Meanwhile, from Noam Sheifaz:Israel was tonight under pressure to allow an independent inquiry into its assault on the Gaza aid flotilla after autopsy results on the bodies of those killed, obtained by the Guardian, revealed they were peppered with 9mm bullets, many fired at close range.
Nine Turkish men on board the Mavi Marmara were shot a total of 30 times and five were killed by gunshot wounds to the head, according to the vice-chairman of the Turkish council of forensic medicine, which carried out the autopsies for the Turkish ministry of justice today.
The results revealed that a 60-year-old man, Ibrahim Bilgen, was shot four times in the temple, chest, hip and back. A 19-year-old, named as Fulkan Dogan, who also has US citizenship, was shot five times from less that 45cm, in the face, in the back of the head, twice in the leg and once in the back. Two other men were shot four times, and five of the victims were shot either in the back of the head or in the back, said Yalcin Buyuk, vice-chairman of the council of forensic medicine.
[...]
"The only situation when a soldier shot was when it was a clearly a life-threatening situation," said a spokesman for the Israeli embassy in London. "Pulling the trigger quickly can result in a few bullets being in the same body, but does not change the fact they were in a life-threatening situation."
At this point it is extremely important to say what we don’t know..We don’t know where [the dead activists] were killed, when, and how they died. We don’t know if and when people were given medical treatment. There were security cameras on deck, but Israel doesn’t show us what they filmed, except for the material which serves its purposes. The night vision clips released by the army end just before the shooting begins.If you're of the mind that either the raid itself, taking place in international waters, or the Gaza blockade on the whole is unambiguously illegal, it probably doesn't matter much what the confiscated video shows. As Glenn Greenwald puts it, "Whether the Israelis fired at the passengers before or after landing on the ship matters little to the crux of what happened here. The initial act of aggression was the Israeli seizing of a ship in international waters which was doing nothing hostile; that action was taken to enforce a horrific, inhumane blockade and, more generally, a brutal, decades-long occupation"(Salon). In this respect, the immorality of a massacre only compounds the greater immorality of Israeli policy; focusing on such details only serve to distract from the larger issue.
On the other hand, if you believe, as does Sol, that it isn't so much the What or Why of the military action, but the How, the details that might emerge with the release of the supposed footage start to seem a lot more important.
Either way, one would think it to be in interest of the Israeli government (particularly if it wants to maintain any sense of legitimacy as it plans to conduct its "independent" review) to release the footage. Refusing to do so (and worse yet, doctoring it heavily for propaganda purposes) have only lead critics to assume the worst.
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