The assertions re: the implications of these photographs are not facts, but if they are true, this proves, to me anyway, beyond any possible doubt that there are two sides in the wrong here.
Kofi Annan today said:
and
bbc
Should the rest of the world / united nations be doing more to stop this conflict? Should there be peacekeepers there?
Is this confict out of control? Is it too late? Will this make peace impossible?
p.s. does anyone have more info on the pictures?
Okay, first of all, this guy was apparently a suicide bomber. Second, it’s no secret that Israel has been targetting and assassinating Palestinian terrorist leaders. So IF they did this, it wouldn’t surprise me all that much, especially if that was a bomb strapped to him. They may have been strip-searching him, saw the explosives, and said “Hell with this. I’m not going to risk my life.”
Or perhaps the man struggled and tried to reach for a detonator. Pretty tough to tell from the pictures.
There’s not really enough information to tell what happened.
Sure does look that way, doesn’t it? On the one hand, we have a dead suicide bomber, which is clearly a good thing. On the other hand, we have an extrajudicial execution, which is clearly a bad thing.
Looks like a tie to me. Let’s throw this sucker into overtime and see if either side can demonstrate an awareness that this is not merely the 1300s with better weaponry.
Ya gotta love the caption on the last frame (lower left side) on the second link:
Hmmm… just the conclusion that I would have reached, especially since this appears to be a secretly recorded video that the frames are taken from. :rolleyes:
I’m not sure which “reality” the “extra-judicial execution” claimants are from, but it’s no different from killing a guy that won’t drop his gun when ordered to by the police.
If it is a “dead suicide bomber” (quite plausible, given recent events), is it also an “extrajudicial execution,” or is it killing in self-defense (and defense of lives and property within the blast radius)?
On the other hand… if it actually was a shooting in cold blood and a frame-up with the robot (not quite as plausible, IMO), then sure: I’ll grant it was an “extra-judicial execution.”
I checked out the photos. A couple show him in his underwear and nothing else. The last one, the one with the robot, there is something around his waist. Is that supposed to be the bomb. God I hope not. It wasn’t there in the earlier photos.
This was all over the front pages of the papers here. People are just horrified. By people I mean my western colleagues at work were way more shocked and horrified than my middle eastern colleagues. The latter seem to be becoming increasingly resigned to the situation, and increasingly losing hope.
Zooming in close shows that to be his arm, not a bomb in the sixth frame of the second link. The robot is dragging away his coat, where the bomb presumably is. In the fourth frame, the cop standing over him appears to be putting handcuffs on, something happens in between then and the next frame that we can’t see. But the guy is now dead, and he has no cuffs. Depending on your bias you could say that he made a move for the detonator cause he knew he couldn’t do it with the cuffs on and the security forces shot him when he did, or he was murdered.
Ten eyewitnesses claim he was completely subdued half an hour before he was shot, yet the photographer never got a photo of him in cuffs?
In my opinion, either the photographer didn’t take the important photos… the actual fatal shot… or the people pushing this story left them out because they didn’t support their claims of murder.
The people making the claim of murder have the burden of proving it. The photos don’t do that, and the eyewitnesses reports don’t jibe with the photos.
Why did so much time pass between the fourth and fifth frames? The scene is completely empty except for the body. If the photographer witnessed the man being murdered surely he would have taken another photo with the culprits in scene. Could it be that not much time passed after all, but the security forces got the hell away from him fast once the man made a suicide/murder/terrorism attempt? Instinct could have you pop a round in the head and then take cover in a fraction of a second. Seems to me that if they wanted him dead they would have carted him off and done it in a controlled environment after interrogation, not in the middle of the street.
Again, I don’t see enough evidence to support a cold blooded murder.
I do see a whole Hell of a lot of leading statements accompanying the photos. Was the guy shooting in the air to scare off eyewitnesses? or just scanning the nearby buildings for security reasons?
The others are ready to execute him? or just training their weapons on him in case he tries to blow himself up?
C’mon, how can any report be taken seriously when it tries so hard to sway opinion instead of report facts. The OP doesn’t provide any information about the source for the second link, presumably because it leads to a site called www.fuckedeconomy.ca …sounds real reputable
Eh, I don’t see any reason to discount the veracity of the photos just because it was posted at a website called http://www.fuckedeconomy.ca/
It looks to me like it’s just a place to post articles and photos. There’s a message board listed, but the link isn’t enabled. I went and looked at some more of “Rasmus’s” articles and photos, and they’re all pretty much middle-of-the-road politics/economy stuff. In other words, his choice of articles to post on this BBS doesn’t make him sound like a conspiracy theorist raving loony, just a person with an interest in what you might call the “inequities” of politics and the business world.
That said, as to whether the photos are real, well, I live in a world in which anybody with a few bucks to spend can buy Adobe Photoshop and spend hours of fun putting himself into production stills of Lord of the Rings. Who’s to say that somebody over there didn’t spend the weekend making a few interesting changes in these photos?
