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Reuters Admits, Pulls Doctored Photos
fragmentate points to a post on PopPhoto which says "Reuters pulled a photograph of burning buildings in Beirut yesterday after a post on the Little Green Footballs blog outed it as digitally manipulated. The photo, filed on Saturday by freelance photographer Adnan Hajj, ran with the caption "Smoke billows from burning buildings destroyed during an overnight Israeli air raid on Beirut's suburbs."
Fragmentate adds "Another image from the same photographer was found to have been doctored.
Whether you're a CNN fan, or a FoxNEWS fan, you have to wonder how much of what we see is fake, or exaggerated."
Virtually EVERY news report from ANY source is either exaggerated (to reflect the reporters bias) or softened (to likewise reflect the reporters bias). Add to this equation the pressure for ratings and simple stories can quickly and easily become "sensational".
True 'unbiased' reporting is a myth.
If you want an idea of whats going on, read/view as much as you can -- from as many sources as you can. From Fox to CNN, from the far left Pacifica to convervative talk radio. From The Standard to the NY Times. From LGF to DailyKos. My limited experience has suggested to me that the 'real story' is usually somewhere in the middle.
That said, I'd like to address this statement from TFA:(sneeze)BULLSHIT(/sneeze)
Bad lighting conditions? Remove dust? Come on. Last I checked CRT and LCDs glow... unless he was working from memory alone without the aid of a monitor, he's a flipping liar.
Sure, this photographer is at fault, and you can make assumptions about his political motives for photoshopping this image. But what's worse is how did Reuters let such a piece of crap into the system? The guys on SomethingAwful or Worth 1000 all do a much better job, and that's just for the glory of the contest. They're not trying to pass their stuff off as "news." Even the guys at Fark aren't this bad (not even Heamer :-) No, this photoshop was of "The Daily Show" quality -- comically bad.
The only conclusion I can come up with is that Reuters isn't actually looking at the images that come in the door. Even if someone at Reuters had the same political agenda as the photographer, he should have had the good sense to deny that picture because the photoshopping was so obvious. Actually, neither conclusion is good news for Reuters at all.
John
You use reporters with a political agenda, shared by the editors, it should come as no surprise that this is what you get. The international press does not like Israel. They especially seem offended that the country hasn't just given up and died yet.
This is no way confined to Reuters. Here is an excerpt from yesterdays reliable sources between howard kurtz and Thomas ricks of the washington post.
Reliable sources
THOMAS RICKS, REPORTER, "THE WASHINGTON POST": I think it will be. But I think civilian casualties are also part of the battlefield play for both sides here. One of the things that is going on, according to some military analysts, is that Israel purposely has left pockets of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon, because as long as they're being rocketed, they can continue to have a sort of moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon. KURTZ: Hold on, you're suggesting that Israel has deliberately allowed Hezbollah to retain some of it's fire power, essentially for PR purposes, because having Israeli civilians killed helps them in the public relations war here? RICKS: Yes, that's what military analysts have told me. KURTZ: That's an extraordinary testament to the notion that having people on your own side killed actually works to your benefit in that nobody wants to see your own citizens killed but it works to your benefit in terms of the battle of perceptions here. RICKS: Exactly. It helps you with the moral high ground problem, because you know your operations in Lebanon are going to be killing civilians as well.
This fellow Ricks is willing to spout crap like the above on national television. The Khmer Rougue could make a convincing case for the moral high ground against Hezbollah. Israel a country that goes to the trouble of trying to get civilians away from targets before they are hit does not.
As peple have been pouring through recent Reuters photographs, a number of other discrepencies have arisen: Here's one http://drinkingfromhome.blogspot.com/2006/08/extre me-makeover-beirut-edition.html from Drinking From Home.
2 separate photographers sent in captioned photographs of a woman who's house "had just been destroyed". The only problem is, it the same woman and same house but the claimed airstrikes were 2 weeks apart.
These pretzels are making me thirsty.
Here's the trick. Don't trust any single news source, read a few that report the same thing, Some will say one thing, others, something slightly or even radically different. The truth is probably somewhere inbetween. You only have to compare and contrast what's going on over in Lebanon right now to see this in action. If you compare Fox or the BBCs coverage of the same event, you'd think they were two different stories.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
In addition to the photos, there are many fake news stories out there. Like the one the photo was supposed to accompany said the photo was of a jet firing three missiles was actually the jet firing one flare. The report that a particular Israeli strike in Lebanon killed 40 civilians. There was only one casualty in that strike.
