the rockets - the civilians are dead.
And by tomorrow th AP will be posting the carnage of “innocent civilians killed by Israel”.
August 2nd, 2006 at 7:54 pm
Sweetness: this is a long read so perhaps you could do an item on it. It pretty much tells us what is going on and why we are seeing all these staged photos coming from the Hezbollah.
http://www.ctc.usma.edu/Management_of_Savagery.pdf
August 2nd, 2006 at 8:59 pm
Retire….that’s a 268 page PDF doc. A long read is an understatement. When you get done with it….how about a 10 paragraph book report. Actually, don’t bother. I think we all know the contents and context in which it was written.
August 2nd, 2006 at 10:21 pm
If I am not mistaken, the body in that front end loader (1st pic) is the same one as was on the bus in the pics from Qana. Note the head leaning dorsally. (ok that’s not a word I know).
August 2nd, 2006 at 10:24 pm
Welcome, Spider!
I don’t know about them being the same body. This seems to be an adult male. I didn’t see any adult males among the victims of Qana. (But I’m sure I didn’t see all the photos either.)
August 2nd, 2006 at 10:31 pm
Here is bunch of pics from Qana.
http://www.bubbleshare.com/alb.....1/overview
August 2nd, 2006 at 10:44 pm
SG:
Thanks. Actually, this is the second or third time I’ve posted (I’ve lurked frequently since the Sheehan/Crawford Ditch/Katrina/VFP days). I lost the password for my first screenname so made a new one.
I saw this body in a pic on another site (I don’t know what the rules are for posting links). Essentially it appears to me to be one of the several “rigor mortis” bodies pulled out of that apartment building that collapsed (but didn’t actually collapse) in Qana following the “Israeli airstrike” (read: Hezbo IED caused demolition)
August 2nd, 2006 at 10:46 pm
I should say “allegedly” pulled out - the “victims” were all obviously dead for many hours before the pics were taken.
August 2nd, 2006 at 10:50 pm
“I saw this body in a pic on another site (I don’t know what the rules are for posting links).”
Posting links is fine, even encouraged. Just cut and paste the url and the software makes them “live.”
I guess it’s possible. (And I wouldn’t put anything past Hezbollah.) But Baalbek is probably a hundred miles from Qana. And it seems like a lot of trouble to go through when they did have dead bodies on hand to work with.
August 2nd, 2006 at 11:33 pm
SG:
The “link” (and I don’t have it anymore) was on freerepublic.com. I looked but cannot find it. I am sure there is some overlap here with there so maybe someone else may have seen it. It was a picture (the first I think in a series of 4 or 5) from a group of pics from the so-called massacre at Qana. It was of a boy lying on his back in the back of a bus, with his head in the same abnormal position - and with the same sallow pallor to the skin (i.e., dead for hours not minutes). The consensus at that site was that this was a photo-op manufactured for the pro-terrorist (or at least anti-US) western press. Apparently a junket was arranged for the AP to come view these “victims” being “pulled from the rubble” (of a building that I understand was at the time still standing) which, from the skin pallor and rigor mortis, were obviously previously deceased corpses trotted out to the scene from the local morgue for the uncurious AP to photograph.
Granted Baalbek may be (it’s not that I don’t believe you I just don’t personally know) 100 miles from Qana, but can we know for sure if these pictures are actually from Baalbek?
August 2nd, 2006 at 11:41 pm
Spider, Is this the one you are looking for?
http://image6.bubbleshare.com/.....15;435.jpg
August 3rd, 2006 at 6:19 pm
Terribly off topic, but note to 1st…if you go to Tinyurl.com, you can download a button to your tool bar. If you do that, when you get a monster url like the one above, you just click on the tinyurl button, and it goes to the site with a _greatly_ decreased number of characters. Probably the only complaint I have about it is that when you scroll over a tinyurl, you only get a tinyurl id, no indication of what the site goes to. I’ve saved a number of them, but more recently make sure I add an identifying description to the url - otherwise you can visit a whole _bunch_ of them before you find the one you want!
August 3rd, 2006 at 6:30 pm
I just right click the pic, then click on image location. Then paste it.
August 5th, 2006 at 12:20 am
1st:
Yup!