Meat wagon story full of holes

New reader Harvey Britt sends in this debunking of a bombed-ambulance story from last month's Israel-Lebanon unpleasantness. As blog cross-examinations go, this one—by "zombie," the mysterious San Franciscan who assembled the Face-of-Muhammad image archive—is less conclusive than cloudgate but considerably more persuasive than dusty-babygate.

Zombie claims this story "contributed to the outrage over the war, eventually causing Israel to stand down," which seems like a stretch. The story got some circulation, but it certainly didn't lead the news in the United States. And some of the claims about the photographic evidence are open to other interpretations, closer examination, and endless enlargements, after which we're all out there playing tennis in the park with a bunch of mimes. (Though it seems clear under any circumstances that the vehicle was not hit by an explosive rocket.) But the stuff about how the story got milked, with an endlessly expanding number of people having lost increasing numbers of limbs and the ambulance enduring larger and large explosions as the story circulated, is pretty amusing. I guess the bottom line is that I've spent most of my life driving automobiles that were in worse shape than this one: