Yeah, well, it seems the Israelis were so totally wrong about that. They’re actually used to smuggle jugs of milk.

Hey, I was skeptical, too. But if you check out this link, you’ll see actual pictures of genuine Palestinian-looking people, in a tunnel, holding what appear to be jugs of milk.

Therefore these tunnels are never used to smuggle weapons. Case closed, I guess. Boy, is my face red.

Soon to be released: shocking photographic evidence that those tunnels under the southern border are actually never used to smuggle drugs, guns, and illegal aliens, but only delicious homemade tamales.

P.S. If you don’t remember Saddam’s “baby milk factory”–which was actually a ricin factory, here’s a refresher.

I’d be a little worried if milk from that plant were passing through the tunnels under Gaza.
___________________

{Post by See-Dubya; hat-tip to Mike at Cold Fury.}

***

Here we go again. You’ll all remember how the MSM brought us the first Fauxtography-fest in the summer of 2006. Well, the photo fakers and their dupes in the media are baaaack. And the blogosphere’s all over them.

LGF’s Charles Johnson and Brian Ledbetter have the rundown on the digitally enhanced Iranian missiles in an image distributed by Agence France-Press. See also: Kamangir, Blackfive, Pat Dollard, EU Referendum, Ace, Jim Hoft, Suitably Flip.

The AFP has retracted the photo. The NYT, fresh from its own photo-distorting embarrassment, reports:

Updated, 9:33 a.m., Agence France-Presse has retracted the image as “apparently digitally altered.”

As news spread across the world of Iran’s provocative missile tests, so did an image of four missiles heading skyward in unison. Unfortunately, it appeared to contain one too many missiles, a point that had not emerged before the photo appeared on the front pages of The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune and several other newspapers as well as on BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, NYTimes.com and many other major news Web sites.

…Agence France-Presse retracted its four-missile version this morning, saying that the image was “apparently digitally altered” by Iranian state media. The fourth missile “has apparently been added in digital retouch to cover a grounded missile that may have failed during the test,” the agency said.

Wait, that’s not all.

On another fauxtographic front, the AP admits getting duped by fake tornado video.

But hey, they’re the professionals with layers and layers of credentialed fact-checkers.

And we’re just amateurs in our basements.

***

Memo to MSM: Give credit where it’s due, why don’t you?!

It’s baaaaack. Loyal readers will recall the summer of jihadi propaganda and the blogosphere backlash against MSM fauxtography in 2006 and beyond. Slublog’s Passion of the Toys spotlighted the uncanny Middle Eastern photo stringers’ penchant for finding pristine stuffed animals and dolls amid the rubble of war. LGF and others caught numerous examples of magically-appearing Korans.

With things heating up in the fauxtographic oasis of Gaza, the jihadi sympathizers are back to playing hide and seek again.

The Jawa Report has the latest.

Meanwhile, there are new developments in the father of all fauxtography scandals–the al Dura case in France. See PJM and Backspin for fresh reports.

Good.

***
Ugh. This is bad on many levels. W. Thomas Smith, Jr., a former Marine and milblogger who writes at National Review Online’s The Tank (and whose work in Iraq I’ve praised and linked to here), posts a long-winded defense of bogus, shoddy reporting he published while he was in Lebanon earlier this fall. It’s painful to read because he takes nearly 1,400 words to get to the main points:

1) He claimed he had seen “some 200-plus heavily armed Hezbollah militiamen” at a “sprawling Hezbollah tent city” when, in fact, he hadn’t seen 200-plus heavily armed Hezbollah militiamen.

2) He reported that 4,000-5,000 Hezbollah gunmen had been “deployed to the Christian areas of Beirut in an unsettling ‘show of force,’” when, in fact, there is no evidence that a deployment of 4,000-5,000 Hezbollah gunmen to Christian areas of Beirut ever took place.

As you read the explanation, ask yourselves this: If Thomas Beauchamp had written it instead of Thomas Smith, would you buy it?

Kathryn Lopez, to her credit, immediately* disclosed (see update above) the controversy to readers. Contrary to the TNR editors, she thanked the reporter who first questioned Smith’s account, instead of trashing critics. Writes Lopez:

Bottom line: NRO strives to bring you reliable analysis and reporting — whether in presenting articles, essays, or blog posts. Smith did commendable work in Lebanon earlier this year, as he does from S.C. where he is based, as he has done from Iraq, where he has been twice. But rereading some of the posts (see “The Tank” for more detail) and after doing a thorough investigation of some of the points made in some of those posts, I’ve come to the conclusion that NRO should have provided readers with more context and caveats in some posts from Lebanon this fall. And so I apologize to you, our readers.

I thank Smith for his good, brave work. He’s a smart, reliable reporter with a great patriotic spirit and sense of service. We owe him and our readers better — we should have gotten you more context and information before a post or two went live. It’s understandable how it happened — the nature of blogging being what it is — but given what an underreported tinderbox we’re talking about, especially, we owed you more. We weren’t blogging about Dancing with the Stars there.

So I’m grateful to the reporter who contacted Smith with questions. He brought them to my attention. We did due diligence. We’ve reported this back to him. And now we’re reporting back to you.

The problem is that “more context” and “caveats” aren’t what was needed. Just the facts would have sufficed. Smith’s work in those posts was not “good” or “brave.” And “the nature of blogging” doesn’t excuse the phenomenal errors. Given Smith’s admissions, “reliable” is not a word that should attach to his Lebanon reporting.

We are all fallible. We all make mistakes. But these were not small mistakes. They were XXL ones.

Moreover, online journalists and bloggers can’t have it both ways: They can’t ask for mainstream media parity when their reporting is dead-on and ahead-of-the-curve–and at the same time hide behind the “well, I was just blogging” excuse if their reporting turns out to be as ill-sourced and wrong-headed as the legacy media’s. Also note: In one of the tainted posts, the headline isn’t “Blogging from Lebanon.” It’s “Reporting from Lebanon.”

The nutroots are having a field day. And yes, points like this one made in the Huffington Post are going to sting:

Smith wrote at least five posts in September and October on The Tank attacking the Beauchamp stories, including the following comments: “It would have been virtually impossible for the things Beauchamp said happened to have played out the way he says they did” on September 10; and “Scott Thomas Beauchamp was either a fictitious character or a liar” on October 27.

An American journalist in Lebanon piles on. And you can be sure this story will get tons more coverage on the left side of the blogosphere in the next few days than the TNR debacle has gotten over the last five months. The liberal media will prop up this case to blunt criticism of TNR’s handling of the Beauchamp scandal. They’ll ignore the fundamental difference in how the two magazines have handled their respective situations. They’ll ignore the slander and the cover-up at TNR, and comfort themselves with a blanket of false moral equivalence.

The worst aspect of the case, however, is that it will give cover to Hezbollah-sympathizing media propagandists and their puppet masters–the fauxtographers, the ambulance manipulators, and the evil-enabling stage managers of the Theater of Jihad.

