My letter of complaint to IMPRESS regarding Bellingcat's flawed investigation of Shireen Abu Akleh's death

I sent this letter to IMPRESS and Bellingcat today. IMPRESS is an independent British organization that maintains a standards code for accuracy in reporting, and Bellingcat subscribes to their regulations. 

______________________________

Good day.

I would like to submit an IMPRESS complaint about the May 14, 2021 Bellingcat article, "Unravelling the Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh," under the grounds of being inaccurate.

The main problem with the article isn't what it says, although it does have major errors of fact. Its main shortcomings is in what it omits. By leaving out relevant facts, it violates the guidelines of IMPRESS that " a significant inaccuracy may be judged by considering whether the story, taken as a whole, was likely to create a false impression."

The Bellingcat article summary leaves little doubt as to its conclusion that the only reasonable explanation for Abu Akleh's death is the IDF shooting her, seemingly deliberately:

As the open source video evidence shows, when IDF soldiers and an armed group were engaged in fighting on the street where Abu Akleh eventually fell, the IDF position had a clear trajectory and was closer to the spot where she was shot. This is in contrast to the more obstructed and more distant positions of the armed groups. The leading vehicle in the IDF armoured vehicle convoy seen in the bodycam footage was located approximately 190 metres from the spot where Abu Akleh was shot. In contrast, the armed group seen firing down the street in Video Three was located some 300 metres away.

Preliminary forensic audio analysis of a video captured in the aftermath of Abu Akleh’s killing also appears to suggest the gunfire originated roughly 177 to 184 metres away, assuming that the weapon and round used are consistent with those seen being used by the IDF and armed Palestinian groups in the area. This estimate more closely aligns with the approximate distance between the IDF position and the site of the journalist’s killing than between the latter and the location of the armed groups.

There are some errors of fact here. 

First of all, according to the position of the IDF in Bellingcat's own map, the IDF is about 197  meters away from Abu Akleh, not 190. More importantly, the article uses the audio forensics to determine that the shooter was between 177 and 184 meters away from Abu Akleh. The difference of 6 meters is understood to be within a range of error. However, the measurement from the audio analysis must be made from the location of the microphone on the camera, not Abu Akleh's position. The camera was roughly a further 14 meters away. So now the IDF is about 30 meters outside the possible zone of a gunshot from an M16 or M4, which is no longer a discrepancy that can be overlooked of 3%, but a major discrepancy of 13% of the distance. 

An audio forensics error cannot account for such a discrepancy, meaning that the IDF's probability of shooting Abu Akleh with the information we have has gone from "the best guess we have" to "nearly impossible."

That is a significant inaccuracy.

The errors of omission are arguably more important. The article does not allow for the possibility of any Palestinian militants who can be between 177-184 meters away from Abu Akleh (really the microphone). They float the idea that a gunman in the building next to the IDF would have had line of sight but say they have no evidence of any such gunman.  

This diagram, excerpted from Bellingcat, gives the impression that there were no other known gunmen besides the two groups shown:

Yet the authors overlooked plenty of open source evidence that there were not only gunmen in the "Goldilocks zone" but that there were many Palestinian snipers in positions all over Jenin.

The evidence of militants who were southeast of Abu Akleh comes from a video and a photo. You can see the video in this tweet, with a followup tweet showing their location:

https://twitter.com/tomasyo99/status/1524343547478036481

Additionally, there is a still photo of some 15 gun toting militants on that same street, from the same morning:

There is a problem of line of sight, but Bellingcat did not even mention these people to see if there was a possibility that there was a line of sight from them to Abu Akleh to begin with. I believe that there might have been a line of sight from further south on that street, where there is a hill, but that is further than the 184 meters. Nevertheless, the cemetery has sections that have a lower wall, and across the street from Abu Akleh was mostly a tarp; as far as I can tell no one looked for bullet holes in the tarp. 

Still, not even mentioning this group, even to dismiss it, gives the impression that no one but the IDF is even potentially guilty of killing Abu Akleh. This is a major inaccuracy.

Furthermore, video evidence of witnesses show that there were many who saw snipers in buildings. I show one video here - the extended video in which one can hear the bullets than killed Abu Akleh: https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2022/05/more-information-on-abu-akleh-reporters.html The reporters, or perhaps residents, point out multiple sniper hideouts in buildings, pointing southeast. Snipers in buildings would have line of sight - and by definition they did because the witnesses could see them above the hedges to the north of the cemetery.

Moreover, the two witnesses closest to Abu Akleh themselves said that they saw snipers in buildings across from them. Shatha Hanaysha said that "we were standing across from a building with snipers." and "we were between the wall and the snipers." This indicates that the snipers were towards the east, not due south where the IDF was, parallel to the wall. 

Similarly, reporter Ali Samoudi said he heard "the sound of bullets raining down on us from the side of the occupation soldiers who were on the roofs of the buildings opposite us." 

 Again, there were no IDF snipers during this operation, and IDF snipers do not use the 5.56mm bullets that killed Abu Akleh. These journalists mistook Palestinian snipers for IDF soldiers. (At least one building southeast of Abu Akleh is both the exact distance for the audio forensics and an ideal sniper position with a clear shot down a street between the sniper and where the IDF could be expected to travel.)

There is more evidence of Palestinian snipers all over Jenin, such as this video taken from the northwest of Abu Akleh's location where gunshots can clearly be heard even though the IDF is over 270 meters away from the rooftop. 

