Confederate Yankee

August 28, 2006

Israel Deploys Top Secret "Fast Rust" Missiles

Reuters claims this armored car was hit by two missiles from an Israeli helicopter.


achit

As you can see, Isreal's new missiles are quite different than the standard Hellfire and TOW ATGMs of the past, both of which, designed for tanks, would have minced an armored car such as this one. Ths armored car is said to have been hit not once, but twice by missiles, and the only apparent damage is a hole that seems to be surrounded by rust. Corrosion, or explosion?

I think it is fairly obvious that if the Israelis did fire two missiles at this armor car, that the car did not take a direct hit. Tanks can't survive the ATGMs Israel uses on their helicopters, and armored cars have much thinner armor than tanks. It would have cut through one side, detonated, and left a shattered, burning hulk. There was no explosion, and even a dud would have completely punched through the vehicle, exiting the other side with a noticable hole. The photo below shows no such penetration on the opposite side.


achit2

Powerline has more. I'd consider the possibility of a near miss causing some damage, but this vehicle was not directly hit by any known missile, and I don't know of any weapons system that would cause a vehicle to apparently rust by the next morning.

To put it mildly, I view the Reuters claims of an successful pair of Israeli missile strikes on this vehicle as highly unlikely.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 06:29 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

August 27, 2006

Before and After

A bit of three years after-the-fact editing in a 2003 Greg Mitchell editorial at Editor & Publisher got quite a bit of attention in the blogosphere yesterday.

For those you now just coming to this story, Mitchell wrote a May, 20, 2003 article in which he admitted to faking a news story as a young reporter. Jon Ham tipped me off to the existence of the article, which led me to write this post opining that perhaps Mitchell wrote his sympathetic and spirited defenses of photojournalists accused of staging photographs precisely because he, too, had an admitted history as a fraudulent journalist.

My post, complete with a link to Mitchell's 2003 editorial, went "live" early Friday afternoon, complete with quotes pulled from Mitchell's article.

Many blogs linked the story quickly starting at 1:56 PM, and by 4:00 PM, no fewer than five other blogs had copied sections of text, including the opening paragraph. By 5:00 PM, in the course of an hour, the long-dormant story reappeared, rewritten to emphasize Mitchell's youth and inexperience.

As Mary Katharine Ham noted:


This is just so phenomenally stupid. CY rounded up all the blogs that excerpted the original article, and he has the link to the original article from the Wayback Machine. It's all there, for everyone to see. All of the incredible dishonesty. If it was pathetic to fake a story about tourists at Niagara, it's downright embarrassing to alter the confession after a couple people bring attention to it.

Stephen Spriuell, writing at National Review Online's Media Blog, says this represents journalistic malpractice, and if true, calls Mitchell's professional ethics into question.

And so as the work week begins again tomorrow, I suspect we're going to learn some lessons not only about Mitchell, but about the company Mitchell works for, VNU Business Media, and it's President and CEO, Michael Marchesano. Marchesano's site states that, "VNU Business Media takes pride in being one of the most prestigious and respected business information companies in the world."

I have no reason to doubt that, and at this point on a Sunday morning, would be quite surprised if Mr. Marchesano even knew about the potential damage to his company's reputation committed by "someone" trying to mitigate the damage to the reputation of someone who is already a self-admitted fraud.

VNU Business Media claims "45 market-leading trade magazines, 17 directories, 70 events and conferences, 65 trade shows and 165 eMedia products." We will learn tomorrow how willing they are to defend their credibility, and how transparently they choose to respond to what is a flagrant and well-documented cases of dishonesty by someone on their editorial staff. This case is easily proven by an internal audit showing precisely who updated the May 20, 2003 article between 4:00PM and 5:00 PM (Eastern) this past Friday afternoon.

The actual investigation should take less than an hour, but how VNU Business Media, Editor & Publisher, and Greg Mitchell choose to respond may affect them all for a long time to come.

Update: It might not be VNU Business Media that looks into Mitchell's apparent transgressions, but VNU eMedia, who can be contacted here. If you choose to write VNU, please respectfully ask for a review of the changes to the article, and explain who you think it warrants a review.

Update: Dan Riehl establishes that Mitchell seems to have lied about other elements of this story as well. Riehl argues Mitchell was neither nineteen, nor an intern, but 21-year-old professional journalist when he committed his first journalistic fraud. It seems Greg Mitchell has a pattern of behavior that should call his entire body of work into question.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:40 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

August 26, 2006

The More Things Change...

Acting on a tip yesterday from Jon Ham, I wrote this post, ripping into Editor & Publisher editor Greg Mitchell for his guilty history of staging the news.

The story was quickly picked up in the blogosphere, including NRO's Media Blog, Instapundit, and Ace of Spades HQ.

The "meat" of the story was Greg Mitchell's 2003 admission that he had faked a minor news story in his past, and this "re-broke" after Mitchell had just written a pair of columns blasting bloggers for questioning the apparent staging and faking of news stories by the media in the recent Israeli-Hezbollah war. The article read:


Since the press seems to be in full-disclosure mode these days, I want to finally come clean. Back when I worked for the Niagara Falls (N.Y.) Gazette (now the Niagara Gazette), our city editor asked me to find out what tourists thought about an amazing local event: Engineers had literally "turned off" the famous cataracts, diverting water so they could shore up the crumbling rock face. Were visitors disappointed to find a trickle rather than a roar? Or thrilled about witnessing this once-in-a-lifetime stunt?

I never found out. Oh, I went down to the falls, all right, but when I got there, I discovered that I just could not wander up to strangers (even dorky ones wearing funny hats and knee socks) and ask them for their personal opinions, however innocuous. It was a puffball assignment, but that wasn't why I rebelled. I just could not bring myself to do it.

So I sat on a park bench and scribbled out a few fake notes and then went back to the office and wrote my fake story, no doubt quoting someone like Jane Smith from Seattle, honeymooning with her husband Oscar, saying something like, "Gosh, I never knew there was so much rock under there!"

Of course, I got away with it.

That was exactly the text of this article when I, Mary Katharine Ham of Townhall.com, Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, Mike of Cold Fury, and Suitably Flip cited the text of the article this afternoon.

And yet now, things have mysteriously changed within the article.

As cited by the six blogs listed in the proceeding paragraph, the opening lines of the article began:


Since the press seems to be in full-disclosure mode these days, I want to finally come clean. Back when I worked for the Niagara Falls (N.Y.) Gazette (now the Niagara Gazette), our city editor asked me to find out what tourists thought about an amazing local event: Engineers had literally “turned off” the famous cataracts, diverting water so they could shore up the crumbling rock face. Were visitors disappointed to find a trickle rather than a roar? Or thrilled about witnessing this once-in-a-lifetime stunt?

By 5:01 PM Eastern time, someone pasting at CY under the name Barfly, in a comment defending Mitchell, noted:


"Back when I was 19 and worked for the Niagara Falls (N.Y.) Gazette (now the Niagara Gazette) as a summer intern[ . . .]"

I think its hilarious how you take Greg to task - and do it in such a dishonest way! Why did you omit the part about his being an intern at the time? Did it interfere with your narrative?. . .

And Barfly was correct: the narrative had changed. It had changed to this:


Since the press seems to be in full-disclosure mode these days, I want to finally come clean. Back in 1967, when I was 19 and worked for the Niagara Falls (N.Y.) Gazette (now the Niagara Gazette) as a summer intern, our city editor asked me to find out what tourists thought about an amazing local event: Engineers had literally "turned off" the famous cataracts, diverting water so they could shore up the crumbling rock face. Were visitors disappointed to find a trickle rather than a roar? Or thrilled about witnessing this once-in-a-lifetime stunt?

Not sure what changed? Let's show the newly added words in bold just to make it a bit more obvious:


Since the press seems to be in full-disclosure mode these days, I want to finally come clean. Back in 1967, when I was 19 and worked for the Niagara Falls (N.Y.) Gazette (now the Niagara Gazette) as a summer intern, our city editor asked me to find out what tourists thought about an amazing local event: Engineers had literally "turned off" the famous cataracts, diverting water so they could shore up the crumbling rock face. Were visitors disappointed to find a trickle rather than a roar? Or thrilled about witnessing this once-in-a-lifetime stunt?

Someone substantially altered the text of the mediainfo.com story, after six different bloggers cited the article. If you type in the URL of http://www.mediainfo.com/ and press "enter" so that you could investigate who mediainfo.com belongs to, wondering how they could change such an old story so quickly, the URL will resolve to adweek.com.

Adweek is owned by VNU Business Media, the same company that runs media web sites BrandWeek, MediaWeek and--you guessed it--Editor & Publisher, where Greg Mitchell is the editor on the hotseat.

It is readily apparent that someone at Editor and Publisher has been manipulating the news a lot more recently than 1967, and if I was a corporate officer at VNU Business Media, I think I'd start my Monday morning by asking who has access rights to post and repost stories, and I'd make a thorough investigation of the server logs to see who uploaded the changes to that article Friday afternoon, sometime between 2:30 PM and 5:01 PM. I'd ask, because that someone is torpedoing my company's credibility.

When they talk to "that person," I hope they remind him that 1967 is long past, but character flaws are forever.

Update: Ed Driscoll notes that the original, unaltered article exists on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:19 AM | Comments (86) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

August 25, 2006

E&P Editor Has First Hand Experience with Staging News

Greg Mitchell, the editor of the influential news trade publication Editor and Publisher has recently raised a spirited defense against questions and allegations that news may have been staged in some instances in the recent Israeli/Hezbollah war in Lebanon, may sound particularly defensive because of his own guilty history of staging news:


Since the press seems to be in full-disclosure mode these days, I want to finally come clean. Back when I worked for the Niagara Falls (N.Y.) Gazette (now the Niagara Gazette), our city editor asked me to find out what tourists thought about an amazing local event: Engineers had literally "turned off" the famous cataracts, diverting water so they could shore up the crumbling rock face. Were visitors disappointed to find a trickle rather than a roar? Or thrilled about witnessing this once-in-a-lifetime stunt?

I never found out. Oh, I went down to the falls, all right, but when I got there, I discovered that I just could not wander up to strangers (even dorky ones wearing funny hats and knee socks) and ask them for their personal opinions, however innocuous. It was a puffball assignment, but that wasn't why I rebelled. I just could not bring myself to do it.

So I sat on a park bench and scribbled out a few fake notes and then went back to the office and wrote my fake story, no doubt quoting someone like Jane Smith from Seattle, honeymooning with her husband Oscar, saying something like, "Gosh, I never knew there was so much rock under there!"

Of course, I got away with it.

Somehow, Greg, I don't think that you did. (h/t Jon Ham)

Update: Mary Katharine Ham has more.


Major update: More Fakery?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:41 PM | Comments (34) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Cluster Bomb Inquiry?

According to the New York Times, the United States has initiated an investigation into the use of cluster bombs in South Lebanon during the recent Israeli War against Hezbollah terrorists:


The State Department is investigating whether Israel's use of American-made cluster bombs in southern Lebanon violated secret agreements with the United States that restrict when it can employ such weapons, two officials said.

The investigation by the department's Office of Defense Trade Controls began this week, after reports that three types of American cluster munitions, anti-personnel weapons that spray bomblets over a wide area, have been found in many areas of southern Lebanon and were responsible for civilian casualties.

For those of you that might not be familiar with the concept of cluster munitions, they different than more traditional explosives in that instead of relying on one large explosive projectile or multiple large explosive projectiles to destroy a target, they deploy a shell or bomb containing many smaller grenade-like bombs (submunitions) over a wider area, saturating a larger area with one cluster munition, theoretically decreasing the number of large explosives needed to take out an area target, such as a troop concentration, or in this instance most likely in the Israeli campaign against Hezbollah, rocket-launching sites. It may be simpler to compare it to the difference between using a rifle and a shotgun.

The recognized downside of cluster munitions are two-fold:

  • cluster munitions are designed as area weapons, and are not capable of a pin-point strike to their wide dispersal
  • the submunitions in traditional cluster bombs have a failure rate of between 2%-4% according to my subject matter expert, John Donovan. this means that between 2% and 4% of the submunitions fail to explode, essentially "mining" the area struck with unexploded ordinance

This does not mean cluster bombs are "bad" any more than any other physical object can be "good" or "bad," but knowing the characteristics of such weapons prescribes how they should be used.

It is generally accepted conventional wisdom that cluster munitions are acceptable area munitions against area targets such as troop and enemy vehicle or supply concentrations and certain kinds of entrenched positions. They are recognized as being dangerous to use in areas where civilians may fall victim to the immediate widespread blast pattern, or may return to encounter unexploded submunitions before engineering units can dispose of them. It is also not advisable to use cluster munitions in areas where you expect that your own troops may advance, as these same submunitions could cause casualties to friendly troops.

It is worth noting that no munition of any design is "dud-proof," but cluster munitions are more prone to fail to detonate simply because they require a larger number of separate charges to work, and some more modern cluster submunitions are designed to self destruct to reduce risk to civilian and soldier alike.

Back to the Times article:


The inquiry is likely to focus on whether Israel properly informed the United States about its use of the weapons and whether targets were strictly military. So far, the State Department is relying on reports from United Nations personnel and nongovernmental organizations in southern Lebanon, the officials said.

David Siegel, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy, said, “We have not been informed about any such inquiry, and when we are we would be happy to respond.”

Officials were granted anonymity to discuss the investigation because it involves sensitive diplomatic issues and agreements that have been kept secret for years.

The agreements that govern Israel's use of American cluster munitions go back to the 1970's, when the first sales of the weapons occurred, but the details of them have never been publicly confirmed. The first one was signed in 1976 and later reaffirmed in 1978 after an Israeli incursion into Lebanon. News accounts over the years have said that they require that the munitions be used only against organized Arab armies and clearly defined military targets under conditions similar to the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973.

A Congressional investigation after Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon found that Israel had used the weapons against civilian areas in violation of the agreements. In response, the Reagan administration imposed a six-year ban on further sales of cluster weapons to Israel.

Israeli officials acknowledged soon after their offensive began last month that they were using cluster munitions against rocket sites and other military targets. While Hezbollah positions were frequently hidden in civilian areas, Israeli officials said their intention was to use cluster bombs in open terrain.

The question seems to be precisely what the language of any such agreement would be, especially in how the agreement describes what constitutes "clearly defined military targets."

I'm merely pontificating here, but I suspect that if such an inquiry is underway, Israel will likely make the argument that a mobile missile launching platform constitutes a "clearly-defined military target." One could easily make a strong case that a mobile Katyusha rocket launcher away from a civilian concentration is a legitimate target, as shown in the this example from camera.org:


kat

This example of a short-range Qassam rocket firing site from weaponssurvey.com apparently located in an orchard would also seem to be a valid target:


qassam

And at least some of the cluster munitions used by Israel in Lebanon seem to have been targeted at rural areas, as is the case of this unexploded M-42 submunition found in a banana grove near (but not in) the village of El Maalliye. If this banana grove was away from homes and the banana grove was being used as a site to launch rockets against Israel, the Israelis can likely make a case that the use of cluster munitions in this instance is acceptable.

This however, is much more difficult to justify. The munition is undoubtedly a cluster munition, and the site is said to be just 100 meters from the main Lebanese hospital in Tibnin. John Donovan identified this exact submunition as an M-42.

The Times article states further:


But a report released Wednesday by the United Nations Mine Action Coordination Center, which has personnel in Lebanon searching for unexploded ordnance, said it had found unexploded bomblets, including hundreds of American types, in 249 locations south of the Litani River.

The report said American munitions found included 559 M-42's, an anti-personnel bomblet used in 105-millimeter artillery shells; 663 M-77's, a submunition found in M-26 rockets; and 5 BLU-63's, a bomblet found in the CBU-26 cluster bomb. Also found were 608 M-85's, an Israeli-made submunition.

What the Times article does not state is precisely where 1,835 were found.

If the majority of these submunitions were found to be in locations consistent with what the agreement shows to be viable military targets, then Israel should be cleared fairly simply. If however, a substantial number of submunitions were recovered from villages and cities, then Israel's use of cluster munitions may have a legitimate basis to be called into question.


It is important to note, however, that at this time only United Nations personnel and nongovernmental organizations (perhaps Hezbollah itself) have raised these allegations.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:47 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

August 24, 2006

Family Business

My brother, to put it mildly is warped.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:40 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Zombie News

Zombie's debunking of the Red Cross ambulance hoax hit primetime news, and as always, Allah has the video.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:25 PM | Comments (0) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Hezbollah's White Phosphorus Lies: Part 2, the Conclusive Debunking

Remember less than a month ago when I wrote this?


It was only a matter of time before Hezbollah and their gullible dupes in the media began applying the Terrorist Propaganda Cook Book to the present war in Lebanon, accusing Israel forces of using chemical and other "illegal weapons" against civilians.

The Sydney Morning Herald was all too willing to print these suspiciously vague allegations:


Killed by Israeli air raids, the Lebanese dead are charred in a way local doctors, who have lived through years of civil war and Israeli occupation, say they have not seen before.

Bachir Cham, a Belgian-Lebanese doctor at the Southern Medical Centre in Sidon, received eight bodies after an Israeli air raid on nearby Rmeili which he said exhibited such wounds.

He has taken 24 samples from the bodies to test what killed them. He believes it is a chemical.
Cham said the bodies of some victims were "black as shoes, so they are definitely using chemical weapons. They are all black but their hair and skin is intact so they are not really burnt. It is something else."
"If you burnt someone with petrol their hair would burn and their skin would burn down to the bone. The Israelis are 100 per cent using chemical weapons."


I stated that:


The arguments are recycled, the evidence contrived; there is no credible evidence that chemical or white phosphorus weapons are being used to target Lebanese civilians, and it is telling that the media are all too willing to be led down this same path of lies again.



It turns out that I was right (thanks to LGF for finding the video). The debunkings of the Greg Mitchell's of the world are coming so fast I can hardly keep up with them...

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:02 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

All Your Fakes Are Belong To Us

Bad Jawa. Great Video.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 04:55 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Self-Inflicted Wounds

First published as a weekly in 1884 as The Journalist, Editor & Publisher (E&P) is a monthly journal covering the North American newspaper industry.

Since 2002, Greg Mitchell has been the Editor of E&P, and he writes both an online and print column. While I've never read the print version, I have occasionally read Mitchell's online Pressing Issues column, and have actually written about what he has had to say twice in the past.

Click. Print. Bang. was a reaction to the mind of Mitchell, as in his column he advocated that the media should attempt to actively undermine (subscriber-only) the current U.S. President:


No matter which party they generally favor or political stripes they wear, newspapers and other media outlets need to confront the fact that America faces a crisis almost without equal in recent decades.

Our president, in a time of war, terrorism and nuclear intrigue, will likely remain in office for another 33 months, with crushingly low approval ratings that are still inching lower. Facing a similar problem, voters had a chance to quickly toss Jimmy Carter out of office, and did so. With a similar lengthy period left on his White House lease, Richard Nixon quit, facing impeachment. Neither outcome is at hand this time.

Lacking an impeachable offense and disappointed that Bush was reelected to a second term, Mitchell made the following alarmist cry to the journalistic community:


The alarm should be bi-partisan. Many Republicans fear their president's image as a bumbler will hurt their party for years. The rest may fret about the almost certain paralysis within the administration, or a reversal of certain favorite policies. A Gallup poll this week revealed that 44% of Republicans want some or all troops brought home from Iraq. Do they really believe that their president will do that any time soon, if ever?

Democrats, meanwhile, cross their fingers that Bush doesn't do something really stupid -- i.e. nuke Iran -- while they try to win control of at least one house in Congress by doing nothing yet somehow earning (they hope) the anti-Bush vote.

Meanwhile, a severely weakened president retains, and has shown he is willing to use, all of his commander-in-chief authority, and then some.

Mitchell's tone is both decidedly shrill and purposefully ominous, as he advocates his solution (while saying he doesn't) for what he seems to regard as the Bush problem.


I don't have a solution myself now, although all pleas for serious probes, journalistic or official, of the many alleged White House misdeeds should be heeded. But my point here is simply to start the discussion, and urge that the media, first, recognize that the crisis—or, if you want to say, impending crisis -- exists, and begin to explore the ways to confront it.

Not content with the news being reported by the media about the administration, Mitchell was publicly pushing for a confrontational antagonistic policy to be used to try to undermine the White House; a smear campaign to "start the discussion." He pushes, in no uncertain terms, to use the media to dig up scandals, building doubts and fears (his warning that people should, "cross their fingers that Bush doesn't do something really stupid -- i.e. nuke Iran" is a clear indication of his mindset).

What he hopes to accomplish by building distrust and fear of the White House in an influential media is open to interpretation, but based upon his earlier comments that Bush seemed neither likely to be impeached nor voted out, Mitchell seems to hope that with enough fear-mongering, someone sufficiently alarmed by the kind of coverage he hopes to gin up might find another way to remove Bush from office.

Not just hostile to the President, however, Mitchell has gone out of his way to condemn Israel's response to Hezbollah's rain of rockets on Israeli civilian targets, while dismissing Hezbollah's attempts at mass murder:


The word “rockets” makes Hezbollah's terror weapon of choice seem very space age, but they are in fact crude, unguided and with limited range – nothing like the U.S. prime grade weapons on the Israeli side. The vast majority of them land in the water or an empty field or explode in the air.

Mitchell again made his opinion on who was more at fault in the recent Hezbollah-triggered war in this column, and as you might expect, Mitchell placed the blame for Lebanese deaths squarely upon Israel and the White House, refusing to even mention Hezbollah's role in the column except to say that Israel created it.

Given his obvious biases, it should have been no surprise when Mitchell released this first part of a two-part column yesterday, attacking those bloggers who questioned the manipulation and staging of photos from some photojournalists in the recent war, primarily fought in Lebanon. His defense should have been expected, as every example of staged or manipulated stories and photographs attacked Israel, and the exposure of this journalistic fraud undermined the anti-Israeli view Mitchell has clearly decided to advocate.

Allahpundit at Hot Air rightfully took Mitchell's column to task, pointing out that clear examples of journalistic fraud did in fact occur, and catches Mitchell misrepresenting the comments made by Bryan Denton, a U.S. photojournalist witness to the sight of some staging performed by Lebanese wire service photographers.

Allah also notes that while Mitchell blasts bloggers and the suspicions and allegations they've made of staged photos, he pointedly refuses to discuss the fact that a German television station captured live video showing just such staging as it occurred in Qana. One can only imagine how much effort Mitchell took to avoid this well-documented proof that one of the most influential stories of the Hezbollah-Israeli war, the so-called Red Cross ambulance attack, was, in fact, almost certainly a complete fraud.

All of this sets up today's editorial from Mitchell, In Defense of War Photographers: Part II, in which Mitchell continues:


In a column here on Tuesday, I mounted a defense of the overwhelming number of press photographers in the Middle East who bravely, under horrid conditions, in recent weeks have sent back graphic and revealing pictures from the war zones, only to be smeared, as a group, by rightwing bloggers aiming, as always, to discredit the media as a whole.

Which is not to say that this is much ado about nothing. Obviously, Adnan Hajj, the Reuters photographer who doctored at least two images, deserved to be dismissed. A handful of other pictures snapped by others warrant investigation. In a few cases, caption information was wrong or misleading, and required correction. In addition, the controversy has sparked an overdue discussion -- some of it here at E&P -- on the credibility of all photography in the Photoshop age and the wide use of local stringers abroad in a time of cutbacks in supervision.

But, in general, the serious charges and wacky conspiracy theories against the photographers, and their news organizations, are largely unfounded, and politically driven, while at times raising valid questions, such as what represents "staging."

Were press photographers smeared, as Mitchell states, as a group?

I have heard no one doubting that news photographers have put their lives on the line to capture stories, and even when what they capture on film isn't always popular or what we want to hear in the past, we've debated it without clearly taking sides based upon ideology.

I can state for my part that I questioned the overall story the media was presenting from Qana based upon seeming inconsistencies between the stories and the photographic evidence. These questions raised by myself and others helped get an investigation launched—thought Mitchell doubtlessly disproves of it, as it is not the kind of investigation that serves the interests Mitchell's observed bias.

This success in rooting out some apparent fraud led to bloggers to look more closely at the other media information coming out of Lebanon for more, where other suspicious photos and stories emerged.

Did rightwing bloggers attempt to smear the entire media, as Mitchell alleges, or were they targeting specific questionable stories, specific questionable photographs, and photographers exhibiting a suspicious pattern of behavior?

The answer, quite obvious to those that actually read the blog posts and the commentary they generated, is that bloggers investigating specific instances uncovered general problems with how the media gathered news and verified the accuracy of the information, a fact that Mitchell begrudgingly admits. I'd like to know which "wacky conspiracy theories" Mitchell was referring to, as the Qana staging episode and the Red Cross ambulance stories most thought implausible when first proposed by bloggers, turned out to be absolutely correct.

In a significant number of the more widely disseminated blog posts asking questions and making accusations about suspicious media accounts, the suspicions of bloggers turned out to be quite well-founded. Contrary to Mitchell's suggestions, quite a few—more than a handful—of the more widely regarded questions raised by bloggers were exposed apparent staging or fraud--a remarkable achievement by people thousands of miles away from the story, doing the fact-checking and analysis that the media should have been doing, but much to their embarrassment, often did not.

Mitchell, apparently then unable to go much further on his own, decides to simply turn to the Lightstalkers photography forum, and quote heavily from media photographers denying that manipulation and staging took place. And while the much-respected Tim Fadek can say all he wants that the scene in Qana wasn't staged, and other photographers choose to take his observations as fact, when I see with my own eyes on YouTube that it was indeed directed by none other than Mr. Green Helmet himself, I have every right to doubt the veracity of Mr. Fadek and other photographers that denied Qana was staged, along with the media organizations that try to act that such compelling evidence of malfeasance does not exist.

I suspect that Mitchell's next groundbreaking column will expose that according to interviews with inmates at San Quentin, 99% are actually innocent.

This E&P editorial chooses to dodge the real issues of the media's vetting of the accuracy of the stories and photographs that they chose to print coming out of Lebanon and other venues, just as they dodged how so many pictures and events ever had reason to be questioned in the first place.

Greg Mitchell, Editor of Editor & Publisher shows himself to be a prime example of exactly what bloggers fear most in the media; a newscrafter, not a newsman, with a quite specific and heavily partisan agenda. He seems terrified that if the public actually looked too closely at how the sometimes tainted product of the news business is manufactured, they might discover it has fewer quality checks than a disposable diaper, and sadly, sometimes ends up smelling much the same.

David Perlmutter wrote of the problems with photojournalism last week:


I'm not sure, however, if the craft I love is being murdered, committing suicide, or both.

A simple glance at such industry leaders as Greg Mitchell suggests that not only are the wounds are indeed self-inflicted, but that some newscrafters can't keep their fingers from jerking the trigger.

Update: Allah reacts as well.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:59 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

August 23, 2006

Bitter Much?

CNN's web team doesn't appear to be a big fan of Joe Lieberman. While the actual article carries the headline, "Lieberman secures spot on November ballot," the Web team decided this was a fitting link:


bitter

This would presumably be the same "fine folks" that brought us this gem in July:


thisiscnn

Top-notch. Professional. Pithy.

This is CNN.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:27 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Carolina FreedomNet 2006

The John Locke Foundation will be hosting a half-day blogger conference, Carolina FreedomNet 2006, open to all on Saturday, October 7 in Greensboro, North Carolina, from 8:00 AM-2:00 PM.

I've been invited to be on the 8:45 AM-10:15 AM Local vs. Global: What Should Be Your Blog's Focus? panel with Lorie Byrd of Wizbang, Sam Hieb of Sam's Notes, and Sister Toldjah.

A second panel of will attempt to answer the question of How Has The Blogging Phenomenon Affected Politics and Political Discourse?, and will feature Townhall.com's Mary Katharine Ham, Jeff Taylor of The Meck Deck, Scott Elliott of Election Projection and Josh Manchester of The Adventures of Chester.

Scott Johnson of Powerline will be giving the keynote speech, titled The 61st Minute: Inside the Eye of Hurricane Dan.

If interested in attending, you can register for Carolina FreedomNet 2006 here.

I hope to see you there.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:57 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

"Backdoor Draft?" Marines Respond

Marines on the Inactive Ready Reserve (IRR) are being recalled to active duty consistent with the commitment they signed up for, and some of the predictably clueless are claiming that this constitutes a "backdoor draft," when it is of course nothing of the sort.

Two very irritated Marine bloggers, Paul and Brando of Brandodojo ripped into these folks last night.

From Paul in the comments of that post:


People like to call this a "back door draft" because they're idiots and are intentionally using misleading rhetoric to bring up emotions from the Vietnam war, which is the last time a draft was used. They use "backdoor" as if the government is using some sneaky loophole, but this also isn't true. All a servicemember has to do is open up their SRB and look at their contract and read what it says. It's not even in "fine print." It's right there. In my case it says, plain as day, 5 years active, 3 years IRR.

Back to my main point: The offensive part of the "backdoor draft" bullshit is that it's used by two groups of people: 1) People who have never served 2) People who have served and refuse to be accountable for their signature.

I don't have a problem with people being pissed about it -- they're leaving their new lives or whatever and going to a shithole country where they might blow up -- everyone I know was pissed but they still went. That's what matters.

In no uncertain terms, this is something that every Marine signs up for, and is clearly part of their commitment. Implying this is sneaky or underhanded behavior and not a standard part of a Marine's service commitment is simply dishonest.

* * *

Interestingly enough, liberal Ron Chusid cites the CNN article linked above and then states:


If actions such as this continue the trend towards decreased voluntary recruits, this could be yet another way in which George Bush is underming [sic] our long term national security.

But if you follow Mr. Chusid's link, you will find it is obsolete, being over a year old, and concerning only part of the year at that. I last wrote about military recruiting a little over a month ago, and it shows Ron's "truthiness" deserves to be called into question:


Military recruiting for June once again met or exceeded goals across all four branches (h/t Paul at Adventurepan:
  • Marines: 105%
  • Army: 102%
  • Air Force:101%
  • Navy: 100%

You'll note that the Marine Corps and Army, responsible for fielding most of the forces on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, have exceeded their goals by the largest margins, despite having higher target numbers than the other branches. They achieved this in the face of a mainstream media attempting to portray the military as rapists, racists, and murderers based up the alleged actions of a handful of men.

Since October 1, all four branches have met or exceed their goals:

  • Army: 104%
  • Marines: 101%
  • Air Force: 101%
  • Navy: 100%

Reserve forces recruiting has not been as even, but interesting enough, the Reserve and Guard forces most likely to be called upon for ground combat overseas (Army National Guard, Army Reserves, Marine Corps Reserves) have been the most successful in recruiting.

One could argue that this also represents only part of the year, but it is the most current data; far more relevant than statistics over a year old that were not reflective of the overall year's total.

About.com's U.S. Military Recruiting Statistics page confirms that recruiting for 2006 (so far) and 2005 were either met or exceeded for both years by all active duty branches. Funny how Mr. Chusid was unable to find those figures, isn't it?

Chusid cherry-picked a story concerning several months in 2005, ignoring the overall 2005 and 2006 recruiting data that undermines his chosen storyline. Honesty is apparently not high on the list of Liberal Values.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:33 AM | Comments (33) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

F-16s Escort NW Flight to Amsterdam

Could be something, could be nothing:


A Northwest Airlines flight bound for India was escorted back to Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport by F-16 fighter jets on Wednesday.

The plane was turned around after "a couple of passengers displayed behavior of concern," according to Northwest Airlines.

"Northwest is cooperating with the appropriate government officials," the company said in a statement.

The DC-10 plane, bound for Mumbai, was carrying 149 passengers, Northwest said. Flight number 42 has been canceled and will be rescheduled for Thursday.

The airport spokeswoman said the pilot had requested to return to Amsterdam and after the plane landed, there were some arrests.

She would not specify if those arrested were passengers.

Sources told Dutch journalist Marijn Tebbens that the disturbance was the result of some unruly passengers. The plane landed safely at 11:39 a.m. (5:39 a.m. ET), the sources said.

This sounds supicious, but at this point we have very little concrete information to go on. I'm am curious about odd sentence from the airport spokeswoman, "She would not specify if those arrested were passengers."

Who else would it be, an errant dogwalker?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 07:50 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

August 22, 2006

Shared Scitless

Proof once again that liberals dispise few things more than a live voter's right to choose:


Critics of Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman's independent run to keep his job attacked on two fronts Monday, with one group asking an elections official to throw him out of the Democratic Party and a former rival calling on state officials to keep his name off the November ballot.

Staffers for the senator from Connecticut, who lost the Aug. 8 Democratic primary to Greenwich businessman Ned Lamont, called both efforts dirty politics. The senator filed as an independent candidate a day after the loss, running under the new Connecticut for Lieberman Party.

A group whose members describe themselves as peace activists asked Sharon Ferrucci, Democratic registrar of voters in New Haven, to remove Lieberman from the party, arguing that he cannot be a Democrat while running under another party's banner.

[snip]

John Orman, a Democrat who gave up a challenge to Lieberman last year, argued in complaints filed with the state Monday that the senator should be kept off the Nov. 7 ballot.

Orman, a Fairfield University professor of political science, accused Lieberman of creating "a fake political party" and added: "He's doing anything he can to get his name on the ballot."

Joe Lieberman, who has a solid liberal voting record going back to when he was first elected to the Senate in 1989, who was nominated as the Vice Presidential candidate for the Democratic party in 2000, isn't "Democrat enough" for the Peace Democrats (otherwise known as Copperheads as they struggled against Abraham Lincoln in the 1860s, calling him Abraham Africanus as modern liberals call the current Republican President the Chimperor without any registration of the implicit racial overtones spanning three centuries, but I digress). If Lieberman's resume is the standard which we discard Democratic candidates, Republicans would run nearly unopposed.

Connecticut's liberals are playing a dangerous game, trying an overt attempt to throw out the seasoned incumbent frontrunner, forcefully limiting the choices of the voter, based upon the most inane of arguments and the most brazenly partisan of reasons.

I wrote just two weeks ago that I hoped Ned Lamont would win the primary, and when he won, I was thrilled that the Democratic Party would be committing Lamonticide. But I had no idea that the self-administered poison would so quickly take effect.

Connecticut Liberals are trying every trick in the book to keep Connecticut voters from have Joe Lieberman on the ballot.

It appears they aren't "Pro-Choice" after all.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:10 PM | Comments (16) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Not Even Phoning It In

Rusty and Allah are all over this example of just how lazy Hezbollah has become in their efforts to provide fake news. The official Hezbollah web site (with an appropriate Iranian URL) is showing a picture of a ship being ripped apart in an explosion. Hezbollah claims that the ship was an Israeli ship hit by a Hezbollah missile.

Here is the picture as shown on Hezbollah's site:


hezship

And Hezbollah did hit an Israel ship, the INS Hanit, a Saar 5 class missile boat, most likely with an Iranian-made C-701 "Kosar" type missile, on July 14, 2006.

This is the INS Hanit (photo credit: Sweetness & Light):


idf-saar5-hit1

Note the damage (most noticeably the scorch marks) near the waterline directly under the Hanit's helicopter hanger, roughly three-quarters of the way to the stern. Note also that while the ship was reported to have serious internal damage and four Israeli sailors died in the attack, the ship is largely intact, the keel unbroken, and the ship otherwise, from this view, externally undamaged, where the ship in the Hezbollah photo to has literally been broken by the blast, the aft half of the ship behind the explosion several degrees out of alignment with the fore.

The two ships, as noticed by Andrew Bolt of the Australian Herald-Sun, are not nearly the same.