We must fight the propagandists with incontrovertible truth, not more propaganda.

Caption: AFP/Yahoo!News Caption: Tuesday August 14, 2007: An elderly Iraqi woman shows two bullets which she says hit her house following an early coalition forces raid in the predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City. At least 175 people were slaughtered on Tuesday and more than 200 wounded when four suicide truck bombs targeted people from an ancient religious sect in northern Iraq, officials said.(AFP/Wissam al-Okaili)

Yes, the blogosphere lit up today over the above photograph (it’s still up on Yahoo!News here). If you haven’t already spotted the error, see Rocco DiPippo, Hot Air, Blackfive, Bob Owes, Jim Hoft, Snapped Shot, and LGF.

Reader DWS, one of our troops in Iraq who works in ammo inspections, e-mails me tonight:

I’m over here in Iraq right now. I’ve seen that picture of the Lady with the two unspent rounds. To me they don’t look like the stuff we use, I swear those are AK-47 rounds. I work in AMMO and I have inspected and handled thousands of 5.56mm ammo, M-16 ammo. It’s thinner than those rounds. Those aren’t even ours.

More scrutiny of the ammo question at QandO.

AFP has issued a “correction,” which Ace points out is flatly dishonest:

“CORRECTS BULLETS TO UNSPENT An elderly Iraqi woman holds up two unspent bullets at her house following an early coalition forces raid in the predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City, 14 August 2007.”

Ummm… that’s not all that was corrected, AFP. The old caption said those bullets hit her house.

Now that you acknowledge they were never fired, of course you admit they could not have hit their house.

Funny how you just omitted that part without actually acknowledging your error there.

Why not just let that caption remain? The woman claimed these obviously-unfired cartridges hit her house. Why protect a liar from being exposed?

Unless, of course, you have a some interest in protecting a liar.

The woman claimed these unfired bullets hit her house. That is what she claimed, and that fact — the fact of her making that claim — remains true, unless the photograher simply made that up.

If the photographer made it up, he should be fired and AFP should admit this.

If he didn’t make it up, then the woman is a proven liar, and the evidence of her stooging for Sadr should remain on the record, rather than being whitewashed away.

Let the Photoshopping begin.

And more snort-worthy mockery at Captain’s Quarters. Click for the caption:

***

AFP needs some working B.S. detectors. How about hiring a blogger or two?

***

Kate at SDA posts an ammo comparison graphic from one of her readers.

Of course, all the best software in the world won’t solve propaganda problems like this one.

But every bit counts.

***

Allah is reminded of the V-chip and other technological band-aid non-solutions.

Yep, he’s got a point.

This post is by Big Lizards (mostly Sachi), not by our dearest Michelle; the host is on holiday somewhere — I couldn’t quite make out where she was, but she shouted something that sounded remarkably like “earache.” Faugh; earache, my eye.

You put your left foot in…

If the mainstream media has no agenda, and their misreporting can solely be blamed upon the fog of war, we should see the mistakes benefiting both sides equally; half the time, they should wrongly report a great American victory that turns out not to be so great after all. I now pause for readers to wrack their memories to recall the last time AP, Reuters, CNN, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Herald, the Wall Street Journal, or Media Matters did so.

Go ahead; I’ll wait.

Curiously enough, every time a major media source blows a story, they do so by publishing something that advances the message of the “emerging defeat” in Iraq, and that only thing we can do is to manage that inevitable defeat. (Similarly, mistakes on restaurant bills always seem to be in the restaurant’s favor.)

We have never read a headline such as “American troops kills 100 terrorists,” only to find out later that we bombed a simple wedding party. It is always the other way around; the wedding-party meme always comes first, followed by a quiet correction in a little box at the bottom of an inside page.

But let us not call it an MSM conspiracy or say that Boehlert is a part of it; for they are all honorable men, and honorable men would not sling such libelous accusations without rock-solid proof.

Let us instead examine some of the stringers upon whose reports the media (especially AP) rely:

Snuff films on Haifa Street: In December 2004, masked gunmen pulled two Iraqi election workers out of their car in broad daylight and assassinated them. An AP photographer-stringer just happened to be standing a few yards away, snapping pictures of the multiple homicide. The terrorists just happened to let him live. They even let him keep his camera and film. This was fortuitous, since the report earned an AP reporter a Pulitzer Prize.

After initial denials, AP first admitted that the photographer had been tipped off; then at last, they revealed the rest of the dirt on the endless supply of stringers ready and willing to accomodate “[i]nsurgents [who] want their stories told as much as other people.” As Power Line’s John Hinderaker concluded:

That makes the admission pretty well complete, I think. The AP is using photographers who have relationships with the terrorists; this is for the purpose of helping to tell the terrorists’ “stories.” The photographers don’t have to swear allegiance to the terrorists–gosh, that’s reassuring–but they have “family and tribal relations” with them. And they aren’t embedded–I’m not sure I believe that–but they don’t need to be either, since the terrorists tip them off when they are about to commit an act that they want filmed.

Stringing AP along: In April 2006, Bilal Hussein was taken into US custody as a member of a terrorist group. Hussein had been working as an AP photographer-stringer; he had sent AP a series of pictures taken inside the terrorists’ training camp.

He also snapped a picture of terrorists boldly posing by the body of a murdered Italian journalist. But perhaps Hussein was only tipped-off by, not embedded with, the killers.

PhotoShop phantasies: In August 2006, Reuters had to fire their Lebanese photographer-stringer Adnan Hajj, after his photo-shopped pictures were exposed by some sharp-eyed bloggers.

These are not isolated cases; the major news media have published hundreds of such photographs by Iraqi photographer-stringers, and thousands of stories by Iraqi writer-stringers. The standard media narrative of tens of thousands of dead Iraqis, as well as the entire case for “the emerging defeat” in Iraq (as Eric Boehlert gleefully puts it), is based upon the concatenation of these questionable stories… many of which have all the earmarks of enemy propaganda disseminated via the reliably compliant (and incurious) American and international media.

How can we ever know how much of what we read and see about Iraq is real, how much exaggerated, and how much simply defeatist fabrication? Is Eric Boehlert even curious to know the answer himself? Or does he, like Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles’ magnum opus, believe the people will think what the media tells us to think?

If that is what he believes, and if he is right, then thank heavens they are all honorable men: just imagine what mischief they could concoct were they not!

Believing is seeing

Meet Salam Daher, AKA Abu Shadi Jradi, AKA Abdel Qader, AKA Green Helmet Guy (how many names do Moslem extremists get to use?)

In July 2006, in Qana Lebanon, in the aftermath of an Israeli attack on a rocket-launching site, the photograph of a Lebanese “civil defense worker,” his face anguished as he held a dead child in his arms, was plastered across the front pages of newspapers around the globe. Yet there was something odd about the guy, a discordant note. Many bloggers pointed out that he had been photographed throughout the day for hours, ghoulishly holding up the same dead child in various poses.

