The mainstream media for the most part has moved on. But there are a few more gleanings to be had, of perhaps the most interesting comes from the Daily Mirror, which labels al-Hilli an extremist on the grounds that he was against the war in Iraq, disapproved of the behaviour of Israel and had doubts over 9/11 – which makes a great deal of the population “extremist”. But the Mirror has the only mainstream mention I can find of the possibility that Mossad carried out the killings. Given Mr al-Hilli’s profession, the fact he is a Shia, the fact he had visited Iran, and the fact that Israel heas been assassinating scientists connected to Iran’s nuclear programme, this has to be a possibility. There are of course other possibilities, but to ignore that one is ludicrous.
Which leads me to the argument of Daily Mail crime reporter, Stephen Wright, that the French police should concentrate on the idea that this was a killing by a random Alpine madman or racist bigot. Perfectly possible, of course, and the anti-Muslim killings in Marseille might be as much a precedent as Mossad killings of scientists. But why the lone madman idea should be the preferred investigation, Mr Wright does not explain. What I did find interesting from a man who has visited many crime scenes are his repeated insinuations that the French authorities are not really trying very hard to find who the killers were, for example:
the crime scene would have been sealed off for a minimum of seven to ten days, to allow detailed forensic searches for DNA, fibres, tyre marks and shoe prints to take place.
Nearby bushes and vegetation would have been searched for any discarded food and cigarette butts left by the killer, not to mention the murder weapon.
But from what I saw at the end of last week, no such searches had taken place and potentially vital evidence could have been missed. House to house inquiries in the local area had yet to be completed and police had not made specific public appeals for information about the crime. No reward had been put up for information about the shootings.
Behind the scenes, what other short cuts have been taken? Have police seized data identifying all mobile phones being used in the vicinity of the murders that day?
The idea that the French authorities – who are quite as capable as any other of solving cases – are not really trying very hard is an interesting one.
Which leads me to this part of a remarkable article from the Daily Telegraph, which if true points us back towards a hit squad and discounts the ides that there was only one gun:
Claims that only one gun was used to kill everybody is likely to be disproved by full ballistics test results which are out in October.
While the 25 spent bullet cartridges found at the scene are all of the same kind, they could in fact have come from a number of weapons of the same make.
This throws up the possibility of a well-equipped, highly-trained gang circling the car and then opening fire.
Both children were left alive by the killers, who had clinically pumped bullets into everybody else, including five into Mr Mollier.
Zainab was found staggering around outside the car by Brett Martin, a British former RAF serviceman who cycled by moments after the attack, but he saw nobody except the schoolgirl.
Her sister, Zeena, was found unscathed and hiding in the car eight hours later.
Both sisters are now back in Britain, and are believed to have been reunited at a secret location near London.
There are of course a number of hit squad options, both governmental and private, which might well involve iraqi or Iranian interests – on both of which the mainstream media have been very happy to speculate while almost unanimously ignoring Israel.
But what interests me is why the Daily Telegraph choose, in the face of all the evidence, to minimise the horrific nature of the attack by stating that “Both children were left alive by the killers”? Zainab was not left alive by design, she was shot in the chest and her skull was stove in, which presumably was a pretty serious attempt to kill a seven year-old child. The other girl might very well have succeeded in hiding from the killers under her mother’s skirts, as she hid from the first rescuers, and then for eight hours from the police.
The Telegraph article claims to be informed by sources close to the investigation. So they believe it was a group of people, and feel motivated to absolve those people from child-killing. Now what could the Daily Telegraph be thinking?
New photo here courtesy of dz61:
http://www.davidicke.com/forum/showthread.php?t=221659&page=75
@ Roland
@ Anders
I found it very odd that I was subjected to personal abuse and the person only got a jokey slap on the wrist for it.
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Kathy, I am a writer, and there is NOTHING WORSE than erasing someone’s thoughts.
Because that is what is happening.
Time after time.
This is supposed to be a progressive blog.
Shakes head.
@Jon
@anders – will continue to delete material from you that is excessively dominating a thread or abusive.
Then why have you refrained from taking such action against others for similar offences eg Katie for thread domination?
Aside: it would be much appreciated if you would improve your citations and quoting, so we can see what text is yours and what is someone else’s.
