Karl Vick has done it again. A few days after angering the ADL for his reporting on Israeli feelings toward the peace process, Vick reports from the Corrie trial in Haifa.
From Israel’s Military on the Spot Over Activist’s Death:
Neither thorough nor credible, and every bit as transparent as a sandstorm, Israel’s investigation of Corrie’s death sheds little light on what happened — the grenade story apparently came out of thin air — but is providing a great deal of fodder for her family’s case against the state. Heard intermittently in the manner of Israel’s court system, the case may not conclude until November. But it has already validated anew Richard Nixon’s timeless observation that it is the cover-up that does you in.
“What, did you kill him?” a soldier asked after Corrie disappeared beneath the blade of a D9R Caterpillar, wreathed in armor for use by the Israel Defense Forces. “May God have mercy on him,” came the reply. The striking exchange, between Israeli soldiers speaking in Arabic, was not included in the report’s transcript of radio transmissions, the former investigator acknowledged on the stand. He said he didn’t think it was important.
Oded testified that the interview of the bulldozer driver was halted on the order of a senior commander. He also testified that investigators waited a week to retrieve from another unit the only known videotape of the incident; failed to interview non-military eyewitnesses; ignored the ambulance workers, doctors and other Palestinians who treated her; and did not even visit the scene of her death. That was a neighborhood in the Gaza Strip where a handful of foreign-born protesters with the International Solidarity Movement tried to do what Palestinians could not do themselves if they expected to survive: turn themselves into human shields between Israeli bulldozers and the Palestinian homes the bulldozers were trying to tear down on the grounds that they provided cover for gunmen and tunnels.
The army maintains that Corrie’s death was an accident: because of the armored plating around the cab, the driver, who is scheduled to testify next month, could not see her, even in a fluorescent orange vest. But on Monday the expert witness whose study of sightlines backed up that claim confirmed on the stand that he in fact set out to support the army’s narrative.
Afterward, Craig Corrie despaired at how easily the contradictions were coming.
“It was really depressing, because my impression was the people were making statements that indicated they never expected to be questioned,” Rachel’s father told TIME. “The lies were like the lies of a 7-year-old.”