Green Helmet Guy told reporters conflicting stories about the number of children found dead. And then, Germany’s NDR found footage of this guy directing scenes, using the dead body of a child as a prop, toted to the site from storage somewhere. Not only that… Green Helmet Guy had done the exact, same thing 10 years ago:

This is nothing new. In Gaza, Palestinians have been staging battles and coaching witnesses for years. We even have a name for it: Pallywood. Here is an 18 minute video from YouTube, taken during the second intifada from 2000 to 2002:

For the first ten minutes, you will see Palestinians staging various events:

• A man shoots into a building as if he were defending himself; but the building is actually deserted;
• Civilians direct soldiers and crowds of “innocent bystanders” (extras) how to act prior to filming a scene;
• Footage of a funeral march in Jenin, after the “Jenin massacre,” where the pallbearers accidentally drop the corpse from a stretcher — and the dead fellow obligingly hops back aboard.

But the most telling footage starts about the 11th minute: an interview conducted by a Palestinian “reporter” with a new mother and father and with the doctor who had just delivered their baby at the local hospital. (I wonder if the reporter is a stringer for AP?)

On the way to the hospital, the reporter discusses with his staff what kind of story he is looking for: the terrible conditions that Palestinians must endure because of the wicked Israelis. At the hospital, the reporter tells the doctor that the young couple must say that the road was so dangerous, they couldn’t get to hospital in time… and the young husband had to deliver the baby all by himself. In fact the doctor had delivered a healthy baby in the hospital few hours earlier.

Chillingly, all three subjects — father, mother, and doctor — agree; they give the interview, describing the terrible ordeal that never occurred.

How many times have we heard that eyewitnesses, bystanders, and doctors had all “verified” some calamitous event caused by the Israelis, the Americans, or our Coalition partners in Iraq? Oh, wait, here’s one:

For the record, along with Hussein, the AP based its Burned Alive reporting on an account from Imad al-Hashimi, a Sunni elder who told Al-Arabiya television about the killings. (He later recanted his story after being visited by a representative of the defense minister.) The AP also spoke to three independent eyewitnesses (two shopkeepers and a physician) and confirmed the story with hospital and morgue workers.

This is from the very piece by Eric Boehlert that is the subject of this discussion.

Please also notice that the “Sunni elder” recanted… but that this was “after being visited by a representative of the defense minister.” Not that Boehlert is implying any threats, intimidation, or torture… he would never do such a thing without a shred of evidence, for Boehlert is an honorable man.

So are they all. All honorable men.

Continued yet again next lizard post…

Comment on this post here.

~^~

The Iraq war — indeed, the larger GWOJ (global war against jihadism) — is as much a propaganda war, a war of ideas and “memes,” as it is a shooting war. Paul Josef Goebbels understood the power of propaganda; so too did Tojo, Walter Cronkite, and so does al-Qaeda, of course. Alas, it appears that both the Bush administration and the GOP are completely clueless in this respect.

The Democrats and the elite media, to the extent they are not the same entity, understand perfectly, however.

When CNN broadcast the al-Qaeda propaganda video showing an American soldier being killed by a terrorist sniper, terrorists gloated that our sensationalist media was always willing to help them out by showing their recruiting videos on the nightly news. The media, for reasons of their own which appear more compelling to them than national security, long ago decided to work with America’s enemies; the most charitable conclusion is that they’re so deathly afraid of American military might becoming American imperialism, that they would rather see an America defeated, humbled, and on its knees than triumphant, dominant, and ascendent.

To think that the internationalists in the elite media are cheerleaders for success in Iraq, let alone the larger GWOJ, is naïve; to imagine that the tilt is so subtle that ordinary readers don’t realize it — is downright insulting.

Yet that is exactly what columnist Eric Boehlert, from Media Matters for America, does in “Michelle Malkin fiddles while Baghdad burns.” Boehlert, and many others like him in the drive-by media, criticize sites such as Michelle Malkin, Flopping Aces, and Confederate Yankee (from the best of intentions!) They call us — he didn’t mention Big Lizards, but I feel some solidarity with the ones he did — they call us “warbloggers,” who are “chronically incorrect” and uninterested in the truth… unlike the perennially truth-seeking mainstream media. (Hat tip, who else? Michelle Malkin.)

In fact, while I wouldn’t say Boehlert has it exactly backwards — there are many bloggers (even “warbloggers”) who are just as biased (or corrupt) as Mary Mapes and Eason Jordan — the mere fact that there is so much more big political money in the professional media than in the blogosphere itself argues in favor of more honesty within the latter.

For Boehlert is an honourable man; so are they all, all honourable men

In fact, Boehlert himself gives us a perfect example of the deep, underlying, and contemptuous atitude of the elites in the professional media towards the upstarts “who have virtually no serious journalism experience among them.” In his lengthy harangue on his Media Matters blog, he attempts to discredit Michelle Malkin — the bête noire he seems to fear more than the rest of the blogosphere combined — with an off-topic and puzzling slap:

It should be noted that Malkin’s breathless excitement over the AP story nearly matches the enthusiasm she used to spread online smears about the press in the spring of 2005 during the Terri Schiavo right-to-die controversy. That’s when Malkin backed the novel conspiracy theory that press reports about how congressional Republicans had drafted a talking-points memo in order to properly spin the Schiavo story were all wrong. In fact, according to Malkin’s fact-free analysis, an unknown Democratic operative had concocted the phony GOP talking-points memo and duped the media in order to make Republicans look bad.

This was a big story, in which the honest and honorable media reported not only that a Republican wrote it — true, Brian Darling, legal counsel to Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL) — but also that the Republicans distributed it to the party faithful on Capitol Hill — which turned out to be completely false: Martinez gave it to Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), and it was then leaked to the media. By charging Malkin with having “backed the novel conspiracy theory” that Democrats wrote the memo, he paints her as a delusional loon who can simply be dismissed.

But wait… did she really push that “conspiracy theory?”

As proof she did, Boehlert links to another post on Media Matters — attributed to “J.W.,” though there is nobody listed on the masthead of Media Matters with those initials; not only does J.W. not back up Boehlert’s accusation, he says precisely nothing about Malkin’s position:

[Josh] Claybourn [of In the Agora] posted a March 26 blog entry claiming that four anonymous GOP Senate staffers had accused a Reid aide of distributing “distributing forged ‘talking points’ to members of the media and claiming Republican authorship. Though this information has since been excised from the post [J.W. must mean excised from the Claybourn post], conservative syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin, who has been actively following this subplot on her blog, stated in an April 7 post that In the Agora originally identified them as staff members of Martinez and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA).

So all that J.W. is saying is that Malkin correctly reported that a Josh Claybourn post identified staffers for Sen. Martinez and then-Sen. Santorum as the culprits behind the false charge that the Schiavo memo was written by a Democrat. J.W. says nothing remotely like Boehlert’s claim that Malkin said “an unknown Democratic operative had concocted the phony GOP talking-points memo.” Eric Boehlert simply made that charge up.