Now you’re just being picky! Ander’s comments are underneath the line of equals signs, it’s unusual but it’s quite quick to pick up…
@Roland Teflon, yes indeed, no-one can prove it, which is why I think it is pointless to speculate endlessly. If someone is seeding disinfo in these threads, then people who suspect them of foul play may of course engage them in detailed conversation. The resulting careful application of debate and logic will separate known facts from speculation and nonsense.
The problem is that all that discussion to disprove the comments they then say they never made, or are being misinterpreted, takes pages and pages of discussion and hours of time and energy, and is a classic disinfo technique to sap the hearts and minds of genuine researchers, to confuse the casual reader, and hide the nuggets of truth under a mountain of verbiage.
Truly, this form of moderation, while being ostensibly “fair”, is favouring one side over the other.
@ kathy
“I definitely read that at one stage in his career he had worked on an energy particle accelerator according to a friend. There has been such silence and disinformation about what his current job really was, who can say? That silence speaks volumes to me.”
————————————–
youre a spook…youre sussed… as soon as talk gets juicy you post LARD
@Jon
Please could you respond to Kathy’s post above where she says:
@ Roland
@ Anders
I found it very odd that I was subjected to personal abuse and the person only got a jokey slap on the wrist for it.
It seems that while you really have it in for Anders, James got off extremely lightly last night. Why the difference? James’s posts last night were truly offensive. And he refused to apologise to Kathy, and still hasn’t. Nor me, for that matter…
@Big Daddy
That’s the second accusation of that kind you’ve made today – and both were in totally the wrong direction!!!
HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR
😀
You are either very dim or you work for the secret services… or maybe both!
Now who was it who said that “Military Intelligence” was a contradiction in terms???
@ Ferret
Yeah, and the way he baited Roland was horrible.
@jon
“I’m not much of a physicist, but why would flying lower require the satellite to travel faster? Is that to counteract a stronger gravitational pull?”
Little help here, OK? use your energy conservation laws and set PE+KE = const. For KE use mVsquare/R for PE use GmM/(R+h) – OK it gets a little more complicated when h is not much smaller than R (earth radius), but only a little bit more laborious. What you will get is that the smaller is h (height above earth surface) the larger is V (speed) for SAT to stay in constant orbit.
Can find in basic gravitation chapter in Physics 101 text (any of them) – for non-majors. The majors do it with calculus but it’s not really necessary to figure out the basic relations.
Your friendly physics tutoring service here (also know as “sucking up to the mods”). And yes, I know it’s OT but you were first.
Big Daddy
I think YOU are the spook.
“I´m spinning around, I´m out my head….”
Euan Blair (Leicester Square, 2000)
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Best post all night!!!!
So fucking true! 🙂
And poor old sis trying to top herself… 🙁
@Big Daddy
Could this possibly be a case of Kathy yet again taking the flack for Katie?
children! asking the censor for favours? he said she said .ne ne ne …FFS
there should be no moderation/censorship..it should roll like kerouac’s ‘on the road’.. the alternative view . is this not aligned with wikileaks? freedom of opinion and information , to let the reader decide to read or not… there is a scroll wheel or arrow button.. i use it all the time on this thread for people like katie, james, kathy etc etc… you are censoring anders , one of the only people worth reading on here… jon, stop censoring… let it roll… we are all it seems adults here…
.-)
“Put your EGO away missus”
Projection.
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Rejection. 🙂
@Big Daddy
Well yeah, arguably I’d agree with you there… no censorship would be my #1 choice… but seeing as how Jon IS censoring, at least he could do it even-handedly… Sheesh.
@Ferret/@Anders, I won’t get drawn into lengthy discussions about moderating, but to put this to bed:
I have no reason to prefer Katie’s posts to anyone else’s. I don’t know what her views are, so she is not being favoured, but imo she generally gets back to topic quickly. However, I’ve deleted a couple of hundred from @anders7777, who has a track record of starting fights and posting deliberate nonsense (remember the RAT TATTAT TAT stuff?).
@Ferret:
I have answered this question before, and it shows you misunderstand the purpose of moderation. A mod’s task is not to delete things that are wrong or unsubstantiated, since that would require me to apply my view to every topic, which would be unfair on people who take opposing views. The mod’s task is simply to break up fights, delete spam and reduce thread domination.
@ Big Daddy
Well thanks for nothing …lumping me in with katie and james. I don’t post a lot but anything I do post is factual or honest.
