Now that Channel 4 had produced yet another video which it claims provides unquestionable evidence that Sri Lankan forces committed war crimes, it is perhaps worth just recording a few of the facts that have been established in this regard. It will also be useful to extrapolate some facts from a case now being heard in Canada, which has been reported as follows –
But rather than heed the call, the man said he went to another house.
"My intention was to somehow move away from that location," he said through a translator.
Asked if he ordered anyone to do anything, he said he didn't.
"Is there anything you could've done to stop what was going to happen?" Begg asked.
"No, I couldn't," he answered, adding that he did not agree with the decision to shoot the soldiers.
"I did not observe what the others did," he added.
It was never made clear Tuesday whether the detained Sri Lankan soldiers were actually executed.’
This makes clear that
International representatives of a body that had no qualms at all about war crimes are now in the forefront of claims that the Sri Lankan army is guilty of war crimes. The main evidence they have is the videos shown by Channel 4. About these videos, the following facts have been established –
It seems clear then that the so-called Experts, as well as the Special Rapporteurs (who present themselves as the same person in essence, whether called Alston or Heyns), grant that there has been editing, which obviously leaves open the possibility of tampering. In this context it is worth recalling the photograph that has been published of the LTTE propaganda wing filming what was supposed to be an atrocity.
The most melodramatic of the Experts, the man who thought it possible that one of the purported victims was drunk or sleeping while others were being shot through the head around him, advanced a fallback position to reinforce his case against the Sri Lankan forces. He declared that ‘Even if the file was transcoded from another format to .3gp, the conversion does not by itself invalidate the events recorded.’
He is of course quite correct, in that tampering with a film recording particular incidents does not mean those incidents did not occur. But if the narrative put forward with such a tampered film is to carry conviction, it would make sense to come clear about what has occurred. In particular, it must at the very least be suspicious that initially there were claims that nothing had been tampered with. When analysis revealed that there was something suspicious about the film, it was granted that there had been editing, but to maintain the story of trophy filming, which Little Jack Christof Heyns has pulled out like a plum, it has to be maintained too that the filming was done on a mobile phone, and all the editing too.
To grant that something more sophisticated was involved would obviously give the game away. So the Experts and their paymasters (who insist that services were provided free, without saying anything about how expenses were covered, including the provision by one expert to another of a further modified version of the video) have to insist that even optical zooming was done with a mobile phone.
But we know that the LTTE was in the habit of executing prisoners of war with AK-47s. We know that they would film scenes of destruction that were later to be used as propaganda. We know that some mistakes in the original Channel 4 film were modified by the time another version of it was sent to the UN Special Rapporteur. Anyone who understood induction would realize that it is not unlikely that the whole film is something doctored to make a terrorist case through the further sophisticated use of acknowledged terrorist activities.
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