But of course, Eric Boehlert is an honorable man.

In fact, it’s even worse: Michelle Malkin was skeptical of Claybourn’s informants’ information from the beginning. On March 26th — nearly two weeks before the J.W. post above — Malkin published a post titled Eyewitnesses?, question mark included. In it, she quoted from the Claybourn post, then added this:

I don’t buy it. Here’s why:

[We skip her five reasons for rejecting the In the Agora accusation.]

Unless someone is prepared to stand up and publicly point the finger at a specific individual and explain the decision to delay disclosing the true source of the memo, I can only conclude that ITA’s sources are probably lying.

Note not only Boehlert’s peculiar relationship with the truth of the matter — saying that Malkin had championed the idea that the Shiavo memo was written by Democrats, when in fact she immediately rejected it — but also the fact that he is so dismissive of those of us who didn’t go to J-school, that he thinks we won’t even bestir ourselves to follow his link and see what Malkin actually said. He believes he is safe, because “warbloggers” are either too stupid or too lazy to do the least bit of research.

Eric Boehlert believes his own arrogant fantasy of pajama-clad losers warblogging from their mothers’ basements. But Boehlert is an honorable man; so are they all, all honorable men.

The blogosphere — threat or menace?

Boehlert’s main subject, however, is the recently discredited and partially retracted Associated Press story about four mosques being “burned” and six Iraqi Sunnis being doused with kerosine and burnt alive; he latches hold of this story and tries to demonstrate how paranoid are the “warbloggers” he despises.

(Before reading further, please first read Patterico’s excellent summary of what we know (as of today) AP got wrong about that story.)

In his post, Boehlert shows utter contempt towards any blogger who dares question elite media reporting (rather than simply receiving it like tablets from Mount Sinai). He mocks the very notion that the MSM could be willing accomplices (or useful idiots), out to make us lose the war in Iraq… just as Walter Cronkite helped us lose Vietnam by falsely (and deliberately) reporting the Tet Offensive — a Viet Cong attack that failed catastrophically, resulting in the destruction of the Viet Cong as a serious military force — as a tremendous enemy victory that meant America had already lost the war.

Boehlert equates “warbloggers” like Michelle Malkin and Confederate Yankee with lunatic conspiracy theorists, disdaining as “illogical obsession” our suspicions about the accuracy, and even the veracity, of Iraqi and Afghan stringers and informers. He crows that we only question the MSM because we cannot face the reality that we lost the war (which certainly would be news to the American military personnel fighting in Iraq; and to the Iraqis; and for that matter, to al-Qaeda or Muqtada Sadr or whomever we’re supposed to have lost the war to).

Boehlert’s central j’accuse is that we “warbloggers” ignore the carnage of sectarian violence, clinging instead to irrelevant minor discrepancies (such as non-existent mosque burnings and burnt Sunnis who cannot be found) like “a ray of hope.”

And he also tries to slip another one across. Unable to seriously damage the credibility of “warbloggers” by actually finding errors or maladroit reasoning in their war-related posts, Boehlert embarks upon a campaign of drive-by discrediting: he finds some post somewhere, typically unrelated or only tangentially related to the war, where the warblogger in his crosshairs wrote something to which Boehlert objects. He then trots this out as more evidence of the “warblogger” being “unhinged,” “obsessed,” “demented,” or harboring “unbridled hatred of Arabs and Muslims” and wanting to see journalists “get killed”:

Warning: Confederate Yankee is the same warblogger who recently posted a Reuters photo of an elderly Iraqi woman wrapped in a headscarf and crying beside a coffin. Confederate Yankee sensed foul play and claimed the picture had been mischievously doctored by the wire service because the Iraqi woman’s face was actually George Bush’s mug superimposed onto the picture. I kid you not.

Actually, “kid you” he does… because following the link to Confederate Yankee makes it perfectly clear that Bob Owens was simply joking, for heaven’s sake. (Strangely, Boehlert never links directly to a blog; instead, he always links to a Media Matters redirect to the link target. I don’t know why he does this; perhaps it’s a pompous Media Matters house rule. But it’s annoying, since I actually must click through to every source to get the URL, rather than right-clicking and selecting “Copy link location”.)

Here is what Confederate Yankee writes:

Apparently, even nominal quantities of over-the-counter cold medications can cause you to see the most interesting things.

I know this, because this Reuters picture has all the earmarks of a crudely-edited PhotoShop, from the rather odd smudges and apparent artifacts around the heads of the two women on the left when the photo is enlarged, to the rather uncanny resemblance that one person in the picture has to someone I feel I should know.

After Adnan Hajj, Reuters wouldn’t fall for this sort of stuff again, would they?

It’s a good thing I can chalk this up to cough syrup. If not, I might have to start questioning the media’s accuracy.

If Boehlert cannot figure out that this is a joke, then he shares his sense of humor with John Kerry. The alternative is that Boehlert knew it was a joke, but he decided to pretend it was serious, in order to discredit Owens. But I cannot imagine he would do such a thing, for Boehlert is an honorable man.

Warning: Having now seen two examples of Eric Boehlert confabulating false charges against the “warbloggers,” who seem to haunt his dreams at night, I will follow the links on each and every such accusation that he makes from now on. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me 217 times in the same post, and I’ll resign from the blogosphere in disgrace.

Baghdad mosques are burning down, burning down, burning down

Here is Boehlert in full cry, expounding his thesis like Marc Antony bestriding Caesar’s dagger-riven body (so Boehlert’s head does not explode, I confess that all emphasis is added for clarity):

By inflating the disputed incident into a monumentally important press story, warbloggers, who have excitedly pounded the story for weeks, convinced themselves that blame for the United States’ emerging defeat in Iraq lay squarely at the feet of the press. Specifically, warbloggers claim that American journalists, too cowardly to go get the news themselves, are relying on local Iraqi news stringers who have obvious sympathies for terrorists and who purposefully push propaganda into the news stream — the way Hussein did with the Burned Alive story — to create the illusion of turmoil. Warbloggers, who have virtually no serious journalism experience among them, announced that what’s coming out of Iraq today is not news at all, but simply terrorist press releases — “a pack of lies” — regurgitated by reporters (or “traitors“) who want to see the insurgents succeed….

But warbloggers aren’t interested in an honest, factual debate about a single instance of journalistic accountability. And they’re not really interested in the specifics of the Burned Alive story. They’re interested in wide-ranging conspiracy theories and silencing skeptical voices.

Shakespeare weeps with envy.

But Boehlert is no fool; he knows that the MSM, like everyone else (including Boehlert himself), has an agenda. Boehlert is unhinged because the media elite, which he is part of, no longer dominates the news cycle, as they used to do before first talk radio, then the blogosphere threatened their monopoly. “Warbloggers” (many of whom are former soldiers) ask too many inconvenient questions; and it is Boehlert, not Malkin or Owens or the fellows at Power Line, who is rather desperate to “silence skeptical voices.”

