| Submit your comments on this article |
| Fifth Column |
| Real Or Fake? |
| 2006-04-11 |
| Via Instapundit Amid the digitized stream of compelling photographs from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are a few that are staged, fake or at least misleading. Photo editors struggle to filter them out. Thanks to digital technology, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the most photographed in history. Photographers with digital cameras have provided, almost instantaneously, an enormous flood of accurate, dramatic, and even shocking images to people around the world. But the daily downloads of news photos include some that are staged, fake, or so lacking in context as to be meaningless, despite the Western media's best efforts to separate the factual from the fictional. On January 14, for example, shortly after unmanned U.S. aircraft fired missiles at several suspected leaders of Al Qaeda who were thought to be staying in the village of Damadola, Pakistan, Agence France-Presse distributed a picture said to be from the scene. AFP is based in Paris, and the picture was sent by one of its locally hired photographers, a stringer. The photo showed a piece of military equipment placed on a damaged stone wall, flanked by a solemn old man and a young boy. Another firm, Getty Images, also distributed the photo to picture editors at newspapers and magazines around the world. The New York Times published it in the paper's January 14 Web edition, and Time magazine ran the picture in its January 23 print edition, along with the caption "Detritus from the latest U.S. raid in Pakistan." But the caption was wrong, the pose was staged, and the picture was, in essence, untrue. The initial AFP caption said that the military object was a piece of a missile from the U.S. strike. Later, AFP issued a correction, labeling the object an unexploded artillery shell. ... It is not just photographers or their editors who can manipulate images. Terrorists anywhere, and insurgents in Iraq specifically, can and do manipulate photos for their own uses. In Iraq, insurgents have displayed and passed around, for example, pictures said to show U.S. soldiers raping Iraqi women. They have also circulated photos of "giant spiders" supposedly sent by Allah to save Falluja from the Americans. The pictures were, in fact, crude photocopies of an American soldier's souvenir photo of two connected solifugids, also known as camel spiders, which are native to Iraq. In the photo, a soldier was holding up the two connected arachnids before an audience of other soldiers, according to Nir Rosen, a writer and a fellow at the New America Foundation, who stayed with insurgents in Falluja. "If you went into anyone's house in Falluja, they had pictures of it.... People believed," Rosen said of the camel spiders. In the photograph, the arachnids, which are about the size of a human hand, seem larger than life because the two look like one large insect and because the soldier's hand holding the creatures is unseen. Without the hand as a visual reference, viewers are prompted to compare the camel spiders' size to the soldier's leg in the background, making them look three or four feet long. The supposed rape pictures were far more important, Rosen said. In a February article for The New York Times Magazine, Rosen quoted a Jordanian Islamist's testimony that the pictures helped to galvanize insurgent activity in Falluja. "In the beginning, [the Fallujans] had said to the insurgents, 'Go make jihad in your own country.' After the rape story, they said, 'OK, we want to start now, or tomorrow we will find our mothers or daughters or sisters raped.' This story exploded the resistance in Falluja. They called us for a meeting and said, 'You were right.'" Rosen told National Journal that the rape pictures resembled those now displayed on a Web site maintained by a radical U.S. Hispanic group, La Voz de Aztlan Communications Network. Go to the Aztlan web link at the sidebar. Read their lame explanation and tell me they are not traitors and should not hanged, drawn and quartered. The men in those pictures have their faces concealed, they are wearing a hodgepodge of military clothing, and they do not carry any weapons or equipment worn by U.S. soldiers. According to a January 2004 article in The Boston Globe, these rape photo claims were repeated in the Turkish Islamist press, possibly contributing to at least one suicide bomb attack in Turkey that killed 11 people. The State Department worked hard, and successfully, to rebut the claims. "It was such an obviously bogus story, we came out pretty well," said a spokesman for the American Embassy in Turkey. Since then, "the atmosphere here is much improved." ... The problem sharpens when no Western reporter is on the scene, but a photographer, usually an Iraqi stringer, is. Photo editors, or even local Western bureau chiefs, have trouble judging the veracity of the images that come from such an event. Last October, for example, The Washington Post printed a striking image of four caskets, purportedly containing dead women and children, and a line of mourning men on a flat desert plain outside the town of Ramadi, west of Baghdad. The photo, provided by the Associated Press, accompanied an article that began this way: "A U.S. fighter jet bombed a crowd gathered around a burned Humvee on the edge of a provincial capital in western Iraq, killing 25 people, including 18 children, hospital officials and family members said Monday. The military said the Sunday raid targeted insurgents planting a bomb for new attacks. ... In December, The Post did a follow-up story about the differences in accounts of civilian casualties in Anbar province during the U.S. Marine offensive there. Ellen Knickmeyer, The Post's Baghdad bureau chief, who wrote both the October and December stories, went back to the Marine Corps, whose officials insisted that the October air raid had not killed civilians but had in fact destroyed a cell of insurgents responsible for setting off roadside bombs. The December story included this passage: "Analysis of video footage shot by the plane showed only what appeared to be grown men where the bomb struck, [Marine Col. Michael] Denning said. After the airstrike, he said, roadside bombs in the area 'shut down to almost nothing. That was a good strike, and we got some people who were killing a lot of people,' Denning said." ... In an interview, Santiago Lyon, AP's New York-based, Irish-born, director of photography, said of AP photographers in Iraq and Afghanistan, "For the most part, they were journalists before the war." i.e. Saddam's Mulhabarat agents that kept tabs on Western journalists are now employed by them. When checking into prospective employees' bona fides, he said, AP applies "the same standards as we apply to the rest of the world." Once a stringer is employed, "we make it very clear that we expect them to maintain journalistic standards" and to act professionally, even under possible pressure from family and friends. Lyon said he did not know of any episodes where AP editors had fired stringers for improper behavior or rejected their photos as staged or fake. ... In 2005, the U.S. military announced that it had arrested an Iraqi stringer for CBS, whose videotapes showed his presence at several bomb strikes against U.S. forces. The cameraman was acquitted on all charges on April 5 by an Iraqi court after being held at Abu Ghraib prison for exactly a year. The exact charges were never made public, but the U.S. military accused him of siding with insurgents. When hiring locals, "you look for recommendations from people you have worked with ... and you make the best judgment you can," said CBS spokeswoman Sandy Genelius. Clearly, terrorists and insurgents know the value of images. In an undated letter from Osama bin Laden to the Taliban's leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, bin Laden wrote about how important the media was in Al Qaeda's war with the West. "It is obvious that the media war in this century is one of the strongest methods; in fact, its share may reach 90 percent of the total preparation for battles." The translated letter was provided by the U.S. Army's Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point. Baz said that, today, unlike in wars past, journalists are constantly pressured to choose sides, and that many combatants on either side don't believe that journalistic neutrality exists. This wartime pressure on photographers is "terrible," Baz said. "It is absolutely unbelievable that you are automatically branded East or West, Muslim or Christian, and you have [to] go on one side or the other." The Post's Elbert echoed the lament: "We're part of the story, and that's wrong." Still, the flawed, faked, and staged photos are only a small slice of the daily download. Harried editors and photo directors will continue trying to filter them out, yet inevitably they won't catch them all. Read it all. |
| Posted by:ed |
| #8 But there were no pictures! I could've used a few examples.... |
| Posted by: Bobby 2006-04-11 18:16 |
| #7 Well, they may be fake, but they're accurate! |
| Posted by: Dan Rather 2006-04-11 08:22 |
| #6 despite the Western media's best efforts to separate the factual from the fictional. ROFL!! HA, HA, whoooeee, [slaps knee, wipes tear] that's a good one!! Nothing like a good laugh and a cup of coffee to wake me up in the morning! |
| Posted by: 2b 2006-04-11 08:15 |
| #5 Of just as much interest are the real photos they suppress. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2006-04-11 07:05 |
| #4 They have also circulated photos of "giant spiders" supposedly sent by Allah to save Falluja from the Americans."If you went into anyone's house in Falluja, they had pictures of it.... People believed. Just as I expected.. it was a fake photo! - have the natives stopped pointing at planes yet btw? |
| Posted by: Howard UK 2006-04-11 04:48 |
| #3 Not to mention the MSM's obsessive, ad nauseam re-release of Abu Ghraib photos and suppression of photos of dead and dying Americans on 9/11. |
| Posted by: Snuns Thromp1484 2006-04-11 03:43 |
| #2 LOL. Great example! |
| Posted by: Thager Elminetle6825 2006-04-11 03:11 |
| #1 Q. What do the following have in common: MSM editors with photos that make the US or Military or Bush look bad, and... Teenage boys with nudie magazines of girls with big hooters. A: They both get excited over the photos, and they dont care if they are fake. |
| Posted by: Oldspook 2006-04-11 02:36 |