In other words, I don’t think there’s ever going to be any way to tell whether the photos are real, but if I had to vote, I’d have to go with “carefully manufactured propaganda”.
The bbc reports that 11 stills were taken, but they only published 5. the other link only has 6. There are still 5 pictures missing. Anybody have info on those missing pictures? They might settle the debate.
And the caption under the second last bbc photo says
I mean its not unusual for ‘official sources’ to lie for whatever reason, but their statement was obviously made before release of the photos. This makes me lean towards the conclusion that they (the official sources) are hiding something.
I think the bbc would have checked the authenticity of the photos before publishing them, (you can usually tell if a photo has been doctored by examining closely) so I accept until its shown otherwise that they are not photoshopped. That still doesn’t clarify the meaning of them though.
I think it’s been pretty obvious all along that there’s plenty of blame to go around on both sides of the conflict.
I don’t see that. In the fifth and sixth frames, he is clearly handcuffed. There is a dark line visible across his left wrist, and his left arm is stretched across his back at an unnatural angle.
Unfortunately, not enough information is given. The article only says he was subdued. It doesn’t say if he was actually handcuffed for half an hour. In the fourth picture, he appears to be subdued with the police putting cuffs on. Then in the fifth picture, he appears to be dead. The half hour that elapsed may refer to the time when they had him in custody, but hadn’t cuffed him yet. We just don’t know without more information.
Personally, I feel good anytime a suiside bomber is summarily executed. If he was a suiside bomber, the bastard intended to kill plenty of other people (as many as he could presumably), and there is no debate about that. He intended to kill innocent people, probably those he did not even know. He intended to give no warning, and no mercy. Screw him, and any roghts he had. He meant to blow up with the bomb, so the police helped him along a bit. Glad he’s dead, glad he didn’t take anyone with him.
Sorry, just my gut reaction, probably not much good for a GD thread, but…
Yeah, to me too. But way too many people (here and elsewhere) have argued that the only ones in the wrong are the suicide bombers.
But anyway, tradesilicon,
I’ll assume you meant rights, and respond by saying rights of the guilty must be preserved if only so they can be equally applied to the innocent. If you want peace, it requires law and order, which must be applied across the board. If rights apply only to some, they are no longer rights, but priveleges.
If this guy was a suicide bomber (which I’m convinced of) then he should have been arrested, tried, convicted, and forced to live (against his wishes) in jail, for the rest of his natural life. I’m sure thats much more punishment than death for someone suicidal.
Its pretty obvious from picture #4 that the jerusalem police are lying. - the detonator was on his chest, his hands cuffed behind his back… even if you accept israel’s assanination policy, WHAT ARE THEY HIDING? And why is no media source on this side of the atlantic carrying this story, if even to debunk it?
I have absolutely no trouble at all believing the Israeli police would perform a summary execution, especially if they found a bomb on the guy. And no, I don’t think it’s okay for the police to perform summary executions, even if the guy is a terrorist. Unless he is a direct threat to someone’s life, people in police custody should not be killed by them - hey, call me old-fashioned.
That said, I don’t think we can tell from the stills exactly what happened. Clearly the alleged bomber was down to his skivvies when shot, and I’m inclined to believe he was cuffed, too, given the position of his arms after death. It’s hard to imagine the arms ending up like that otherwise, and this seems pretty significant to me. The fact that the cuffs were then removed is not sign of a coverup, though, it could just be a sign that some cop wanted his cuffs back and they weren’t serving any more purpose where they were.
It also looks to me like the cops didn’t start out intending to go shoot someone. They look like they’re making an arrest, but if they then discovered a bomb, or suspected there was a bomb, I can understand how their emotions may have led to, shall we say, a decreased adherence to traditional police procedures; Israel seems to be like that. That doesn’t make it right, of course.
I think this is a not-unlikely interpretation of the photos, though not necessarily the only one.
What we have here are 6 pictures (each capturing a moment from one viewpoint) over the span of at least half an hour. There is a lot that is not being revealed by the photographer. Where is the tape or other pictures that fill in some of the enormous gaps in the coverage?
In picture #4, I don’t see his arms (as in #5 & 6), so I can’t say that his hands are cuffed behind his back. I can’t see his chest, or much else other than most of his rear torso, his right ass cheek, and the outside and back of his right leg, so I can’t tell if he has a real bomb on him, a fake bomb or a tattoo on his forehead saying in Arabic: “Hi, I’m a suicide bomber.” In other words, nothing is pretty obvious from picture #4.
Are police shootings of suspects normally covered in the world press? I know it makes local news when the cops have to shoot someone that won’t drop a gun, or lunge with a knife, etc., but unless there are questionable circumstances (i.e. Diallo in NYC) they don’t even make state-wide news, let alone become a world-wide story.
Well, the israeli/palestinian confict itself is intl news, with the egregious tactics of palestinians getting a shitload of coverage; and the circumstances of this incident are very questionable.
Here is one eyewitness account of what happened:
