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August 15, 2006
Does the AP Owe Green Helmet Money?
Fool! I am write-protected!
I am at a loss to explain why Kathy Gannon, Associated Press's Iranian Bureau Chief, continues fellatiating Salam Daher, who many on the internet believe to be part of Hezbollah, an Iranian sponsered...
Well, I guess I answered my own question.
The article itself is a rehash of Gannon's Sunday piece with the exception of how Daher got his face scratched (I'd lay money it was actually while shaving) and one sentence referencing, almost in passing, a certain video starring Gannon's new best friend.
In one photograph, taken after an Israeli airstrike hit a building in the village of Qana, Daher held a dead infant over his head. The boy's blue pacifier was pinned to his nightshirt.One photograph? There are several photos of this honorable man thrusting the infant toward the cameras, all from different angles and each with Salam Dahar facing the lens. One photograph: bullshit.
"I did hold the baby up, but I was saying 'look at who the Israelis are killing. They are children,'" Daher said. "These are not fighters. They have no guns. They are children, civilians they are killing.' "Gannon fails to mention the name of the website which originally posted the video: NDR Fernsehen, a German television network. When I asked about NDR on a BBS I frequent last Thursday, a member who is a German citizen responded, "NDR is part of the "official" stations under public law, and are usually quite reliable. Would have to watch that report, but normally, they're no propaganda station..."He said he had no regrets and he made no apologies. "I wanted people to see who was dying. They said they were killing fighters. They killed children."
After the photograph taken at the July 30 Qana strike, which killed 29 people, Daher has found himself under attack, accused of being a propagandist for Hezbollah guerrillas.
One Web site posted video purporting to show Daher arranging to have the body of a child taken off an ambulance and displayed for photographers.
The video has spread via YouTube and eventually aired on Faux News (very appropriate titling in this case) this morning. That alone is likely the only reason Gannon even mentioned it or why she felt she needed to write another "hero profile" on Daher a mere two days later. At no point in the article does she ask Salam Daher about the video which shows his statement about displaying only one body to the cameras to be a lie.
Oooh, your helmet is so big!
I do hope she wore her kneepads.
Posted by Skayhan at 09:09 PM | Comments (0)
Fox News Shows NDR Qana Video
The video was shown at 10:45 AM and at least once earlier.
EDIT (1:10 PM): You can now view the clip at Hot Air.
The video looks like they pulled the YouTube version instead of the better ZDR website one. The result is a poor choppy appearance worse than a cell phone capture.
During the report, Fox also mentions the AP interview with Salam Dahar (aka Green Helmet). Now that the video is beginning to be shown on the networks, perhaps someone will ask the AP why Daher was wearing the blue armor journalists wear.
Posted by Skayhan at 10:59 AM | Comments (0)
August 14, 2006
The Truth from a Certain Point of View
I saw the guy in the green helmet (in the NDR video), but his picture was never in the Post
Deborah Howell, Washington Post Ombudsman
8/13/06
True, if only in regards to the print version of the Post. The online version, however...
Washington Post: Crisis in the Middle East Multimedia
Photos: Deadly attack in Qana
Slide #2
Photo editors are on the look out for things like this.Perhaps those who produced and edited the photos in the Qana gallery (Stephan Cook and Lindsay G. McCullough) should sit down with Deborah Howell so they can reconcile their differing points of view.
Deborah Howell, Washington Post Ombudsman
8/13/06
Posted by Skayhan at 08:36 AM | Comments (0)
August 13, 2006
Ignoring the Elephant in Qana
Update: Not So
Douglas Adams might have called this an application of a SEP Field. There are articles and editorials coming out on the question of staged photos in Qana that concentrate only on the pictures they received and used while ignoring anything outside of that scope that may show the doctoring began before the shutter snapped. They believe that must be someone else's problem.
Case in point:
A War of Images and Perceptions by Deborah Howell, Ombudsman, Washington Post
My review of war photos published in The Post didn't show any obvious manipulation. Several readers questioned the July 31 Page 1 photo of the dead at Qana and said they had heard that one person had been moving and that the photo had been staged.Once again, there is no mention of the elephant in the room: the NDR video.Post photographer Michael Robinson-Chavez was there. "Everyone was dead, many of them children. Nothing was set up. There was no way photos could have been altered with a dozen photographers there."
I have written to Deborah Howell with links to the footage because any article written discussing the coverage of events in Qana, Lebanon is incomplete without it and does a diservice to the public.
Besides, that pacaderm isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
UPDATE (2:00 PM)
Deborah Howell responds:
I looked at these. I was writing about what appeared in the Post. I saw the guy in the green helmet, but his picture was never in the Post. Photo editors are on the look out for things like this.I thank the Ombudsman for her answer and am glad to know they have been aware of the video. It makes sense not to assume that, since one instance is confirmed to be staged, every photo must also have been staged. In fact, unless hard evidence is made to the contrary, the assumption must be the opposite. This is why I have mentioned only the NDR video and Salam Daher in regards to staging.Deborah Howell
Washington Post Ombudsman
But I still think the video should have been part of the discussion.
Posted by Skayhan at 12:55 AM | Comments (0)
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.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.
ADVERTISEMENTHe 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."
I find the accompanying photo by Ben Curtis interesting
This is what he normally wears as also photographed by Ben Curtis
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):
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.Were front-page photos staged? by Dave Kopel, Rocky Mountain NewsMany, 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.
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 12:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 06, 2006
Reuters Corrected Photo
Reuters earlier today killed the obviously digitally doctored photo and has replaced it with a corrected image. According to a statement issued by Reuters, they will no longer accept any photos from Adnan Hajj who has denied any wrong doing.
"The photographer has denied deliberately attempting to manipulate the image, saying that he was trying to remove dust marks and that he made mistakes due to the bad lighting conditions he was working under," said Moira Whittle, the head of public relations for Reuters."This represents a serious breach of Reuters' standards and we shall not be accepting or using pictures taken by him," Whittle said in a statement issued in London.
This is the "corrected, unaltered" picture by Hajj:
Excuse me for a moment while I ponder why Reuters is so naive. Hajj submits an altered picture which slips past editorial review and is pulled only when the obvious is pointed out to them. Reuters is then given perhaps the lamest excuse for its existence by the perpetrator. So why would Reuters accept anything from him especially a "correction" of a false image?
I'm calling bullshit on the correction. If anything, the only corrections made were to clean up some sloppy work. Therefore, I'm going to enter crazy land once more and state that Hajj's correction is still a complete fabrication based mostly on the July 26th pic by Ben Curtis.
I overlaid the two photos by making the following adjustments to the Hajj "correction":
1. Enlarged it by 3%Both adjustments were guestimations and I did not expect a perfect match. This is the result
2. Rotated it two degree counter-clockwise
Regardless of whether or not I'm right about the Hajj-Curtis amalgam, there was another strange artifact that appears in the Hajj photo but not in Curtis's suggesting that this is still not a legitimate photo.
This looks like the roof of a building (the building directly to the left and slightly below to be exact). But Hajj's photo was taken two weeks after Curtis's. Is this another example of the extraordinary construction ability of the Lebanese?
Or have I simply been staring at these photos for far too long?
Posted by Skayhan at 10:59 PM | Comments (0)
August 05, 2006
My Lying Eyes
It's been a while since I've commented on anything political. This has mainly been because either I could not find the humor in it or, more commonly, I could not add anything substantive to the subject. However, there is one thing I'm fairly good at: PhotoShopping.
source: Yahoo! News
Coming so close on the heels of the tin-foil brigage's charges of a hoax at Qana, when I first read of this I was a tad more than skeptical. But with my first glance at the photo there was one suspicious element that just jumped out at me.
(Image cropped, enlarged 2x, and labeled; no other enhancements)
Okay, three elements (six if you consider the little "v" shape beneath each column a separate element) but you understand what I mean.
What are the odds of identical formations of smoke appearing right next to each other? The photographer, Adnan Hajj, should buy a lottery ticket at his next opportunity. Or perhaps he would be better served observing the photo-editing work of the masters over on SomethingAwful.com so he might avoid such beginner's mistakes in the future. Hint: the smudge tool is very handy to obscure use of the clone tool.
But the lesson here is, once again, view the news critically and never just accept what is presented, regardless of the source. That should go doubly for editors at the major news agencies like Reuters who, in this instance, should have rejected this photo as showing the possibility of being doctored.
Of course, it may be time to get fitted for my own tin-foil hat.
Update: I've browsed through many of Adnan Hajj's recent photos and, aside from the photo above, none of them give the slightest suggestion of digital manipulation. So my questions are: if true, who did this and, more importantly, why? Is Beruit so devoid of scenes of war that a photo needed to be enhanced? It makes no sense.
UPDATE II: And just like that, I'm wearing a shiny, maleable, protect-me-from-freezer-burn hat.
Take a look at this 7/26/06 picture from AP Photographer, Ben Curtis, specifically the lower right section.
Could this be the original source of the 8/05/06 Hajj "photo"?
At first I thought that the location the picture(s) was taken from could simply be a favored locale for journalists which would be a simple, logical explanation for the two pictures. Unfortunately, there are yet more oddities.
1, 2, and 3 are buildings that appear to be the same.
4 serves as a landmark further suggesting the areas are the same.
But then where did the "?" building on the right come from. Even the Japanese after a Godzilla attack could not put up buildings in less than two weeks! Isn't it also weird how #3 and "?" are remarkedly similiar in design and size despite their spacial difference? Except that "?" seems to be chopped in half right where building #3 intersects with an adjacent structure.
Is the Hajj picture a complete fraud?
Hey, like I said, I'm in tin-foil hat territory now! But while I stew in conspiritorial juices, I'd love to see higher-res versions of both pictures.
UPDATE III "I can't stop the madness!!!": Here is a photo taken by Adnan Hajj on July 25, 2006 from apparently the same location.
This actually lines up better with the August 5th photo in regards to the x-axis relationship between buildings 1, 2, and 4. If I were to hazard a guess (and I am guessing), the photoshop used elements of the July 25th Hajj pic and the July 26th Curtis pic as the source material.
For example, building #4 is taken from the Hajj photo while building #3 (and its clone) are from Curtis's. Also, based on both of the July pictures, there is no way building #4 and the horizon could be where it is in the doctored picture in question; it should be lower.
FINAL UPDATE: Reuters has killed the photo and made the following statement
PICTURE KILL FOR LBN20 TRANSMITTED AT APPROXIMATELY 1408GMT ON AUGUST 5, 2006. PHOTO EDITING SOFTWARE WAS IMPROPERLY USED ON THIS IMAGE. A CORRECTED VERSION WILL IMMEDIATELY FOLLOW THIS ADVISORY. PLEASE REMOVE THE IMAGE FROM YOUR SYSTEMS. WE ARE SORRY FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE. REUTERS LBN20 Smoke billows from burning buildings destroyed during an overnight Israeli air raid on Beirut's suburbs August 5, 2006. Many buildings were flattened during the attack. REUTERS/Adnan Hajj (LEBANON) REUTERS NEWS PICTURESNo doubt this had to do with the fact that if I could notice it, pretty much everybody else could too.
Kudos to Reuters for their swift response to this.
Posted by Skayhan at 07:35 PM | Comments (0)