Together, the evidence is overwhelming that trigger happy Jenin youths, amateurs with M16s from 180-190 meters away, are far more likely to have killed Abu Akleh - perhaps mistaking her helmet poking over the brush as belonging to an IDF soldier - than a professional army that has huge disincentive to kill reporters. 

Why was none of this evidence even mentioned? The reader is being misled, perhaps deliberately, to believe that there are no Palestinian militants in the area besides the two groups identified to the south of the IDF convoy.

That error of omission is the basis of Bellingcat's thesis that the IDF is the most likely culprit in Abu Akleh's death, when there are many other militants in the area at the time, many of them closer to Abu Akleh than the IDF was. 

These facts have been tweeted to Bellingcat, under the assumption that they would be at least addressed and the article updated, but that has not happened. Therefore I am submitting this formal complaint in the hopes that this additional evidence can be evaluated in an objective manner and the article updated with all the relevant information, not only the information that leads one to a specific conclusion.

I hope to hear from you soon.

Thank you,

Elder of Ziyon

__________________________________

I will keep everyone posted as to what I hear back. Bellingcat says "We will acknowledge your complaint by e-mail or in writing within 7 calendar days and will normally respond to your complaint with a final decision letter within 21 calendar days. If we uphold your complaint, we will tell you the remedial actions we have taken."

---

---

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

Read More

Summing up Abu Akleh and the mistakes of the investigators

This is mostly a Twitter thread I wrote earlier today.

Here is a summary of what @bellingcat and @CNN got wrong with Shireen Abu Akleh's death:

The only way they have any clue of the distance of the gunshots that killed her came from is the audio study. It is accurate. But they assume that fire can ONLY have come from due south.

They make the basic error (and I did too!) that since the only videos they had seen showed only the IDF at (roughly) that distance, that the fire MUST have come from the IDF.

And since it appeared that it was directed at the reporters, they assumed it was purposeful.

It didn't QUITE add up - the IDF was further away than their estimate (and their estimates were about 20 meters off) but since there was no other possible gunmen in that area south, it MUST have been the IDF. Everyone else made LESS sense. So, assume it is the party whose guilt requires the least amount of twisting facts - even though facts still needed to be twisted.

The fact that the IDF is a professional army, with great disincentive to fire on reporters, did not enter their thinking. This could be because of subconscious bias, or assuming that evidence at hand is all the evidence.

IDF professionalism and the fact that Jenin fighters are trigger-happy amateurs did not enter their parameters. Find the best fit, gloss over the inconsistencies, and voila! We solved it!

So they fit the conclusions with what they knew, not with what was possible. This is a basic error Sherlock Holmes would call out in an instant.

But they didn't know about the group of 15 Jenin gunmen to the southeast.

So they didn't consider that a possibility.

That changes EVERYTHING. Suddenly, when we KNOW there was another group, a whole new range of ideas that were not considered make MUCH more sense than the IDF acting like a spoiled teen or despot who wants to get rid of critics.

What do we know about these gunmen?

1) They WERE walking within the range of the audio estimate of distance to Shireen.
2) They AREN'T professionals. They love to shoot guns. They don't learn military discipline.
3) They can EASILY make mistakes in shooting at people from a distance.

Also, the firing patterns of the shots that killed Shireen did not sound like the IDF's way of doing things, but they sounded - undisciplined.

Did the militants shoot Shireen?

If I am seeing this video accurately, showing reporters dodging a bullet minutes before Shireen was killed, and then pointing to a building while saying that there were Palestinian militants there, it sure seems possible or likely.

And if they could see a gunman in a building from where they point, that indicates a line of sight from the gunman to Shireen.

This brings up the possibility of gunmen on upper floors in buildings, which definitely solves the line of sight problem. This building would be ideal:

It would have a straight shot west if the IDF convoy went one block north, it is camouflaged with trees, - and it happens to be the exact distance that the bullet traveled to kill Shireen Abu Akleh.

It also fits the bullet patterns of the tree perfectly.

It's just a theory. There might be sections of the wall on the ground that provide line of sight. This is something CNN could have checked and it wasn't interested. 

A militant could have hopped on top of a wall, too.

The IDF wasn't in the southeast so any bullet that came from there was from a militant. And we have evidence of at least one that reporters seemed to think did, in fact, come from the southeast.

Does everything add up perfectly yet? No, of course not. But they didn't add up perfectly to indict the IDF, either. We need the bullet. We need Shireen's helmet. We need the bullet that hit the other reporter. But there is enough evidence that there was another group, who were undisciplined, and who were not at all excluded as suspects by the evidence we have.

Perhaps Bellingcat will have the intellectual honesty to look at these other possibilities - they fit in better with the tree bullet holes, they fit better with the reporters in the video, and they fit better with basic logic if you know anything about the IDF beyond BDS lies

And you KNOW CNN will never admit they are wrong unless the evidence becomes overwhelming. They care more about reputation and ratings than the truth.

That's where we are at. There is a compelling alternate theory that was NEVER considered. When you compare the chances of an IDF mistake (or assassination, in the middle of a street battlem turning their backs on the terrorist to their south in order to kill a reporter that would backfire spectacularly) with the chances of a Jenin terrorist making a mistake, there is really no comparison - unless you think the IDF is a bloodthirsty, vindictive army before you start looking at the evidence.

Not considering alternate theories, and thinking that the open source media gives a complete picture of the facts, is a recipe for failure.

---

---

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

Read More