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Makes you want to weep, but not for the "reasons" they give:



Guardian Unlimited | World dispatch | Battle for truth in Jenin



Professor Derrick Pounder, a forensic pathologist at Dundee University, visited Jenin hospital on behalf of Amnesty to examine some of the bodies that had been recovered. But what surprised him most was the absence of severely injured patients, since the hospital is less than a kilometre from the camp.



"In a conflict of this type in a densely populated are, where the Israeli army lost a substantial number of men, it is inconceivable that there were not also large numbers of severely injured," he said.



Normally, he would have expected to find three people severely injured for every one killed. Even if one accepts the Israeli claim that "only" 40 Palestinians died, there ought to be another 120 lying badly wounded, in hospital. But they are nowhere to be found.



"We draw the conclusion that they were allowed to die where they were," Professor Pounder said. Turning to the Israeli claim that all those killed were "terrorists", he said that the 21 bodies recovered at the time of his visit were a mixture of Palestinian civilians and fighters. They included three women.
I remember the quiet horror from 9/11, when everyone began to realize that there weren't going to be "thousands" of wounded flooding the hospitals. The ratio of dead to injured was slewed completed toward the dead.



The good professor also discounts disciplined troops exercising fire control. Obviously he believes that all soldiers engage in "spray and pray." Maybe he didn't notice the change when the US Army took the full-auto setting off the M-16. And doesn't Israel buy US-made weapons? I'm pretty sure I've heard some bitching and moaning about that....



Last, how does one tell a terrorist body from a civilian body, and what's the difference if it's a woman? I seem to recall several female suicide-homicide bombers as of late. Does he assume that a fighter will always have a gun in his cold, dead hand? I guess no one is supposed to pick up the weapons of the fallen.



I find myself exceedingly happy that "Professor" Pounder teaches elsewhere, though I'm afraid his standards of "evidence" are finding wide acceptance.



Everywhere but in a courtroom, that is.

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