ASVS Headline News: AP: Whitewashing the Propaganda

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August 12, 2006

AP: Whitewashing the Propaganda

I have officially lost trust in the Associated Press.

Watch this video from Germany's NDR broadcast earlier in the week showing the infamous "Green Helmet Man" directing a macabre pagent in Qana, Lebanon.

The full video can be found on NDR's website

Now read this current CYA article from Associated Press's Kathy Gannon
'Green Helmet' helps rescue the wounded

TYRE, Lebanon - After hours of digging in the blistering heat, Salam Daher emerged from the wreckage with the body of a 9-month-old baby, a blue pacifier still pinned to its nightshirt.
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He held the infant up and, click, an Associated Press photographer snapped another picture of Daher, in his trademark green helmet, displaying a civilian victim of Israeli bombs for the world to see.

Daher, a member of the civil defense for 20 years, has been photographed with bodies of the dead in two wars now — first in 1996 and most recently with the baby on July 30 __ both times after Israeli attacks in the village of Qana six miles southeast of the city.

For that reason, some Web sites have labeled him the "Green Helmet," and accused him of being a member of the Hezbollah guerrilla group, and of showing off bodies as propaganda.

"But that isn't true," he told The Associated Press. He is not affiliated with any party, he said. "I am just a civil defense worker. I have done this job all my life."

This article follows close on the heels of another such feature in Stern Magazine. Nowhere in either article do they mention this video even though it has been circulating for days.

I find the accompanying photo by Ben Curtis interesting

This is what he normally wears as also photographed by Ben Curtis
Tyre Ben Curtis 1.jpg

Why, in a piece supposed to dispel allegations of staging and cooperation by the media, is the subject dressed up not in his regular uniform but that which the press wears as shown in the above and below pics?

The AP expect this to dispel rumors about their pics being staged? Seriously, where the hell is the rest of the media on this?

Finally, I challenge someone to find a pic of this guy with any victim that isn't a corpse!

Links (right wing sites but the left's silence on this is deafening):

LGF
EU Referendum

UPDATE:
Salam Daher is from Marjayoun and apparently so is AP photographer Lutfallah Daher. Are they relatives? That could explain where Salam got the cool blue threads for his glamour shot. And look at this picture by Lustfallah taken back in Feburary:

And who is there in the back wearing the glasses? Our man Salam posing with yet another corpse.

UPDATE II (2:20 PM): Are news outlets slowly beginning to notice?

Lebanon photos: Take a closer look by Tim Rutten, LA Times

What's hard to imagine is how anybody can look at the photos and not conclude that they're riddled with journalistic deceit.

Many, including grisly images from the Qana tragedy, clearly are posed for maximum dramatic effect. There is an entire series of photos of children's stuffed toys poised atop mounds of rubble. All are miraculously pristinely clean and apparently untouched by the devastation they purportedly survived. (Reuters might want to check its freelancers' expenses for unexplained Toys R Us purchases.) In some cases, the bloggers seem to have uncovered the same photographer using more than one identity. There's an improbable photo by Hajj of a Koran burning atop the rubble of a building supposedly destroyed by an Israeli aircraft hours before. Nothing else in sight is alight. (With photos, as in life, when something seems too perfect to be true, it's almost always because it is.) In other photos, the same wrecked building is portrayed multiple times with the same older woman — one supposes she ought to be called a model — either lamenting its destruction or passing by in different costumes.

Were front-page photos staged? by Dave Kopel, Rocky Mountain News

I e-mailed some questions to Linda Wagner, the AP's director of media relations and public affairs. She sidestepped my question about access to the building, stating: "We know that, generally, access to combat sites for journalists in Lebanon is greater than it has been for journalists operating within Israel, Iraq or Afghanistan."

On July 22, Reuters published a photo of a woman crying because Israeli planes had just destroyed her apartment. (See drinkingfromhome.blogspot. com, Aug. 6 entry). On Aug. 5, the AP published a photo of the same woman in Beirut, crying because Israeli planes had just destroyed her house.

Regarding the woman's claims, Wagner said, "We will not speculate." More precisely, it could be said the AP's decision to publish the photo and to attach a statement repeating the woman's claim as fact was based on speculation the woman was telling the truth.

Something else the AP will not do is release the original files of its Qana photos so the internal digital time stamps on the photos can be examined. At the least, such examination would reveal the time interval between various photos, which would provide evidence regarding whether the photos were staged.

Asked about the German network's video, Wagner replied: "There are gruesome realities in all war zones that result from war's death and destruction. Victims of such destruction sometimes want the world to see its results.

"The full sequence of AP photos and captions from the incident at Qana on July 30 reflect that reality.

"In AP's captions, the man in the green helmet was identified as a civil defense worker, and we have confirmed that he is in charge of civil defense in Tyre, which is near Qana.

"Partisans on both sides of a conflict will interpret images of that conflict in different ways. AP strives to stick to the facts."

Fair enough, but that does not mean the media should cooperate with "victims" (or Hezbollah operatives) in producing staged or posed photos. On Aug. 1, the AP, Reuters and Agence France Press released a joint statement "strongly denying that the images were staged." In light of the videos, those denials are implausible.

Posted by Skayhan at August 12, 2006 12:31 AM

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