@Jon
So you are saying you do not think Katie is guilty of thread domination??? I guess we’ll just have to differ on that one then.
The mod’s task is simply to break up fights, delete spam and reduce thread domination.
Then why did you ask Anders to post proof of his claims just now? No one else has been asked that here, and there’s plenty of unsubstantiated BS flying around…
Funny how I am being singled out for attack again!!!
jon has a choice… he can choose to NOT censor right? i mean m you wont get shot in the head will you if you dont do your job?
@Dave B
“What *were* SAH’s links to nuclear weapons research?”
At a guess, none.
Guess again?
Guess why the D Notice said “No mention of his links to nuclear weapons research”?
@Kathy
Yes, isn’t it…
:puzzled:
@ Ferret
Was it something I said?
@ Ferret
“Guess why the D Notice said “No mention of his links to nuclear weapons research”?”
Yeah anyone – even a second hand cars salesman according to the postman – can get a job on an energy particle collider!
Me: ‘I was suggesting that 3 or 4 or 5 eyewitnesses won’t necessarily agree on all details’.
Ferret: ‘No, you weren’t. You were saying (in the original context) that it didn’t matter that some witnesses reported hearing 30 seconds of automatic gunfire, while others (specifically BM) heard none’.
My actual words were: ‘What [my story] says to me in relation to the al Hilli case, is that relatively minor discrepancies should be *completely ignored*.’
I don’t think it’s hugely relevant whether people said they heard gunshots or not. (Unless you’re pushing the story that there were no killings at all, and the whole thing is an Anders fairytale™ — are you?) Many, if not most, people don’t know what real gunshots sound like. They’re relying on what they’ve seen/heard in films. And I would have assumed that assassins/killers would have used silencers anyway – which probably explains why RAFman heard nothing. There could have been other noises which people – after the event – decided must have been gunshots.
Unless these people belonged to a family involved in hunting. But a hunting weapon wouldn’t sound the same as an unsilenced Beretta, would it? (I’ve used a rifle and to me it doesn’t sound like a handgun. But I don’t claim for a minute to be any kind of weapons expert.)
The same goes for RAFman and his reference to a ‘sibling’. He would have heard about the real sibling after the event. And without thinking, referred to a ‘sibling’ rather than ‘another child’ in his TV interview. I don’t find anything odd about that at all. Why it would have been deleted from the interview, I have no idea. (Unless someone was reading the kerfuffle about it here.)
Also, I don’t see anything unusual or suspicious about him being stiff or stilted or unnatural in the interview. I’ve done quite a bit of radio and TV (more TV than radio) in the past and I can well remember how ‘unnatural’ I was on the first couple of occasions. The set-up is not exactly conducive to being relaxed or being “yourself”.
“Truly, this form of moderation, while being ostensibly “fair”, is favouring one side over the other.”
So (according to you) favouring the ‘other side’ would be better??
I’ve had a busy day, and I’m off now, barring any immediate controversy about what I’m saying, above.
@Kathy
Yeah anyone – even a second hand cars salesman according to the postman – can get a job on an energy particle collider!
As I have mentioned before I use to work at RAL .ALH would be on student work experience.
There is a lot of BS about people who have worked there dying ,a lot of people do work there and some do kill themselves ,but its nothing to do with working on particle accelerators.
The old cathode ray tube in the older tv sets is a particle accelerator ,its not magic.
You should try crawling under the beam lines to fix a PM detector when the machine running, very scary one slip and you get zapped with the beam ,seen someone there who
had got burnt up,hit his face not nice.But like any job there are dangers.
Nuid.
Your post. Fair and balanced..and agreeable.
Concerning the “gunshots”.
I would imagine it would be dependable on where you relative to the place that the shots where fired and the environment you are in.
If you are in a vehicle on a tree lined road (wooded area), I would expect that environment what be totally different to being outside working on a house in the still of the day and without trees or other buildings around you (or indeed up a ladder working on a house).
I imagine, that is.
@ Dave
Well I must confess I totally haven’t a clue about technical stuff so maybe it isn’t that significant. Energy particle colliders just sound so impressive and sinister to people like me!
“Put your EGO away missus”
Projection.
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Rejection.
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And this one was DELETED by Jon.
I’ve had dozens deleted the last few days.
Disgraceful state of affairs.
At the same time why is there such secrecy about his job?