Author’s note: Watch the discussion board on my Examiner page light up on this one, because anything not 100% positive about Israel brings out the religio-crazies.
Excerpt:
A 19-year-old Turkish-American citizen has been confirmed to be among the at least 9 humanitarian aid workers killed by Israeli commandos aboard a relief ship in international waters bound for Gaza.
MSNBC has identified Furkan Dogan, a U.S. born citizen who moved to Turkey after turning four, as one of the dead. According to a Turkish news agency, Dogan suffered a shot in the chest and four bullets fired into his head from close range.
Two other Americans aboard the relief aid flotilla included retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Ann Wright and former U.S. Navy signalman Joe Meadors from Corpus Christi, TX. Meadors, ironically, was aboard the intelligence-gathering ship USS Liberty in 1967 when the Israeli Navy and Air Force attacked it, killing 34 U.S. Navy crew members and injuring 173.
According to Veterans Today, via Witness Gaza, all ships were thoroughly searched by local port authorities in Greece and Turkey prior to their departure. Additionally, the coalition hired an independent security firm to search the ships and certify that no weapons were on board. All passengers went through nonviolence training and were likewise searched for weapons prior to boarding. The Turkish government, a member-state of the NATO alliance, vetted all the Turkish passengers to insure that no one with ties to extremist groups boarded any of the ships.
Nilufer Cetin, a Turkish woman who was aboard the Mavi Marmara, which bore the brunt of the Israeli raid, said that the ship had “turned into a lake of blood” with clashes that were “extremely bad and brutal”. She said that after Israeli ships “harassed” the flotilla for two hours, starting around 10pm on Sunday, they returned at 4am and told the ships to turn back. “The operation started immediately with firing,” she told waiting reporters as she arrived in Istanbul carrying her baby. “First it was warning shots, but when the [ship] wouldn’t stop, these warnings turned into an attack.”
A Press TV journalist, Hassan Ghani, who was aboard the ship has this account of the ordeal:
We were some 90 miles off the Israeli coast and we were by no means within the so-called military exclusion area, which was originally 20 miles but later extended to 68 miles…Israeli commandos, each armed with at least two weapons, landed on the ship….They came down and we heard gunfire… at this stage we did not know if they were rubber bullets or live ammunition but we heard gunfire…activists used objects at hand and mostly their bare hands to defend themselves. The soldiers opened fire with their [automatic weapons] when they faced resistance from activists who held them back from approaching the cameras broadcasting the course of events live from the main deck….Passengers successfully disarmed some of the soldiers…with bare hands, when the Israelis started using live bullets causing fatalities….A man was shot in the head…and the gunfire continued for quite some time even after the activists had raised their white flags.
Rejecting Israeli media reports about the alleged use of firearms by the activists, Ghani said the only weapons touched were those seized from the Israeli soldiers. The weapons were taken and thrown overboard after bullets were removed to be preserved as evidence.
A Pakistani journalist, Talat Hussain, provides a similar account. He alleges that Israeli soldiers were shooting people in cold blood. “I witnessed myself the first Israeli assault on the ship. There was no weapon on the ship,” Hussain told Aaj news channel by phone from Jordan. “Scuffles broke out when Israelis tried to arrest people.”
“After that people threw at the Israelis whatever they got hold of. Four people were shot in the forehead in front of me. I witnessed four people dying,” said Hussain, executive director and anchor of Aaj Television. He added that he would provide video of the whole episode and further details in his television program.
Yet another account of the incident comes from Bulent Yildirim, chairman of the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (IHH). Yildirim, who was on board the vessel, said some of the activists had grabbed guns off soldiers in self-defense. “Yes, we took their guns. It would be self defense even if we fired their guns,” he said, adding that people shouted to them not to use the weapons. “By this decision, our friends accepted death, and we threw all the guns we took from them into the sea.”
Yildirim said the Israeli commandos fired rubber bullets from close range before switching to live ammunition, after some activists on board had attacked them with chairs and bats. He also said an Indonesian doctor was shot in the stomach as he helped a wounded Israeli soldier. “We told the Indonesian doctor to take the soldier back. He took his patient back, and as he was going back, they shot him 5 times in the stomach,” he said.
Another report from the Telegraph UK quotes Paveen Yaqub, from Manchester, who was also on board the Mavi Marmara. She said she was later kicked and abused by two Israeli policemen. “They were kicking my legs to make me fall and mocking me in Hebrew,” she said. “They were trying to take trophy pictures with me and they liked laughing in my face. They also searched me but I won’t go into that. They took pleasure in humiliating us.”
The same report also quotes Sarah Colborne, director of campaigns and operations at the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, was also on board the Mavi Marmara. Insisting that no one on board the boat was armed, she said the attack was an act of piracy and a “massacre”. At one point, she saw a man being shot dead by an Israeli commando:
When I was on the upper deck I saw an injured person being brought to the back of the deck being tended to by a doctor and someone who is trained in first aid. He was shot in the head. As I walked up, the dinghies the Israelis used were bristling with arms. I couldn’t even count how many ships there were in the water. It was just literally bristling with ships, helicopters, gunfire. The whole thing was just horrific.
Thus far President Obama has failed to condemn the Israeli attack and some U.S. congressmen have applauded it. The paper of record, the New York Times, declined to interview any of the survivors of the incident, but managed to locate Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, and a couple of Israeli experts. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden on Wednesday defended Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip and its decision to intercept the pro-Palestinian flotilla bringing humanitarian aid to the coastal territory.
While what really happened in this incident is still unclear due to a virtual media blackout, the eyewitness accounts seem to be consistent. Only an impartial investigation can lead to a definite conclusion. Four shots at close range to the head of a 19-year-old aid worker, however, would suggest the use of excessive force to most forensic examiners.
It will be interesting to see what sort of comments are generated on the discussion board here, because both the AP and Yahoo have been caught manipulating user comments regarding anything that is objective about the conflict in Gaza and not pro-Israel.
Read more, get links and a video clip of Cynthia McKinny ripping a CBS anchor a new one here: Orlando Independent Examiner: American,19, among dead on ship bound for Gaza as details of incident begin to emerge