The fact that Reuters didn't even look at the photos before publishing is just laughable. Anyone with an ounce of experience in photography could tell they were fake. Either Reuters is so inept you can't trust them to know the truth from lies or they don't care to tell the difference. Heck, a death threat to "Zionist pigs" was traced to a Reuters IP. Sure, I'll believe anything they say.
Either way, as a previous poster said, read from a wide variety of news sources and figure it out for yourself.
But why is the rum gone?
Are you telling me that a this Reuters professional photographer has "Photoshop" skills so poor as to try and pawn off this VERY poor photo edit as the real thing? My God, he took the same puff of smoke and simply stamped it an extra 25 times on the photo. Absolutely unbelievable that anyone is that stupid, much less a professional.
"It's what you learn after you know it all that counts", Earl Weaver - Legendary Coach of the Baltimore Orioles
LGF's extreme anti-Muslim stance is often disturbing, but this is the second time that they've made a major contribution by outing negligent reporting by the mainstream media--they were also the first to identify the fraudulent "Bush memos" as crude forgeries.
After browsing through a number of blogs, the two photos mentioned are just the tip of the iceberg. Reuters has distributed many other photographs from Adnan Hajj that are fake or questionable. With his talents, maybe Hajj can get a job with the Weekly World News.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I am not exactly sure what the "political agenda" you are suggesting Reuters has is. In what way is a "political agenda" served by leading people to believe they are looking at a photo of a building in Beirut burning? Are you suggesting that buildings in Beirut are not burning, and some sort of agenda is being served by leading people to believe buildings are burning in Beirut?
Perhaps a simpler explanation is that these doctored photos are simple fraud by a photographer trying to make the photos he is taking look exciting because he is being paid to take exciting-looking photos.
Two of history's worst atrocities - not because anything happened, but because of what the Islamic terror brigades tried to say had happened, going so far as to fake it.
But this is what the Palestinians do every day. You can check out the raw footage for yourself.
They lie and lie, and get away with it. Following the famous line of Joseph Goebbels that the people will believe any lie if it is repeated often enough.
Here's what you do:
Start by reading the Koran. There's nothing better than the words of the great proph^H^H^H^Hpedophile Mohammed saying to kill the jews, the jews and christians are apes and pigs, and on down the line. Oh, and that whole "yellow stars of david" thing? Sorry Adolf, Mohammed beat you to that by about 1200 years or so.
Then take a look at the rest of the Muslim religion. There's not a reformist imam, not even a moderate imam, out there. All these photos, the new Qana hoax with the bodies dug from graveyards and paraded in front of the media that Hezbullshit forces were holding at gunpoint, follow the Islamic doctrines of Taqiyya and Kitman: that it is a Muslim's duty to lie in order to make Islam look better or to help attacks upon infidels succeed.
Islam is the Arab version of the National Socialist Party. The only question remaining for the civilized world is whether we Chamberlain ourselves yet fucking again.
For that reason, there are "forensic cameras" available that have a digital signature algorithm built in that sign the images. Any tampering results in an invalid signature. Perhaps news photographers are going to have to go that route next?
Well this brings up the point that all photographs are manipulated. The only question is degree. And the secondary question in the case of news is "what degree of manipulation is acceptable?"
People need to get it through their heads that just as a news report can never be truly unbiased, a photograph can never be a true representation of reality. In the old days, different film stocks rendered colors differently, and today different sensors do the same. Contrast, brightness, tonal range are never captured precisely or processed perfectly in the camera (or in photo processing software). The data needs to be manipulated to create a decent approximation, but it can only ever be that. Images obviously need to be resized to print on the web, and detail is lost. They need to be cropped to focus the eye on the important part of the image. Is this not acceptable? Presumably much of the rest of Beirut was *not* on fire when the photo in question here was taken - what if the photographer had simply cropped all of that out of the photo? Is that "over-dramatizing" the story or is that simply illustrating what the story is? After all, the story is that part of Beirut was bombed, not that most of it wasn't. (But the reality, of course, is the opposite.)
If you're talking about a digital "signature" that makes any change to an image impossible, then a) you are fundamentally misunderstanding the purpose and capabilities of photography in general, and b) you are disallowing benign and even beneficial "manipulations" like resizing and cropping.
I think the bottom line is a human being needs to sit there and look at these photos and judge each one individually. It's not a question of whether the image is an exact representation of reality (which is impossible) or whether it's the exact image out of the camera (which, for both web and print publishing, is impractical). It's a question of when manipulation crosses an editorial line and starts having a point of view of its own. And that's what editors are supposed to be there to judge; that's why they call them "editors".
This photo was so blatantly over-manipulated that I have a hard time believing an editor ever saw it before it was published.
Yes, but now things are very different. Sensor data is not subject to ANY limitations and is not by nature AT ALL a visual medium. Thus everything must be decided.
Most modern image processors include things like tone mapping and white balance. When developing from RAW, I can make the same image look like a boring stone bench on a sunny day or an ancient, craggy stone bench on a stormy night just by selecting different tone map and white balance settings. Modern digital sensors can often see the stars even in the daytime, even though most developments of the file would not show them. But if you map the blue tones at the top of the data curve across a much wider space, suddenly there they are -- in a deep blue, detailed sky -- even though you shot on a clear summer's day. The point is that those stars aren't fake, or exaggerated in any absolute sense. They're THERE and the sensor saw them. The only question is how that data is mapped to human visual space. I as the photographer have to choose.
Very often of course the intent is to get the photo as close to "my memory of the scene" as possible, which means trying to discard data beyond human perception without a camera. But is it really philosophically any "more real" to discard data than to map across to human visual characteristics in such a way as to be perceptible? But you'd be shocked in a group of photographers processing RAW images of the same scene just how much "memory" can vary.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
That site assumes that anti-Israeli sentiment is inherently bias. That's like saying that a broadcast from 1936 Germany would be biased if it showed a reporter's concern about the way things were going.
It's actually very hard to get a BBC reporter to admit that things are as bad as they actually are out there; they see far more than they can tell because they know that the truth would be spun as SO anti-Israel that there would be no point, in fact it would be counter productive, to say it. So they hint broadly. But at the end of the day they know first hand that the Israeli security forces are barbaric and will happily shot to kill reporters, ambulance drivers, UN observers, children, old people etc.
And that's not bias, it's just what many people don't want to hear.
Its not bias in this case. its deception.
Theres a huge difference.
These pretzels are making me thirsty.
IMO, there's an exponential difference between adjusting brightness, contrast, or other filters that apply to the entire shot. Images themselves are just a lens's interpretation of a scene, just in that people's eyes are just their interpretation. Everyone sees a scene differently, it's not just cameras. Our eyes aren't the same.
I don't think many people would argue against processing for print; it's a necessary evil. (Also acceptable: blurring out someone's FEMA credit card number...)
However, this goes above and beyond simple brightness or contrast for print clarity. This is not just processing, it's editing and manipulation on a level of Zelig or Forrest Gump. A news photo should represent a moment in time and re-creatable if somehow you could relive that exact moment in time.
Would you be happy if Cuba launches missiles at the USA because confirmed anti-communist elements in the USA kidnap three Cuban soldiers, kill 7 other Cuban soldiers and escape into the American borders not to even be glimpsed at by the American government?
Now imagine I tell you these anti-communist elements have attacked Cuba for a few decades now, and have kidnapped and killed other Cuban soldiers and civilians - all of this after Cuba retreated from the conquered American soil to prevent such attrocities. What do you think now?
You can't catch terrorists or gorillas with missiles at their neigborhoods.
Strangely enough, Reuters and many other news agencies seem to be able to do that.
I feel like the Israeli response to terrorism is the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
Israel is using a new strategy. For the last 6 years Israel has traded potshots with Hezbollah, and still Hezbollah continued to lauch rockets into Israel.
Responding to terrorists with air strikes has not reduced terrorism. This is not working, its time for a new respone.
Actually, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that a powerful military response will deter Arab "militants":
When the Muslim Brotherhood began to threaten Syria in the early 1980s, Assad responded with overwhelming force and destroyed the town of Hama, killing around 30,000 people. The Muslim Brotherhood stopped threatening Syria.
When the Palestine Liberation Organization threatened Jordan in the late 1960s to early 1970s, King Hussein responded with overwhelming force and killed thousands. The Egyptian media called it genocide. The Palestine Liberation Organization stopped threatening Jordan and instead moved to Lebanon (leading to the 1975 civil war).
Lebanon is sadly learning the cost of sheltering, aiding and abetting a terrorist army.
IMO, there's an exponential difference between adjusting brightness, contrast, or other filters that apply to the entire shot. Images themselves are just a lens's interpretation of a scene, just in that people's eyes are just their interpretation. Everyone sees a scene differently, it's not just cameras. Our eyes aren't the same.
I'm not really disagreeing with you, but remember that one of the first big stories about "photo manipulation" was the cover of Time (Newsweek?) with OJ Simpson, where the contrast of the image itself was considered a "lie" -- making him appear darker-skinned and "blacker", presumably to make whites less sympathetic or more hateful than they would otherwise be.
