Monday, September 11, 2006

Guardian: We stand by the Red Cross ambulance story


OK, the Guardian is a anti-semetic commie rag redder than Chairman Mao. Everyone knows that. However, this denial is absurd. This is something out of a Monty Python skit. The pictorial evidence speaks for itself. The vehicle was plainly not hit by missiles and you don't have to have the excruciatingly detailed fisking that Zombietime did to realize this. You just need functioning eyeballs.

[Update]
OK, maybe its obvious this was faked to me because I'm an engineer and have a passing knowledge of physics, strength of materiels, explosives, and shit like that. If its not obvious to you, go read the Zombietime takedown.



Guardian
...I have received a number of emails referring to the zombietime website, one from a reader describing his complaint as "purely personal" concluding, "Before I take this complaint forward to the PCC [the Press Complaints Commission] I would appreciate your comments on the linked website [zombie-time] and also whether you intend to retract the story." On the basis of my inquiries over several days last week I do not intend to suggest that the paper should retract its report.

Two Australian newspapers, in fact, revisited the story after the country's foreign minister, Alexander Downer, accused some of the world's "most prestigious media" of falling for a hoax. One of them, the Australian, carried its rebuttal under the heading: "Downer's unfounded faith in the internet", and it accused him of being hoaxed by what it called "a callous blog" (zombietime is a website not a blog). The heading on the Age story speaks for itself: "Ambulance attack evidence stands the test."

What the zombietime website, which takes issue with both of these Australian rebuttals, does show is a fairly large number of inconsistencies and anomalies in the reporting and pictorial coverage of the event across the media: whether these are larger in number than might normally be expected to occur in reporting from a war zone is a matter for conjecture. A Guardian picture archivist with a special interest in images from areas of conflict, who carried out extensive research for me, concluded that there was cause for doubt about the nature of the munitions involved and the manner of their delivery, but not in the reality of the attack. Suzanne Goldenberg told me: "I remain confident that the story was true." She points out that she and Sean Smith reported the story first hand and independently and did not rely on what purported to be amateur video footage of the incident...

...The zombietime version invites the conclusion that the Lebanese Red Cross conspired in an elaborate anti-Israel propaganda plot to dupe the world's media. I do not think that is proven at all.

1 comment:

beakerkin said...

I saw the pictures and this story is a joke. The damage was not caused by a rocket