Myth and Fact in TV News Reporting

This month’s issue of Commentary has an excellent article by Nidra Poller titled “Myth, Fact and the al-Dura Affair”. Ms. Poller goes through the development of this story and its evolution from a blood libel against Israeli soldiers, to the more recent washing of the hands by those who first reported and disseminated the footage of little Muhammed ad-Dura’s death.

Poller briefly recounts the event as the world saw it: A father pleading, while he and his young son are shot, ending with young Muhammed ad-Dura in, what Poller aptly describes as a pieta position across his fathers wounded legs, apparently dead.

At the time, we were told that the 55 seconds of footage was the accurate record of the final minute of a fuselage endured by the pair for three-quarters of an hour. Only the boy’s death throws were edited out. So went the narrative of France-2’s reporter, Charles Enderlin, on the film that the state-owned television station distributed royalty-free worldwide.

Only, as it turns out, Enderlin wasn’t there. His Palestinian cameraman told conflicting stories, and finally recanted on important elements after three years. So too with the French television channel’s news department that, at first stonewalled, and then began to back away, until all that was left were those 55 seconds – no substantiation, no 45-minute firing by IDF soldiers, no final death throws.

What is troubling is not the implicit question as to whether Muhammed ad-Dura was really killed that day – a question that has to now be asked as a result of the revelations documented in the article. This has become irrelevant to everyone, save the boy’s family. The image has been fixed in the public mind and the damage to Israel is probably irreversible.

The truly troubling aspect of the piece is what was on the outtakes uncovered by Poller and a variety of other investigators. The ad-Dura shooting was about one minute in its entirety. Much of the several hours of tape, however, contained what Poller describes as obvious acting out of combat scenes by Palestinian police and civilians – complete with faked wounded and dead. And it wasn’t just France-2’s Palestinian stringer who was engaged in this obvious fabrication. His film shows clearly, according to Poller, stringers from other seemingly respectable networks and news agencies doing exactly the same thing.

The shocking thing about this whole case, now fixed in the mind of the public for nearly five years – a case that has certainly had an impact on both private and state relations with Israel and the Palestinians – is that apparently so much of what we see on the news – the very images that create public opinion and influence foreign policy – is based on faked footage. Faked footage, produced by interested parties in conflicts and then, knowingly or naively, disseminated as broadly as possible by the mass media.

Everybody Loves Raimondo!

Speaking of Justin Raimondo, the wacko conspiracy theorist has a new article on his Web site dealing with his favorite obsession: supposed Israeli foreknowledge of (and implied complicity in) 9/11. For anyone not yet familiar with this particular digression from rational discourse, you can get to all his past articles on the subject here. (Notice the importance he places on this subject.)

In the latest article, Raimondo cites a recent news item in the Philadelphia Times Herald about a memorandum composed by one Gerald Shea for submission to the 9/11 Commission and Senate and House intelligence committees. For the most part, this article is a rehashing of two stories circulating since early 2002 (in large part due to the efforts of Justin Raimondo), particularly on the Internet.

The first story is that of the “art students”. Briefly, both before and after September 11, 2001, 100 or so Israelis illegally in the US posed as art students while peddling paintings door to door in office buildings and residential neighborhoods. As most Israelis with children or friends in their early and mid-twenties know, traveling abroad while engaging in a variety of sales scams is quite common – an after-army service obsession almost as consuming as Raimondo’s obsession with said youngsters in the US.

Seems quite innocent. But the circuits in the conspiracy theorist’s head start popping when it comes out that some of the offices they peddled to were in US Federal buildings in major cities, and among them, offices of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), where several were stopped and questioned by Federal authorities.

Gevalt! They caught us!

Of course, US Federal buildings, as I recall, do tend to be where other office buildings are, and there is no credible evidence that these “art students” only scammed those of the Federal variety. But then there is the charge that they also came to the homes of DEA employees with their wares! Again, I believe that there are no special neighborhoods in the US for government employees, and there’s a pretty good likelihood that, if you’re canvassing every home in a particular location, the odds are pretty good you’re going to eventually knock on the door of a Federal employee – maybe even an unsuspecting DEA agent.

In short, there’s nothing really incriminating here, and certainly nothing that suggests anything more than the fact that there were young Israelis in some of the same cities as some of the 9/11 hijackers, and at some of the same times. One blogger, Bruce Rolston, did a pretty effective debunking of the “Raimondo’s Smoking Gun” soon after the antiwar.com pundit began obsessing, and I don’t think that Justin has added anything substantive since to shore up his conspiracy case.

The better story, in my opinion, is that of the Israel movers. Again, we have a group of five young Israelis in their early and mid-twenties who are in the US illegally. They were actually picked up on September 11, 2001 following a phone tip by a New Jersey housewife. The accounts have varied on this story as to exactly why she called. Initially, it was reported that they were dancing. Then that they were laughing. Finally, that they were kinda acting strange.

Well, it appears that that “strange” behavior mostly involved the fact that they were taping the tragedy unfold across the river with a video camera – along with probably several thousand other people in the greater New York metropolitan area. This whole episode was described in detail by Neil Mackay in the UK’s Sunday Herald Online. What’s interesting is what this housewife – known only as Maria – was doing at the time she spotted the suspicious Israelis: she was looking on with binoculars!

But wait, there’s more! (And it only gets better.)

When the cops came and arrested the five, what was it that made them suspects? Why it was the contents of their moving van – especially the box cutters. Imagine that, box cutters in a moving van!

There, of course, were other suspicious things going on. For example, the Israeli employer of the five (and presumably more) illegals promptly fled the US after being interviewed by the FBI. Strange? Well, I’ll leave it to the reader to look up the Federal fine for employing illegal residents and then multiply that by at least five. I think you’d probably consider leaving, posthaste, as well.

At any rate, the “movers” story was pretty much put to rest in October of last year when four of the five movers brought a multi-million dollar law suit against the US government for, among other things, wrongful imprisonment (a suit joined, BTW, by several Muslim former-prisoners as well).

So, there you have it. The suggestion is that Israel ran a massive spy ring in the US manned by over 100 inexperienced young people without papers. I can only imagine the cost of running an operation of that magnitude! Even more interesting is that Raimondo and Shea would have us believe that the mossad is, at once, the most sophisticated intelligence operation on the planet, able to penetrate and manipulate US security, while perhaps the most bumbling organization of its kind that selected operatives who went out of their way to dance in public so as to be caught red handed.

We already know that Raimondo has been obsessing on this for almost four years. What we should be asking now is who the hell is Gerald Shea, and why now?

Shea, who is a retired attorney according to both Raimondo and the Times Herald article, is not apparently a past or present member of the intelligence community. He was not asked to prepare or submit his memorandum. As far as I can tell, he did so out of his own patriotic motives. Too bad that he submitted the memorandum on September 14 – well after the 9/11 Commission had concluded its investigation and nearly a month after it released its final report.

I can only speculate about the timing. It comes at a time when many of the conclusions of the Commission have come into question as a result of the release of information about project “Able Danger”. Of particular interest is the pre-9/11 whereabouts of Mohammed Atta and his possible meeting with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in the spring of 2001. We already know that Saddam had given refuge to a number of high-ranking terrorists, including one of the indicted co-conspirators in the 1993 WTC bombing, and Laurie Mylroie has done an excellent job of providing evidence connecting the bombing with Iraq. If Atta’s “Prague Spring” meeting is now verified, this could give what Raimondo likes to call the “War Party” a smoking gun justifying the invasion of Iraq.