So even the simplest of changes can be widely criticised -- imagine that the phographer had, instead of cloning smoke, simply exposed for it at a super-high shutter speed and let the smoke and clouds mingle together with much more contrast and darkness, appearing to be a shadowy landscape with incredibly dark smoke filling the sky when perhaps it was really a lovely day with light grey smoke?
Ultimately people just have to learn at a visceral level that photos don't represent "reality" more accurately than anything else.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
But at the end of the day they know first hand that the Israeli security forces are barbaric and will happily shot to kill reporters, ambulance drivers, UN observers, children, old people etc.
And that's not bias, it's just what many people don't want to hear.
Replace "Israeli secruity forces" with "Hezbollah" and add rockets firing into civilian population and it's all the same, although Israeli army "happily" shooting non-combatants is offhand. Ironic how you talk about bias but only present from one side. What's different is Hezbollah uses civilians as human shields and they hide among them as well. IDF targets Hezbollah(many civilians killed as a result of this since Hezbollah hides among civilians), Hezbollah targets Israeli civilians and uses Lebanese civilians as cover.
Before you start implying that someone is paranoid, you may want to do a little fact checking. Going over the grandparent post line by line:
- Would it surprise you to learn that these doctored photos were placed by someone on the far Right trying to discredit the centrist media?
- Sort of like the way the fake 60 Minutes article on Bush's little vacation from the Air National Guard was placed by a GOP operative trying to smear CBS and Dan Rather.
- The goons on the Right in this country are playing a very deep game.
- They're sophisticated enough to data mine,
- and they're morally deformed enough to try to smear the patriotism of a triple amputee war hero.
- It's just fascinating that the paste-eaters at LGF are always the ones who find these doctored photos,
- but never say a word about the ones on GOP web sites that show too much smoke on the destroyed World Trade Center.
- With a news media that's run by press agents,
- and a government run by lobbyists,
- you should just be prepared to only believe your own experience, and the media that you absolutely trust.
- Other than that, expect it to be lies.
- Then, get ready for the struggle to save our freedom that is inevitable.
-- MarkusQNote that he's not saying that it's true, just suggesting that it might be. And, given that this is a well known technique in spin control / psyops, it isn't an unreasonable questions.
Well, he's certainly not alone in this theory, and it is consistent with what Rove is known to have done to Alan Dixon, John McCain, and many others.
Goons is subjective, and pejorative, but the rest of this point is darned hard to argue with. When a party rises from the mat to take control of all three branches of the federal Government, is a coordinated effort lasting decades, you'd be hard pressed to call it luck.
Widely known
His name was Max Clealand, and they did just what he said.
"Always" is an exaduration, and "paste-eaters" is (probably) unjustified, but other than that it is an interesting point. They certainly have found a number of them, and always leaning to the right.
This did happen, and so far as I know none of them raised a stink, so he's spot on.
Also well known.
Well, they write the laws, and
If you want to, go ahead and argue that you should believe sources you don't trust.
Thing that aren't true, are...lies. Again, pretty hard to argue with.
Everyone from Ben "A Republic, if you can keep it" Franklin has agreed with this.
No, I am not saying that this is journalistically ethical, but what I am saying is that your drawing the line as being between "truth" and lies is unhelpful and does a disservice to the public because it reifies the misconception that any photos that aren't pulled are the "real" and "truthful" ones, which they're simply not. A critical eye is, in my opinion, always warranted.
You can take two positions with respect to photography that I will personally agree with:
(1) All images (photos included) are lies. They fall on a spectrum of untruth, yes, from little lies that we can accept to big lies that we probably shouldn't countenance, and intentions while telling those lies vary, but they are ALL lies and must be regarded and examined critically in each case.
or
(2) All images (photos included) are truths. They fall on a spectrum of truth, yes, from "true in the broadest sense possible" to "true in the narrowest possible sense achievable," but they are ALL truths if you look long and hard enough to find the truth in them.
But to attempt to classify images of any kind (photos included) into absolute "truths" and "lies" and to try to draw that line for the public at large is merely to exercise your biases while claiming a transcendence of the limitations of knowledge, perception, context, and representation.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
OK, I'll bite.
I don't believe it is unreasonable, nor prejudiced, to think that a man, who obviously and intentionally doctored a photo, did so to fan the anti-Isreali flame that seems to permeate the world right now.
The fact, that the man has an "arab-sounding name", only intensifies that theory.
However, it is just a theory as is your excusing his fraud by stating he was simply trying to "make a buck." Unless you have personal knowledge of his reasons, your theory is no more valid than any others. Of course, I'm not calling you a racist. Heaven forbid someone come to the logical assumption that he may have biased intentions based on the fact that he is either from that region or a muslim (based on his "arab-sounding name").