But Boehlert is an honorable man; so are they all, all honorable men.

Continued next Lizard post…

Comment on this post here.

Paging Kathleen Carroll

My blogging has been lighter than usual the past few weeks due to family time, Fox News duties, holiday chaos, holiday illness–and, yes, planning for a trip to Iraq. As you know, ex-CNN newsman Eason Jordan extended an invitation to me three weeks ago to go to Iraq to investigate the Associated Press/”Jamil Hussein” story. He offered to pay for a trip. As you’ll recall, I asked if he would offer to cover travel and security costs for Curt from Flopping Aces–who broke open the story of AP’s dubious sources on Thanksgiving weekend and continues to lead the blogospheric search for the truth. Jordan agreed.

I spoke with Jordan by phone before Christmas to learn more details of his offer, which I’m not going to get into for privacy and security reasons. (He asked that his discussion be off the record.) I let him know that I had received invitations to embed with the military and planned to follow up on some of these offers concurrently with the investigation of the AP’s reporting. Since our conversation, things have moved at a fast pace on the embed side. Over the holidays, my Hot Air colleague Bryan Preston and I received word that our embed applications had been approved. We have been busy preparing our families and ourselves for the journey. Our overarching goals are two-fold:

1) to report on how the troops perceive mainstream media coverage of the war (with a particular focus on the wire services relying on local stringers); and

2) to report on progress and interaction between U.S. troops and Iraqi Army trainees.

The “Jamil Hussein” story is one important item on our agenda, but not the only one. As Curt and other bloggers on this story have noted from the beginning, Jamilgate isn’t just about “Jamil Hussein.” Bryan and I plan to do as much on-the-ground reporting as we can to nail down unresolved questions–not only about Jamil Hussein and the Hurriya six burning Sunnis allegations, but also about the AP four burning mosque story discrepancies and the many other AP sources that our military has publicly challenged–including “Lt. Maitham Abdul Razzaq” and more than a dozen police officers listed by U.S. military spokesman Navy Lt. Michael Dean. There’s also the issue of detained AP photographer Bilal Hussein. And we are looking forward to reporting first-hand on the security situation in Iraq outside the so-called “Green Zone” (International Zone) and talking to as many American and Iraqi Army troops with insights on these and other broader matters.

I am very heartened by Eason Jordan’s post yesterday challenging the Associated Press’s credibility, but am puzzled that his own crew in Baghdad still has nothing new to report more than a month after bloggers first started raising questions. I hope Jordan follows up on the most recent investigative developments in the blogosphere. As of Dec. 21, the AP refuses to answer these simple questions:

1. Is Jamil Ghdaab Gulaim the real name of your oft-cited source, “Captain Jamil Hussein” aka ” Jamil Gholaiem Hussein?”

2. If not, where is “Captain Jamil Hussein” currently working? If he is a Baghdad police officer, as AP asserts, why hasn’t anyone — not CPATT, not MOI, not Marc Danzinger’s sources [nor Eason Jordan's] — been able to locate him?

3. What is your response to the CPATT officers’ report that Jamil Ghdaab Gulaim denies being AP’s source?

The reply from Linda Wagner, AP media relations officer, you’ll recall, was this:

Michelle-

I have no additional information for you at this time.

Linda

The reply from AP exec editor Kathleen Carroll…well, there was none.

Jordan has called on the AP to “to appoint an independent panel to determine the facts about the disputed report, to determine whether Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein exists, and to share the panel’s full findings and recommendations with the public.”

I support that call. But I have decided not to wait on the AP or depend on Eason Jordan for answers and accountability. Bryan and I will be heading out to Iraq very shortly as embeds to advance the story and get first-hand the side of the story the AP refuses to hear–the side of the troops on the ground. (It is an expensive trip. If you’d like to pitch in, we’d greatly appreciate any help. Donation info. below.) You’ll start hearing from us soon. Stay tuned here and at HotAir.com. I’ll also be filing dispatches for the New York Post, which provided us with media accreditation.

I have notified Jordan of our plans and encouraged him to move forward with his trip and his offer to bring Curt of Flopping Aces.

More importantly, I have asked Jordan to extend the travel funds and security coverage he would have spent on me to the AP’s Kathleen Carroll.

Ms. Carroll, you may remember, was the AP executive who derided bloggers for sitting at home instead of traveling abroad to do their own reporting during the fauxtography debacle last summer:

“It’s hard to imagine how someone sitting in an air-conditioned office or broadcast studio many thousands of miles from the scene can decide what occurred on the ground with any degree of accuracy,” said Kathleen Carroll, AP’s senior vice president and executive editor.

Yet, from her own comfortable office, Ms. Carroll has decided that bloggers, Jordan, the U.S. military, and Iraqi government officials are all wrong to question her news organization’s questionable news sources:

Kathleen Carroll, AP executive editor, told E&P today that she had not read Jordan’s latest item, posted Monday, and likely would not. But she stood by the news organization’s previous statements backing the existence of an Iraqi police captain, Jamail (sic) Hussein.

“I’ve been pretty public about what we have done to get to the crux of the criticism we have gotten about it,” she added. When asked about critics’ demands that AP produce Hussein to prove his existence, she said “that area [where he works] has pretty much been ethnically cleansed, it is a nasty place and continues to be.”

It is unfortunate that this neighborhood has been reportedly rife with sectarian violence, but that doesn’t change the fact that there is no police captain named “Jamil Hussein” working now or ever in either Yarmouk or al Khadra, according to on-the-ground sources in Baghdad (see here and here).

Ms. Carroll, why not leave your “air-conditioned office…thousands of miles from the scene” and find out for yourself if “Jamil Hussein” is who AP says he is? Or is it the “do as I say” standard for bloggers and “not as I do” for MSM news executives in their high-rise offices in Manhattan?

***

Donations to defray the costs of our trip to Iraq are gratefully accepted. Checks can be sent to Hot Air Network LLC, 554 N. Frederick Ave., #115, Gaithersburg, MD 20877. Credit card and PayPal payments can be made by clicking the donation button below:

***

Fresh commentary and reporting elsewhere in the ‘sphere:

Flopping Aces: “Eason Jordan Urging AP To Investigate”
Confederate Yankee: Gone in 60 Stories: The Grunt Work
Confederate Yankee: Gone in 60 Stories
Richard Miniter: Jamil Hussein and Confedeate Yankee
Ace of Spades: Cool Facts About Police Captain Jamil Hussein
Ace of Spades: “Katty Carroll To Critics: Drop Dead”
Patterico: Does the AP have a “scandal” on its hands?
Video at Hot Air: Brit Hume covers Jamilgate
Allah on Eason
Bruce Kesler: AP & Eason Jordan & MSM Self-Responsibility
Armed Liberal: It’s just a scratch

Related: Embedded blogger Bill Ardolino’s very interesting interview with a “Sunni Iraqi journalist” named “Quais Abdul Raazzaq.” Part two here. Ardolino files from Fallujah here, where he reports “morale seems high.”

Update:See Curt at Flopping Aces on Quais Abdul Raazaq, Qais al Bashir, and Maithem Abdul Raazaq.

Rusty Shackleford:

My first response to Curt’s post was kneejerk: breakout the tinfoil. But I suppose that most testable hypotheses start with speculation. And with AP stringers even the most far-fetched theories, that I would have never believed just a couple of years ago, have turned out to be true. And the names are a bit uncanny. Keep an eye on this one.

Satire: “Jamil Hussein’s” blog

Dan Riehl on Kathleen Carroll

Previous:

The AP (non-)responds and another search comes up empty
Tracing “Jamil Hussein’s” footsteps and ignoring anti-blog hatred
What’s so funny about going to Iraq? Plus: More questions for AP
Looking for Jamil Hussein: Accepting Eason Jordan’s invitation
Eason Jordan is back
AP: Still not off the hook; Plus: The Question
Free Jamil Hussein
Questioning a NYTimes reporter; challenging CBS News & ASNE
The alleged war atrocity that the NYTimes can’t substantiate
Rumors and reporting in Iraq
Burning Sunnis, burning mosques, burning questions
Burning Six update: The AP responds (to USA Today); update: and now, a new AP account
Real news vs. fake news in Iraq
The media fog of war
The Associated (with terrorists) Press strikes again
Bilal Hussein’s congresswoman
AP runs to the Washington Post
AP stands for Advocacy Press
AP vs. the “so-called blogosphere”
Associated Press and the Bilal Hussein case
Where is Bilal Hussein?

TPM Muckraker has some questions about the Lonely Kerry photo posted by Scott Hennen and linked by Power Line, me, and others. Justin Rood writes:

At Hennen’s site, commenter “Anthony” noted that the picture’s embedded data, just a right-click away, shows the picture was taken on January 9, 2006 — several months before Kerry botched his joke:

News accounts at the time put Kerry in England around that time — which might explain the giant Union Jack hanging on the far wall.

At PowerLine, another problem surfaced: As commenter “Angus” noted, the flag hanging to the right of the Union Jack belongs to Portugal, which withdrew its mighty 120-man coalition force from Iraq nearly two years ago.

Update: There may be reason to question the image data. In addition to giving the date of Jan. 9th for the picture, it says it was taken by a Vivitar Vivicam 8400 camera. According to this article dated Feb. 27, that model was not yet released. Can anyone verify this?

I’ve e-mailed Scott Hennen for a response. One more question: Can anyone verify that
the location depicted in the photo is the mess hall at the US Embassy in Iraq, as Scott Hennen’s correspondent identified it?

If not, I owe a big apology to Sen. Kerry and to readers.

Update: It’s TPM that owes apologies.

Update: Talked to Scott Hennen by phone. He vouches for the authenticity of the photo and while protecting the identity of his source, he told me it was a reliable source who works for someone high up in Iraq and was there during Kerry’s visit.

TPM Muckraker suggests the photo is a year old based on the image data date and suggests the photo was taken when Kerry was in England. I think they’re wrong. As many readers note, lots of camera users neglect to change the date settings on their equipment and EXIF data can be easily manipulated. (Also: reader Gregor writes, “Would they still have Christmas decorations up on Jan 9th? Maybe, but I thought it’s worth asking. If I were to guess … I don’t see the stuff staying up two full weeks after Christmas.”)

Another photo of Kerry in Iraq on Dec. 16 (this time surrounded by a few more troops), noted by Jim Hoft at the time of Kerry’s visit, shows him wearing the same shirt he’s wearing in the photo posted by Hennen:

He’s also wearing the same shirt in these photos from his Iraq visit posted at Blackfive.

TPM Muckraker commenter Donald notes this photo of the Embassy mess hall, apparently posted by a Baghdad-based photographer on December 25, 2006. I’ve added a yellow oval to call attention to the decorations hanging from the ceiling, which appear to be identical to those in the photo of Kerry posted on Hennen’s site:

It is unlikely in the extreme that the same Christmas decorations were used in a U.K. mess hall in January 2006 and an American mess hall in Baghdad in December 2006.

Update: Reader Terry M. sends a link to this photo of the Embassy mess hall at Thanksgiving, which was uploaded to Flickr by a Baghdad-based photographer on December 9, 2006. I’ve added a yellow rectangle to call attention to the lights, which appear to be identical to those in the disputed Kerry photo (you’ll also note all the coalition flags, which explain the presence of the Union Jack in the original photo posted at Scott’s site):

If you believe the disputed Kerry photo was taken in England in January 2006, then you must also believe that: (a) Kerry wore the same shirt in England as he did in Iraq 11 months later; (b) the U.K mess hall had Christmas decorations hanging from its ceiling two weeks after Christmas Day, (c) those decorations were identical to those hung 11 months later in the American Embassy in Baghdad, and (d) the U.K. mess hall has the same lights as the American Embassy in Baghdad.

***

Reader Tom A. writes:

The guy to Senator Kerry’s left (seated behind him) is wearing a U.S. Army “Army Combat Uniform” (ACU).

This is a relatively new & unique camouflage pattern and looks nothing like any U.K. uniform — or any other army for that matter.

Moreover, if a U.S. Soldier was in the U.K. at an official meal, it is highly unlikely he would be in a utility uniform.

Finally, having spent a couple of holidays in Iraq and Afghanistan myself, I can vouch for the fact that this dining facility bears a striking resemblance to every other U.S. dining facility in the combat zones — cheap tables, cheap tablecloths, cheap paper mache decorations, and hired-hand kitchen help in pseudo-tux uniforms who are on contract from a third-party country.

It’s Iraq alright.

Another reader e-mails:

My brother is an Air Force Col. serving on Gen. Casey’s staff in Baghdad. I emailed him yesterday to ask if he had seen the picture of “Mr. Lonely.” He had seen the pix and the following is what he wrote back:

“The picture on the website of the Senator is from the same chow hall I use. We call it the DEFAC (Dining facility). The night prior I was in the chow hall with the Senator, he
came in just behind me and sat a few tables over. Everybody avoided him like the plague.”

Reader John:

Not that you need any more evidence, but the chair backs in the disputed Kerry photo are identical to the ones in the other, undisputed, U.S. Baghdad embassy mess hall photo.

***

Bottom line: Nice try, TPM, but the photo is real. If you’re looking to exercise your fauxtography-debunking muscles, see here.

***

12/29 update: Final word. TPM Muckraker Justin Rood doesn’t apologize, but his latest post all but concedes that his suggestion that the photo was fake was dead wrong. He received the following e-mail and photos from CPT Benjamin G. Runkle in Iraq, who runs the blog Ben of Mesopotamia. The e-mail was cc’ed to Scott Hennen, Power Line, and me:

Justin,

Thank you for your interest and for taking the time to contact me regarding the photos. I certainly did not intend to kick up such a firestorm by posting them on my web log. (Another friend here sent a separate photo and account to radio host Scott Hennen, who subsequently publicized the incident). In the name of fairness, I’m copying the other bloggers you mentioned in your post so that everybody has equal access to this story.

To answer your questions, yes, the photos are authentic. Although I did not personally take the pictures, I saw the person who did immediately after they took them and asked for a copy.

The explanation for the date/time stamp falls under the category of Occam’s Razor: the person whose camera was used had just arrived in Baghdad, hadn’t taken any pictures with it yet, and hadn’t set their date/time stamp yet. (Believe it or not, not all servicemen here are technological wizards. As my wife could tell you, I wasn�t able to figure out our DVR while home on leave). This, as you noted, also explains the seeming discrepancy between the date/time stamp and the commercial availability of the camera model.

To hopefully put this matter to rest, (but given the current state of our political discourse and related conspiracy theories, not likely) I’m attaching two photos taken this morning with the same camera from roughly the same angle. Note the same Christmas and wall decorations (although one poinsettia has been added since December 17), the same flags in the background, and a copy of today’s (12/29) Stars and Stripes as “proof of life.” (Incidentally, I commend to your readers Megan McCloskey’s article on the Marine Engineering Battalion that has adopted an Iraqi school).

The date/time stamp, for those interested, is exactly twelve days after the original time stamp. Apparently, the owner still hasn’t gotten around to setting it.

As to why the Portuguese flag is still flying in the Dining Facility . . . well, okay, you got me there. My guess is that the contractors who run the DFAC either:
a) Have no idea whose flag it is and whether they are still in country or not;
b) Don�t care about the political implications of hanging that flag; or
c) Don�t have anything else to fill the empty wall space.
Either way, I will bring it to the manager’s attention at lunch today.

Again, thank you for your interest in this matter. Have a Happy New Year.

Be sure to read CPT Runkle’s reflections on the left-wing’s hysterics over the photo as well.

Power Line reflects on moonbattery here.

Ann Althouse has fun with photo time/date stamps. Hee.

You all remember the ambulances in Qana that were supposedly targeted by Israel last summer. And you all remember Zombietime’s thorough, devastating analysis arguing that the alleged attacks probably never happened.

Last week, Human Rights Watch released a report purporting to debunk the debunkers. To its credit, HRW took the debunkers’ concerns seriously and directly addressed many of their arguments–something that most previous critics failed to do. HRW traveled to the scene of the alleged attack, interviewed witnesses, took photos of the ambulances, and wrote up a detailed report. The report acknowledges that much of the initial reporting of the incident was flawed, but concludes that “the attack on the ambulances was not a hoax: Israeli forces attacked two Lebanese Red Cross ambulances that night in Qana, almost certainly with missiles fired from an Israeli drone flying overhead.”

Zombie posted a detailed response to the HRW report this morning. An Israeli blogger, G. Tikotzinsky, also responded. Tikotzinsky’s two-part analysis is here and here. Both conclude that HRW’s report fails to make its case.

There’s a lot of material to digest. Here are three unresolved issues that caught my eye:

1. Is it possible for a missile of any kind to cause the damage that was inflicted on the ambulances? HRW speculates that the ambulances were struck by Spike missiles, DIME (dense inert metal explosive) missiles, or some other mystery missiles of unknown type. Zombie walks through each of those possibilities, arguing convincingly that no missile or bomb could have caused the observed damage.

2. What is the deal with those holes in the pavement? These two photos, provided by HRW, show the holes supposedly created by the “missiles” that passed through the ambulances. Take a close look:

Do you think those holes were caused by missiles? Here’s what a few of Zombie’s readers say:

Are they seriously claiming those holes in the road come from a missile strike? It’s ridiculous. When missiles hit the ground, they create a large crater, not a pristine little hole. Where did all the missing material go? The soil, asphalt, rocks etc that formerly occupied the empty space of that hole didn’t just disappear. They couldn’t have been ejected because the hole is too narrow. If something had actually pierced the ground like that, the ground matter would have been squeezed sidways in all directions, creating a raised area around the hole. The asphalt should have buckled. But its totally flat in the picture. Also, there’s no evidence of heat or burning, which should be around the edges. If anything, that picture proves that it couldn’t have been a missile.

I know a drilled hole when I see one. Someone took a cement drill with a dull blade and made those holes after the fact. Gimme a break.

There is no lifting or heaving of any sort at the site of the hole. Wouldn’t an entering projectile, explosive or not, with enough force to puncture the tarmac expend enough energy underground to warp the pavement or at least raise the perimeter even slightly? (Drive a nail into plaster or drywall and see the surface raise up evenly around the nail). It’s a road – that is, a road bed, with gravel and fill underneath, not empty air -not just a thin veneer of asphalt that can be punched through.

Some of Zombie’s readers made another interesting observation: “if the holes were made as claimed, then the missiles must still remain buried at the bottom of the holes, to this day. Why haven’t they been dug out to provide incontrovertible proof of the attack?”

3. What is up with with Ahmed Fawaz, the guy whose leg supposedly was blown off by one of the missiles? As Tikotzinsky notes, HRW’s recounting of Fawaz’s injury strains credibility:

After the missile hit, the two ambulance crews scrambled for safety in a nearby basement, and did not return for 1 hour and 40 minutes. “The crew members were unable to retrieve Ahmed Fawaz and his mother Jamila from the first ambulance hit, and believed them to have been killed.” And then, in the next paragraph: “The ambulance crew stayed in the basement of the building for one hour and 40 minutes.” The report then quotes Mr. Fawaz’ own account of the event. He recalls feeling for his leg and realizing it was not there, and then drifting in and out of consciousness. So, here we clearly have a person with a severed leg and blood gushing out, hemorrhaging fast. He received NO first aid treatment, and yet he was still alive one hour and 40 minutes later. Maybe a reader with more medical knowledge than me can explain this miracle. Mr. Fawaz testimony appears to be a major flaw, and in fact it threatens to discredit the entire report…. How did Mr. Fawaz survive for 1 hour 40 minutes with a severed leg without hemorrhaging to death?

Zombie concludes with this statement:

After assessing all the evidence — including HRW’s new evidence — I’m still not convinced that there was even an attack at all. Yes, I realize that if the whole story is a hoax, then more than a few people must be lying or fabricating details, which is also hard to accept — yet the forensic evidence in no way matches the sequence of events that HRW insists happened.

But even if there was some kind of violent incident involving the ambulances that produced casualties, there is no solid evidence whatsoever that it was an Israeli weapon that struck the ambulances. Yes, I realize that if it wasn’t Israel, then there’s no evidence that the destruction was caused by anyone else either. But there were no witnesses who saw Israeli craft; no shrapnel of an Israeli munition was ever found; nothing.

And even if you believe that the ambulances were struck by munitions, and those munitions must have been Israeli, there’s still no proof that the attack was intentional. For all anyone knows, the ambulances could have been hit by accident in the middle of a war zone; or that the vehicles were presumed to carrying Hezbollah fighters, and were not recognized as ambulances until it was too late to call back whatever munition was fired.

And if, in the final analysis, you the reader think that Israel truly did hit the ambulances on purpose, then please accept that the erroneous and misleading accounts by contradictory news reports (prior HRW’s latest investigation) led a great many reasonable people — including me — to the honest and inescapable conclusion that the story seemed dubious at best.

Read HRW’s report and the responses from both Zombie and Tikotzinsky and let me know what you think. Input from missile experts and doctors is particularly welcome.

***

Update: A medical student writes:

I read the article at Zombietime earlier today, and as I read your site 2 or 3 times a day, I saw the comment on the severed leg there. I’m not a
doctor, I’m a medical student at the Medical College of Georgia, but I
thought I’d share. Under some circumstances, an artery can “withdraw” from the injury point (kind of pulling back from the wound site) because of elastic fibers in the artery wall. This can slow the bleeding, which
could account for Fawaz’ survival. Maybe.

While I say that it’s possible, I will put my budding medical reputation on
the line and say that if his leg was severed and he just lay there for an
hour plus… he would be dead. No amount of withdrawal will stop that kind
of blood loss. If you look in the picture of him resting in his hospital
bed, the amputation was above the knee, not further down where the arteries
are smaller. Bigger diameter = more flow = less time to survive without
medical aid.

Another reader concurs:

I posed the question to my relatives in the medical and transportation fields. About 50,000 people in the US die every year in automobile accidents due to exsanguination. You can bet that A) a vast majority of their injuries are less traumatic than the loss of a limb, and B) they’re receiving aid a lot quicker than an hour and 40 minutes. This guy’s blood pressure alone would have drained him like a bathtub without a tourniquet.

And this from a retired U.S. Air Force munitions maintenance specialist:

I’m a retired USAF munitions maintenance specialist, and although I’ve been away from it for a while, I think I can assure you that whatever made those holes wasn’t explosive in any way shape or form. Anything that punched through the ambulance, the pavement and THEN exploded would have left a crater large enough for someone to stand in. Notice also that there is NO physical damage to the pavement, nor scorching of any kind, nor is there any indication of the many and varied fluids from the vehicle that would have stained the pavement.

Another point to keep in mind is that the weapons being blamed have distinctive impact effects that pretty much rule them out as the villains here. First, SPIKE has a shaped charge warhead. Without getting into a long technical explanation, a shaped charge warhead – especially one intended to defeat tanks – creates heat and blast effects that would have literally erased something as lightly built as a Palestinian ambulance and left unmsitakable signs on the pavement. The explosion of such a warhead creates a jet of molten metal that moves mostly along the axis of the missiles’ impact, but also sprays outward as it continues moving forward. Imagine a garden hose spraying molten steel and you’ve got a good idea of what happens – then imagine this happening in the confines of that ambulance. There would have been no crews and Mr. Fawaz ‘scrambling for cover ‘ – they would have been incinerated in the fire created by that jet of molten metal. It’s POSSIBLE that the missile may have penetrated most of the way through the ambulance, the light sheet steel ambulance body not being enough to trigger the missile’s fuze – but the heavier body pan and chassis would have set it off, with the same effects – not to mention what would have happened when the unburnt solid rocket fuel in the missile lit off. If it was a ‘DIME’ missile – and after a net search that anyone can do, I’m not at all convinced they exist as anything other than a concept – again, the weapons’ blast efefcts would have completely destroyed the vehicle and left telltale signs on the pavement. Supposedly, a DIME explosion is confined to a very small space – but anything in that space, like the ambulance, its crew, and the pavement, would have been shredded and burned.

***

LGF notes this report on the anti-Israel bias of Amnesty International and HRW.

Previous coverage.

The gallery of 208 images includes everything from a guy submerged in tomatoes, to soccer shots, celebrity cheesecake, more celebrity cheesecake, more sports shots, the Chavez-Castro lovefest, the lady speared with a javelin, Mel Gibson’s mugshot, more celebrity cheesecake, and, oh, did I mention celebrity cheesecake?

I slogged through the entire slideshow. Guess what’s missing?

Yup, the two most unforgettable Reuters images of them all: The Picture Kill graphics of disgraced former Reuters fauxtographer Adnan Hajj’s Photoshopped fakes uncovered by bloggers Charles Johnson at LGF and Rusty Shackleford at My Pet Jawa:

Perhaps Yahoo! would consider creating a special slideshow dedicated to the worst fauxtography of 2006. Start here. Go here. And here. And here. And here. And here. For starters.

Meanwhile, Charles at LGF notes that Reuters CEO Tom Glocer has addressed fauxtography and the blogosphere in a recent speech.

So what does the Hajj incident tell us? There are three key lessons:

The first is accountability. The upside of the flourishing blogosphere is that beyond our own strict editorial standards, there is a new check and balance. I take my hat off to Charles Johnson, the editor of Little Green Footballs. Without his website, the Hajj photo may well have gone unnoticed.

The blogosphere provides accountability. They’re not always going to be right. Indeed, many of the accusations levelled at traditional media are partisan in nature – but some are not. We have to listen to the bloggers – we shouldn’t ignore them.

The second lesson is about the trust of our audience. We learned at Reuters that the action of one man – a man who wasn’t even a full-time staff member – could seriously hurt the trust in our news, built assiduously over 155 years. His stupid decision to clone smoke cost us.

We learned that your reputation is only as good as the last photograph you transmit, or the last story you file.

The final lesson we learned was this – more than ever the world needs a media company free from bias, independent, telling it as it really is, without the filter of national or political interest…

…Telling the story truthfully is more important than ever. Reporting it without spin and without editorializing is critical if history is to accurately record events.

AP could learn a thing or two from Glocer, I think.

***

More end-of-the-year polls:

John Hawkins of Right Wing News has announced the winners of the annual Warblogger Awards. Thanks so much to John and to all who voted for this blog–including those who voted me “most annoying right-of-center blogger.” If you ain’t annoying somebody, you ain’t doing yer job.

Wizbang is holding its annual Weblog Awards. Voting is underway until December 15. These contests, like all contests, can bring out the best and the worst in people. Just remember: It’s a fun way to honor the hard work of bloggers of all stripes–and a great introduction to many new sites you may not have heard of before. Operative word: Fun. Thanks to Kevin Aylward and crew for their hard work putting it together.

LGF is holding its annual Idiotarian of the Year contest. I imagine Kofi Annan will do well.

And it’s an end-of-the-year Photohop contest!

Join the Jawa Report Fakers’ Ball.