Reporters Dispute Israeli Account of Raid
By ROBERT MACKEY
Updated | 5:02 p.m. On Thursday, Al Jazeera English broadcast an interview with Jamal Elshayyal, one of the channel’s journalists who was on board the Mavi Marmara on Monday when it was intercepted by Israeli commandos enforcing a naval blockade on Gaza.
In his account of the start of the raid, which left nine activists dead and has sparked calls for an independent investigation, Mr. Elshayyal insisted that the Israelis had fired live ammunition at the ship from the air before commandos landed on the boat and said that he had seen someone shot and killed by a bullet that hit the top of his head. He said, in part:
As soon as this attack started, I was on the top deck and within just a few minutes there were live shots being fired from above the ship, from above, from where the helicopters were. [...]
The first shots that were fired were either some sort of sound grenades, there was some tear gas that was fired as well as rubber-coated bullets. They were fired initially and the live bullets came roughly about five minutes after that.
Asked if the shots fired at the ship by the Israeli forces had seemed to come from ships nearby or the helicopters above, Mr. Elshayyal said:
It was evident there was definitely fire from the air, because one of the people who was killed was clearly shot from above — he was shot, the bullet targeted him at the top of his head. There was also fire coming from the sea as well. Most of the fire initially from the sea was tear gas canisters, sound grenades, but then it became live fire. After I finished filing that last report and I was going down below deck one of the passengers who was on the side of the deck holding a water hose — trying to hose off, if you will, the advancing Israeli navy — was shot in his arm by soldiers in the boats below. [...]
There is no doubt from what I saw that live ammunition was fired before any Israeli soldier was on deck. What I saw, the sequence of events that took place, there was a pool camera, so reporters took it in turns to file, so after I had done my first file, I turned around to see what was going on and there were several shots fired. In fact, one of the helicopters at the front of the ship, you could almost see the soldiers pointing their guns down through some sort of hole or compartment at the bottom side of the helicopter and firing almost indiscriminately without even looking where they were firing. And those bullets were definitely live bullets.
Mr. Elshayyal’s account, of course, is only one part of the puzzle, and it will not be accepted easily by people who see his network as biased against Israel. That said, now that the accounts of activists and journalists who were detained by Israel after the raid are starting to be heard, it is clear that their stories and that of the Israeli military do not match in many ways.
On Thursday, Today’s Zaman, an English-language newspaper in Turkey, reported that the president of the Turkish aid group that helped to organize the flotilla said that a photographer working for the group “was shot in the forehead by a soldier one meter away from him.” Bulent Yildirimhe, the president of the aid organization Insani Yardim Vakfi (known in English as the I.H.H.), told the newspaper on Thursday after he returned from Israel: “Our Cevdet [Kiliclar], he is a press member. He has become a martyr. All he was doing was taking pictures. They smashed his skull into pieces.” The newspaper added:
Kevin Ovenden of Britain, an activist on the ship that arrived in İstanbul on Thursday, also said a man who had pointed a camera at the soldiers was shot directly through the forehead with live ammunition, with the exit wound blowing away back of his skull.
In another report, the newspaper said that Israeli officials had confiscated images taken by one of its photographers in the flotilla:
A photojournalist from Today’s Zaman Kursat Bayhan who was on board an international aid convoy for Gaza said he tried to hide a flash disk which included the photos from the moments of Israeli attack on the convoy under his tongue to prevent Israeli authorities from seizing it but his effort failed during a medical examination.
The report added, “Bayhan said the journalists in the ship including him tried to protect the video footage and photos they took,” after the ships were seized by Israeli commandos, but “all the materials of the press members, including their passports and identity cards, were taken away.”
The way these accounts diverge from that of Israel’s military would seem to make an independent investigation into the events crucial. That is particularly true since, as The Lede noted on Wednesday, Israel is apparently in possession of much more video evidence than it has yet released.
In a post making the case that Israel should not conduct that inquiry, Noam Sheizaf, an Israeli journalist and blogger, pointed out that journalists in the flotilla seem to have left Israeli custody without any of the video they shot during the raid that might bolster their accounts.
Israel has confiscated some of the most important material for the investigation, namely the films, audio and photos taken by the passengers [and] journalists on board and the Mavi Marmara’s security cameras. Since yesterday, Israel has been editing these films and using them for its own PR campaign. In other words, Israel has already confiscated most of the evidence, held it from the world and tampered with it. No court in the world would [trust] it to be the one examining it.
Captured and detained by Israel, an American tells his story
After two days in an Israeli jail, 64-year-old Paul Larudee speaks out
Sixty-four-year-old Paul Larudee, an American citizen and longtime pro-Palestinian activist, was on board one of the ships carrying humanitarian relief to Gaza that was raided by the Israeli navy on Monday. He dove into the Mediterranean Sea, only to be captured and held in an Israeli prison for two days.
This was not Larudee's first brush with Israeli authorities, but it was easily his most dramatic. He spoke with Salon about the raid and his captivity this afternoon from Greece, where he arrived after being released by Israel.
At around 4 a.m. on Monday, Larudee's ship was boarded by as many as 500 Israeli soldiers. After the ship's captain called an alert, Larudee immediately walked out onto the deck and found that Israeli soldiers had broken the windows of the wheelhouse (the area where the captain controls the ship) in an attempt to take command of the vessel. As Larudee and several others tried to defend the wheelhouse, Israeli soldiers tased him twice so that he would back away from the area. He said he offered no resistance and just let his body go limp.
"I have never struck anyone in more than 20 years," he said. "I was beaten. There is black and blue all over my body. They inflicted pain on me on a frequent basis because I did not recognize their authority."
Everyone on all of the ships was completely unarmed, he said. However, on the Turkish ship -- where the civilian fatalities occurred -- some passengers clashed with the soldiers and tried to beat them up as they descended on the ship. (Larudee was on a different vessel.) "But that is akin to what the passengers on the hijacked 9/11 did to hijackers who had taken the aircraft," he said. "In other words, they resisted someone who was invading their ship."
After some time, Larudee decided to jump off the ship and to try to swim away from the Israeli forces.
"I knew it would be a way to slow down what they were doing," he said. "It caused the ship to stop for an hour or possibly longer and it kept another ship occupied for several hours actually."
He hoped this would create a diversion that would allow another ship to make its way to Gaza with the humanitarian aid. "It was worth doing that, but I paid a price for it."
When the Israeli forces picked him up, Larudee said, he was severely beaten and tied to a mast at the stern of their ship. His legs and hands were bound as he was subjected to the hot sun in wet soaking clothes for four hours. He said his body almost went into shock from the extreme hot and cold conditions.
The soldiers refused to release him unless he told them his name. He repeatedly refused, but said he would cooperate only if they released him from the mast. They finally agreed and took him below deck. "For the remainder of the trip to the port, we got along fine," he said.
When on land, Larudee was taken to the processing area, but refused to cooperate with authorities, who wanted him to say that he entered the country illegally. "This happened at 18 miles at sea, which is well beyond their own territorial waters, or anyone's territorial waters," he said. "We were in international waters. We weren't violating anyone's sovereignty or breaking any rules that we knew of, even by their standards."
More beating ensued. Larudee, who again let his body go limp, said he was carried by nylon restraints, which were placed on his arms and legs. They cut into his skin, causing more contusions and deep pain. He was carried into an ambulance and taken to a hospital, but wasn't treated. He said he believes he was taken there because the Israeli soldiers didn't want the media to see his black eye, pronated joints, bruised jaw and body contusions.
Then, he was transported to the hospital ward of a prison, and eventually into an isolated cell. He was forbidden to speak with other prisoners, denied an attorney, a phone call, and access to television, radio, paper, pencils -- anything else that would connect him to the outside world. A diabetic, Larudee was eventually granted a request to be moved to a cell with windows and some air circulation.
He spent a total of two days in the prison, and on the second day, was granted a 10-minute meeting with a representative from the U.S. embassy. Before the meeting, he was given a long-sleeve shirt to wear, but refused to put it on.
On the third day, the captain of Larudee's boat, a Greek national who was sharing the same prison cell, met with the representative from his embassy. The Greek embassy official helped arrange for Laurudee to leave Israel for Greece. After arriving at the airport for his flight, Larudee was told that Israeli authorities wouldn't permit him to go directly to Athens. Instead, they insisted that he fly first to Istanbul, then sign a release. Larudee refused to cooperate and was once again subjected to a beating by Israeli soldiers.
"But this time they did it in front of 30 to 40 other prisoners, who had seen similar things," he said. "They went nuts."
An all-out brawl began and some prisoners were badly beaten, Larudee said.
Those who had arranged for Larudee's transport to Greece eventually intervened and negotiated with airport officials. Larudee was finally allowed to leave Israel. He's now in Greece, where he says he's staying with friends who are taking care of him. He is scheduled to fly home to the states on June 11.
