Friday, December 29, 2006

Unknown unknowns

If you don't know about the Lebanese ambulance fraud, when it was alleged Israeli missiles hit two vehicles dead centre and... made neat little holes just like the ones cut out to mount the flashing lights, then read this. And this, and this.

Of course, if you do know all about this, and haven't seen the follow-ups to Human Rights Watch's in depth report, read them too.

Thus, in order to explain the physical evidence, HRW proposes the theory that one of three types of Israeli weapons caused the damage seen in the photographs:

- A Spike anti-armor missile; or
- A DIME (dense inert metal explosive) missile; or
- An as-yet unidentified mystery missile of unknown type.

Even a cursory examination shows that none of these options matches the evidence, and that HRW was misinformed as to the nature of the Spike and DIME missiles that they say must have caused the damage. Nor could any type of mystery missile explain the forensic evidence, as discussed below.
These fiendish Israelis and their mystery missiles of unknown type...



Via lgf

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I was ready to believe that this might have happened; shit happens, in wars.

So I read HRW's theories as of... last week, I believe. The version they were pushing that day had a rocket fired from a drone, which went vertically through the roof, the stretcher, and the floor of the ambulance, and the road surface (...making a little rocket-shaped hole in each; they regarded those last two as crucial evidence), and then exploded inside the ambulance, shattering the windshield of the ambulance behind it, while doing some fairly minor localized damage to the stretcher and to the stretcher's occupant. The stretcher was pictured. There wasn't a speck of blood on it. They had decided that all the other pictures were of the second ambulance; apparently nobody thought to photograph the one directly involved. Except of course for the vent in the top.

They also said that you shouldn't assume it's a hoax, just because all the witnesses contradict each other and (repeatedly) themselves, and there's no remotely persuasive physical evidence either. In particular, we're supposed to ignore the man behind the curtain in the matter of all the inconvenient photos having been retconned onto another ambulance. They demurely neglected to explain how it came to pass that nobody photographed the actual ambulance that got hit by the Mystery Bouncing Jew Bomb or whatever they're calling it.

They've had five months to work on this, and they still haven't come up with a plausible story. They're not even trying. But then again, the people who believe this stuff don't exactly care whether it's true or not.

And maybe they've been devoting more effort to documenting real human rights abuses than to fabricating imaginary ones. Which would be nice. But it would be nicer yet if there was a single "human rights" "watchdog" on Earth who wasn't in the business of fabricating propaganda designed to encourage and justify the commission of war crimes against civilians. Which is precisely what they are at here.