I despise the use of racism as a method of shutting down opinions that are contradictory to the politically-correct crowd.
I think you're being more than a little paranoid with what you think you 'see between the lines'. Not everybody has some kind of insidius agenda, whether they be freelance photographers or /. posters.
Listen to the news and take note: When the fighters are contrary to the wishes of US foreign policy, they are insurgeants or even terrorists. When they are for the wishes of US foreign policy, they are soldiers or even patriots. (This brought to light during the Reagan presidency regarding the actions in Nicaragua, it's the same these days.) News tends to colour Hezbollah and Hamas as organisations with dirty, bloody even, hands. The problem is, both sides are about as bad, rather like the tit-for-tat vengeance killing in Iraq between sunnis and shites. It's were everything becomes shades of gray and the news, often in line with Whitehouse wishes (because the Whitehouse feeds much of the media), is coloured in.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The Khmer Rougue could make a convincing case for the moral high ground against Hezbollah.
Anyone who thinks they could place the Khmer Rouge on higher moral ground than Hezbollah has no business criticising others for having agendas.
You'd have to be a grandmaster of spin to credibly equate a terrorist group that has killed fewer than a thousand people in its 20+ year existence with a regime that executed hundreds of thousands of its own people (and caused the deaths hundreds of thousands more) in the space of a few years, and not have any regard for the disservice such an odious comparison does to the memory of those who died in the Cambodian genocide.
I tend to agree (90%+?) with your reaction to the parent comment, but I think you go too far in defining bias. "Water is wet" is not biased. But it's about something trivial enough that no sane person would disagree, unless it's a class on epistemological deconstruction or some bullshit like that.
... anything? OK, maybe that's too strong, but this definitely hurts its credibility in general, and not just on this narrow "conflict".
However, when something becomes important enough, we have to choose between terms like "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" to describe the same people, depending on our biases. I agree that good journalism, or good discussion in general, needs to recognize bias and identify it wherever possible. For example, in discussing the current conflict (is that a biased word?) in Lebanon and Israel, it seems unbiased to report something like "Hezbollah launched 160 missiles aimed at Israel yesterday" or "the Israeli army attacked several Hezbollah bases in villages in southern Lebanon yesterday". It does get difficult after that (like "bases in villages", for example). For myself, I try to delineate where my personal biases lie, and I find that I can have reasonable discussions with others who do the same, regardless of whether or not I agree with them. BTW, identifying all those biases is difficult, and I value discussions with others of opposing viewpoints for calling me out on them from time to time.
That said, I guess I wouldn't bother to have a discussion with Reuters about
First, let's get this out of the way: taking a picture always entails a reduction. Any picture is a two dimensional projection of one brief moment in four-dimensional space-time. So there is, necessarily, no objective reproduction of the observed reality. Whis is fine, as long as the image does not convey a grossly inaccurate view of reality, whether on purpose or not. That said, there's plenty of room for creating misleading depictions without resorting to post-processing (nowadays done mostly digitally, but the fine art of analog retouching has been practiced for more than a century by glamor photographers).
Now suppose there's one burning building in a city. There are many different ways to depict the situation. An aerial shot will show an isolated fire, without showing any details of the damage to the burning building. A photo taken at street level will show one or two sides of the building, probably focusing on the more heavily damaged sides. People may or may not be included in the picture. If they are, does it show terrified residents running away from the building? (Shock and awe.) Onlookers standing around? (Entertainment.) Firefighters doing their job? (Situation under control.) Did the photographer go directly for the jugular (weeping mother holding her infant)? Depending on what is shown, the composition, the exact moment, etc. one can convey vastly different messages, not all of which accurately reflect the situation.
If you look at award-winning photojournalism, it's the drama-queens that win: the typical scenes are usually boring, and the unusual photos take on an iconic status. The Vietnamese girl running crying down the street, the raising of the flag over the Berlin Reichstag or on Iwojima all range from unusual to unique. They are powerful symbols, but not necessarily an accurate depiction of what goes on most of the time during a war, crisis, natural disaster, etc. (namely, not a whole lot).
Hezbollah didn't start firing rockets a few weeks ago. They've been launching rockets into Israel for years. Until this most recent set of events, Israel would respond with an occasional air
So, how long does Israel just sit there and let rockets fall on civilians before they can respond in such a manner that will stop it once and for all?
Hezbolla is considered a terrorist organization by Israel, the US, and Canada. But the Islamic countries consider it a resistance movement, as do a number of other countries worldwide. It is not just a military organization (though it has a military wing) but also a poltical party.
Military organizations and resistance movements target the enemy's military organization and protect civilians. Terrorists target civilians and hide among them as cover. Which one is Hezbolla doing?
Political parties are not armed. Governments, and terrorists organizations are. If Hezbolla is not a terrorist organization, tell me where I can find the country of Hezbol.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
The parent post suggests..."the only solution is to avoid allowing muslim/arab reporters from submitting GWOT stories"...and then has a sig that says "Stop censorship, blah, blah, blah".
The entire post is little more than propoganda and should have been rated "-1 incitefull" or at best "-1 hypocritical".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Terrorists kill without the laws of war- blowing up random people, sometimes their own (like in Bali) and sometimes no one. The intent is to bring about political change, from the eyes of the terrorists.
Problem is, after 50+ years, the tactic is getting nowhere.
And exactly why is is that, every time Israel kills a kid, it's news. Evertime a terrorist kills 30 kids, it's not just as big a deal? The only time terrorists DON'T kill civilians is by accident. Why is Israel held to a different standard?
(kill 50 people a year in Israel on busses, it's no big story; when they retaliate for it, a single dead child makes the phones ring at the UN.)
It's my suspicion that Greater Arabia has serious money problems; their per-capita income over the last 25 years or so has plummeted from $20K to $7K. It's my hunch that the last 30 years has been more about keeping the "Arab Street" distracted from rebellion, more than protecting their "bretheren"...their "bretheren" are still sitting in refugee camps for the last 50 years...tents and other miserable surroundings. Bretheren? Doesn't seem like it.
But back to the media; why is it we never hear *anything* in America about the day-to-day Arab activities- marriages between important people, when certain "celebs" go see a movie, etc? Surely things of importance happen in a place that throttles our world's most precious resource. We never hear a peep.
Say what you will about the doctored photos; the whole wahabi movement seems only intended to maintain the thrones, for the mere price of endless Palestinian AND Israeli suffering.
Can anyone source me confirmation on these hunches?
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Yes, the two hours I spent at Toul Sleng Museum in Phnom Penh was one of the few times I've ever felt ashamed to be human. I'm not Cambodian, and in no way can appreciate the Khmer Rouge's violent ideology, but just the sheer thought that someone could come up with such a human depravity gives me the shivers even now.
This isn't a see-my-baddies-are-worse-than-yours pissing contest. Hezbollah could be evil incarnate for as far as I care, I really have no insight into their methods or aims, but let's not bring in comparisons with the Khmer Rouge here. Let's just say that those two years of Khmer Rouge rule should count as the lowest point in the history of our species and leave it at that.
More than mere navel gazing.
I'm assuming that (since you only objected to one point), that you agree with the rest and will focus on the one you singled out:
It certainly is possible to fact check a bald assertion. Of all the things you might want to fact check, a bald assertion is perhaps the easiest. If I say something like "The bulk of Portugal lies to the west of Spain" you will find it much easier to fact check than if I say something like "How like a flower my true love blooms."
Of course, this doesn't always mean that we have the resources to do it. Claims like "The far side of Jupiter is about -170 degrees Celsius" or "Arnold Schwarzenegger wears pink thong underwear" can be hard (expensive, risky, time consuming) to verify. So instead you can do the next best thing, and sanity check the assertion, from multiple directions.
Yes. Everyone agrees that the documents exist, and no one has proven them to be authentic.
Yes.
No, not really. The other proposed explanations (e.g. Terry McCallef(sp) did it) are even weaker.
No, not at all. In fact, the two prime reasons for suspecting Rove are 1) that it's very similar to things he's been known to do in the past (e.g. spreading negative information against his own candidate, such as he did for Harold See, forging documents as he did against Alan Dixon), and 2) it accomplished exactly what he would have wanted
Not really. Nothing in the memos was contested, and all of it had been previously reported (e.g. by the BBC). Bush never even attempted to deny any of it. The people who would know even stated that the information in the memos was essentially correct. So it wouldn't have helped Kerry's team much at all to have the documents, even if they had been legitimate.
You can go on and on like this, but I don't see how you can make it a "tin foil hat" theory, even if it can't be proved. And bear in mind here that the burden of proof at this point is on you; the original poster asked a (possibly rhetorical) question and you attacked without (so far as I can see) much ground to stand on.
--MarkusQ
Yes, the forty years of Democratic rule in the House of Representatives was very well coordinated... oh wait! You were talking about the Republicans in congress over the last 13 years. Yes, I suppose since it has been over 10 years that the Republicans have held congress it can technically be considered decades. However, for six of those years, there was a Democrat in the White House (you do remember Clinton don't you?). Hmm, decades is starting to sound like an exaggeration, and so far, I am only talking about two branches of the federal government. "Control" over the three branches did not occur until the past year.
There is enough division in the United States without adding bald-faced lies and distortions to make the divisions even stronger. You want a conspiracy? Then tell me why there seems to be a concerted effort to alienate and divide practically every segment of the American society. You know, one of the best ways to defeat someone is to divide and conquer....
I believe in de-evolution. God made the world perfect, man fell, and its been going downhill ever since!
I wanted to put in my two cents here and say that I agree.
Part of the problem seems to be that we've taken to using the word "terrorist" so broadly, and with such a stigma attached to it, that we've forgotten what it actually means. A terrorist is a person who intentionally attacks a civilian population, usually with the immediate goal of causing mass casualties, with the ultimate goal of accomplishing a political end by causing terror and fear in said civilian population.
To say "one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist" is a lie; at the very least, it assumes that one man is either deluded, or misunderstanding the nature of terrorism. (At the very least it is simplistic: a person could be both a freedom fighter and a terrorist, or neither, or either one singly.)
To be a "terrorist" doesn't imply any particular political ideology. You could be a "Zionist" terrorist as easily as you could be an "Islamo-facist" one. Being a terrorist also doesn't require that someone be disconnected from a government, either; I think you could make a fairly convincing argument that a lot of warfare and accepted strategy in World War Two falls squarely into the realm of terrorism: bombing a city for its "morale effect" is simply terrorism by another name. (It's worth pointing out that most countries have rejected these tactics, and at the same time the word 'terrorist' has become more stigmatized as it becomes a less tolerated practice.)
Just because a word is used politically doesn't immediately strip it of all factual meaning; if that were the case, we wouldn't have any language left.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
This particular photographer has reputedly commited fraud before. I'll accept that *his* motive was financial gain. What was Reuter's motive for accepting work from a know producer of fraudulent news?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
But there are people who are using this to try and prove that using these photos.
Take a look at giyus.org. They basically have software which they are using to astro-turf/spam thier agenda as they find it. The Israeli foriegn office have hired over 5,000 trainee diplomats as well to run the software.
This is one such story that appeared a few hours back and I am seeing it spammed elsewhere. Even money said that a giyus user spammed slashdot with this story.
The fake photos doesn't detract from the fact that there are over 900 civilians dead, over 30% are children and over 800,000 people displaced from thier homes.
Not about the image that the original post is about, but about what happens after something like this gets out. Read this blog post:
http://powerlineblog.com/archives/014929.php
A fine example of a blogger making a fool of themself, doing the exact same thing they are accusing Reuters of doing. Read my response to it:
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The only photograph that strikes me as somewhat odd is the bottom image http://powerlineblog.com/archives/Hajj4567.jpg.
The other 4 images are clearly photographs of the same scene. Let me give you my view on the positioning of the photographers in each.
#1 : http://powerlineblog.com/archives/Hajj1234.jpg
This picture was taken with a regular angle lens, say somthing like 35mm, towards a building, across the bridge that is out. The photographer was standing close to the right side of the road (when viewed in this direction). The car in the next picture is out of the frame, to the left of the photographer. The photographer is too far from the actual damage to get a good shot of it. The actual damage is close to the right shoulder of the man in the center of the image, off to the left.
#2 : http://powerlineblog.com/archives/Hajj1245.jpg
This picture has been taken from the opposite side of the road from #1, i.e. the left, shooting in the same direction. The photographer will have used a telelens, say 200mm. This pulls in the distant background and seems to place the pilons in the center of the road closer together. Note the tree white and red pilons, with the overturned fourth. Now look at #1 again, you will notice the same three pilons with the overturned one pointing towards the photographer. Also not that the two palms and the car on the right side of the road are visible in #1 as well, off in the distance.
Again, this picture has been shot across the destroyed bridge, which is now partly obscured by the car and the man. But you can make out the concrete mesh fragments sticking off the right shoulder of the man, to the right.
#3 : http://powerlineblog.com/archives/Hajj2345.jpg
In #3, the photopgrapher has arrived at the collapsed bridge. From this angle, the photographer, shooting with something like the 35mm again, can shoot into the gap, clearly showing the damage. The photographer is now well past the car in #2, but the other car is still visible across the gap. The car in #3 is actually visible in all of the images, as is the building in the background, though very poorly in #1.
#4 : http://powerlineblog.com/archives/Hajj3456.jpg
In #4, the photographer has moved back beyond the overturned car. Or, about as likely, #4 was actually taken before #1. The photographer is now so far back and to the left, that the small watchtower is also in the frame.
The allegations in the piece are sensationalist and don't stand up to scrutiny. The author (and powerlineblog) are doing exactly what they are accusing Reuters of doing: posting material without a critical and sceptical review. If the bottom photo (#5, http://powerlineblog.com/archives/Hajj4567.jpg) was published as a photo of the same incident, that's not right But some of the comments on the other 4 are simply wrong.
I've included a schematic drawing of the scene as I think it was, for your reference. Note that I was there no more than the author was and that errors in my reasoning or schematics should in no way impact what Reuters and Hajj have to say for themselves.
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The schematic I'm talking about: http://i86.photobucket.com/albums/k88/Grismar75/i
ENOUGH of this "both sides are about as bad" B-S. Let's see if I can make this clear....
Those who intentionally TARGET children and PUBLICLY celebrate the deaths of children == Terrorist
Those who intentionally try to NOT TARGET children and publicly MOURN and REGRET the deaths of even their enemy's children == Probably NOT terrorists.
READ the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the other amendments! http://lcweb2.loc.gov/const/const.html
I have an even simpler definition for you:
Initiating conflicts, intentionally targeting civilians, intentionally putting civilians in harms way = terrorism.
Responding to aggression, making best efforts to not kill civilians even though foe dresses as and hides among civilians = not terrorism.
The news tends to cover Hezbollah with dirty and bloody hands because, well, they do. They intentionally locate their weapons in civilian locations such as apartment buildings, schools, and hospitals. They launch anti-personnel rockets towards population centers. When Israel responds, with inevitable civilian casualties, they are decried as evil baby killers. The media perpetuates this no-win situation by gobbling up every photo-op, whether real or doctored, because it forwards their agenda and/or ratings. How you could claim that the media is in the White house's pocket, especially in light of stories such as this one, is beyond me.
You're forgetting that terrorism has a definition: the deliberate targeting of civilians with the intent to either exploit the death or suffering of the civilians (as is done with kidnappings or hostages) or with the intent to cause terror (and probably use that politically). Hamas, Hezbollah, and Fatah are all terrorist organizations, having, on an organizational level, deliberately targeted civilians for such purposes. The U.S. and Isreal are not: The bombing of a building with one terrorist or legitimate military target, and any number of civilians is not a terrorist act if the primary objective is the terrorist or legitimate target, it may be reprehensible depending on the worth of the target and the number of civilians (any civilian deaths are to a certain extent reprehensible), but it is not terrorist. Rogue U.S. soldiers who do deliberately kill civilians help prove that the U.S. is not a terrorist organization since we do subject them to the full persecution of the law and definitely do not condone such actions on an organizational level (meaning, yes, you could brand those individual soldiers as terrorists).
In the distant past, the U.S. has been a terrorist organization, certainly we targeted innocent Native Americans, and I'm sure I could think of other innocents if I tried.
"The problem is, both sides are about as bad..."
Except, of course, that Hizbollah straps explosives to the chests of humans and has them enter crowded market places and blow up citizens. They do this first. They have a history of doing this first. They do this because their stated goal is "the elimination of Isreal". Other than that, your moral equivelancy is showing.
"(because the Whitehouse feeds much of the media)"
That being so very obvious in the disproportionate coverage of Hizbollah's side.
So the IDF are terrorists then?
After all, they targeted a house known to contact 50+ people, including 40 children, as there "may" have been some roc kets launched from there.
You know, the small, shoulder launched type rockets. The ones that can be set up and removed in minutes.
Oh, and when they destroy bridges - why not let the Lebanese govt know so they can block the road off? At least that way kids wont be killed.
But then the good ol US of A keeps sending bombs to these killers, so i doubt you'll be able to see past this....
*giggle*
Did you read what the latest leaflets said? "Any veichle seen moving will be destroyed." Or do you think it is coincidental that so many people over this massacre have been killed on the roads? On TV here we routinely see convoys being shelled by Israelis as refugees try to flee. Lets make something clear: the Israelis are targetting anything they can to maximise Lebanese suffering while trying to avoid too much political fallout in the west. On the other side, Hezbollah would not consider any tactic `below the belt', and I'm sure that includes sending suicide bombers in, though that is more a Hamas tactic.
Personally I think if one side in any conflict is routinely raping the other with punitive political, economic and military action then it is entirely morally acceptable for the underdog to do ANYTHING in retaliation.