"A lot of Americans are looking at Israel through rose-colored glasses," he said. "Israel is not a demon, but it is not being held accountable for its actions, and when you do that, it allows bad things, very bad things, to happen."
- >via: http://www.salon.com/news/israel_flotilla_attack/index.html?story=/news/feature/2010/06/03/paul_larudee_flotilla_account
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Three American Subplots in Flotilla Drama
By ROBERT MACKEY
Dogan Family/Hurriyet, via Associated PressA 2008 family photograph of Furkan Dogan, a Turkish-American activist killed on Monday.
On Thursday, Turkish and American officials confirmed that one of the nine activists killed in an Israeli commando raid on Monday on a ship challenging Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza was an American citizen.
As my colleagues Sabrina Tavernise and Michael Slackman report, Turkish news agencies “identified the American as Furkan Dogan, 19, who was born in the United States before returning to Turkey with his family as a young child.” The Anatolia news agency reported that an autopsy showed that Mr. Dogan had been shot at close range, once in the chest and four times in the head.
Another American who was on one of the boats in the flotilla, Edward Peck, a retired diplomat, described his experience of the raid an interview with NPRon Wednesday after he returned home to Maryland. Mr. Peck explained told Steve Inskeep of NPR that he was not on the largest ship in the flotilla, the Mavi Marmara, where activists were shot and killed:
I was on a much smaller ship that had sailed from Athens. Four o’clock in the morning we awakened to have the commandos already on board. They’d come up very quietly on their little boats – their Zodiacs – with just enough time to get a small passive resistance effort started, try to keep them out of the wheel house and away from the engine room.
Mr. Peck, 80, also gave this account of the raid to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now this week:
Mr. Peck who had a long career in the American State Department, has been a critic of American foreign policy for many years. In an interview with Fox News on Sept. 15, 2001 he suggested that the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington had come in response to U.S. policies. After video surfaced in 2008 of Rev. Jeremiah Wright referencing Mr. Peck’s remarks in that interview during a sermon about 9/11, Michael Getler of PBS transcribed part of the former diplomat’s exchange with David Asman of Fox News.
Mr. Peck: They came to do to us what they perceive, it doesn’t make them right, but what they perceive is we’ve been doing the same thing now for a long time in various parts of the world. It doesn’t make them right or us wrong. Don’t misunderstand me. But the only thing anybody has to
Mr. Asman: I just have to stop you. We’ve been doing the same thing around the world?
Mr. Peck: Yeah. You want a list of the countries that we’ve bombed and invaded over the last 25 years?
Mr. Asman: What country, in what country have we rammed a plane loaded with fuel through a known civilian center such as was done this week? Excuse me, Ambassador, but I can’t think of a precedent for this week anywhere in the world, certainly not one committed by the United States.
Mr. Peck: Certainly not, we’ve never had to do that because we have, you know, untrammeled military force. These people are terrorists. They resort to that because they can’t take us on, head on, nor should they even, well they can’t. But the point is that some of the things that we have done in the firm, honest belief that we are advancing the cause of justice, human rights, and freedom and all of that are not perceived that way by the people that we bomb. I offer you Panama. I give you Haiti. Take Cambodia. What about Iraq?
The Facebook profile image of Emily Henochowicz, who was badly wounded at a protest on Monday.
As The Lede reported earlier this week, another American, a 21-year-old student named Emily Henochowicz, was badly wounded during a protest on Monday against the commando raid on the flotilla at a West Bank check point.
The most recent entry on Ms. Henochowicz’s Facebook page, posted on Monday afternoon, said simply, “Gaza on my mind.”
On Thursday, JTA reported:
An American Jewish art student lost an eye when she was hit by a tear gas canister fired by Israeli troops at a pro-Palestinian demonstration. Emily Henochowicz, 21, of Maryland, was hit in the eye on Monday when she joined a protest at a Jerusalem roadblock against Israel’s deadly raid on an aid flotilla headed for the Gaza Strip, which killed nine people.
Spokesmen at Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital, where she underwent an operation, confirmed Tuesday that she lost an eye in the disturbance. The military did not comment.
Witnesses told media outlets that Palestinian boys were throwing rocks at troops but said Henochowicz was standing aside and not participating in the violence.
JTA also explained that the American is student at Cooper Union in New York and “had participated in other nonviolent protests against Israel’s presence in the West Bank,” while studying art at Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy.
Graphic, raw video shot during the protest on Monday just after Ms. Henochowicz was wounded showed her being carried away for treatment by fellow activists from the International Solidarity Movement.
>via: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/three-american-subplots-in-flotil...