HMAS Torrens, a decommissioned Australian destroyer escort, was purposefully sunk in a torpedo test on June 14, 1999. If you look at first picture in the second row on this page, it becomes quite likely that Hezbollah stole the image from this wikipedia entry, cropped it, and then enlarged it to get their end result.

A ship built in the mid 1960s and decommissioned in 1971 is not going to be mistaken for a modern vessel launched in 1994.

Of course, seeing is believing.

The INS Hanit (picture mirrored 180 degrees from above for comparative purposes):


idf-saar5-hit1

HMAS Torrens, just prior to the torpedo test:


Mark_48_Torpedo_testing

Not even close. You would expect that a recently unemployed Adnan Hajj would have been make it at least this close:


idf-saar5-hit1

These days, Hezbollah isn't even phoning it in.

Update: Blue Crab Boulevard uncovers more Hezbollah pictures.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:37 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Iran Assaults Oil Rig, Captures Crew

I hope that the Left will condemn this obvious war for oil:


A Romanian oil rig off the coast of Iran came under fire from an Iranian warship and was later occupied by Iranian troops, a company spokesman said.

The Iranians first fired into the air and then fired at the Orizont rig, said GSP spokesman Radu Petrescu. Half an hour later, troops from the ship boarded and occupied the rig and the company lost contact with the 26 crew members shortly afterward.

Petrescu said he had no information about any injuries or deaths. The Orizont rig has been moored near the Kish island in the Persian Gulf since October 2005, he told the Associated Press.

Eugen Chira, the political consul at the Romanian Embassy in Tehran confirmed the incident, but provided few details.

"Some forces opened fire. That an incident has happened is true. We have no details or the reason yet," he said.

If this is the first stage of an attempt to shut down the Persian Gulf, the Iranian's picked an odd place to start, as Kish is to the northwest of the Straits of Hormuz.

More as this develops.

Update: This is still something of a "non-story," that I'm not seeing widely reported, for whatever reason. I'm not sure if it is a lack of information, or a determination by the news Powers That Be that this is a minor story. More info comes from Bloomberg, indicating that this might be a business/teritorial dispute:


Iran attacked and seized control of a Romanian oil rig working in its Persian Gulf waters this morning one week after the Iranian government accused the European drilling company of ``hijacking'' another rig.

An Iranian naval vessel fired on the rig owned by Romania's Grup Servicii Petroliere (GSP) in the Salman field and took control of its radio room at about 7:00 a.m. local time, Lulu Tabanesku, Grup's representative in the United Arab Emirates said in a phone interview from Dubai today.

[snip]

Iran urged the United Arab Emirates last week to help it return another oil rig owned and operated by the Romanian company in the same waters close to the Straits of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world's daily oil supply moves on tankers.

Grup said it recovered its rig last week because of a contractual dispute with its Iranian client, Oriental Oil Kish.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suspended Oriental Oil's activities in 2005 on alleged corruption activity and ties to Halliburton Co. of the U.S. The U.A.E.-registered drilling company had signed a preliminary contract with Halliburton after winning an estimated $310 million contract to develop phases 9 and 10 of Iran's offshore South Pars gas reservoir.

Mircea Geoana, the head of the Social Democratic Party, the main opposition party in Romania, called on the government to ``undertake all diplomatic measures necessary'' to persuade the Iranians to release the rig.

He also called on President Traian Basescu in a news conference broadcast on Realitatea television to invite all political party heads to the presidential palace to "discuss what Romania's reaction will be to this provocation."

You just knew Halliburton would get dragged into this, didn't you? I suspect that it is just a matter of time before the accusations start to fly that this is a set-up by the Bush Administration to use as a justification to go to war.

Andy Sullivan, your newest conspiracy theory awaits...

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 06:11 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

August 21, 2006

BBC Risks Lebanese Boy for Photo Op with Unexploded Bomb

It is horrific that they would risk a child's life by forcing him so close to an unexploded but still very much "live" bomb.


child

It is even worse that they admit it (my bold) (h/t LGF):


When Um Ali Mihdi returned to her home in the southern Lebanese city of Bint Jbeil two days ago, she found a 1,000lb (450kg) Israeli bomb lying unexploded in her living room.

The shell is huge, bigger than the young boy pushed forward to stand reluctantly next to it while we get our cameras out and record the scene for posterity.

The bomb came through the roof of the single-storey house and half-embedded itself into the floor, just missing the TV.

"Reluctantly" is correct. The Lebanese boy, wearing a blue tank top and jeans that hang on his thin frame, is visably leaning away from the unexploded ordinance, hands in pockets. That someone pushed him forward to be in such a picture, and that the BCC was willing to capitalize on this obvious bit of propaganda staging, going so far to admit it openly, is reprehensible.

This is an admittedly staged photo by an ostensibly professional and once-respected news organization. Martin Asser and any other BBC staff complicit in this event should be fired, without question.

Much to my disgust, the suicide of photojournalism continues at an every more dizzying pace.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:03 PM | Comments (35) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Forcing God's Hand

This just in from CNN:


Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Monday that Tehran will continue to pursue nuclear technology, state television reported.

Khamenei's declaration came on the eve of Iran's self-imposed August 22 deadline to respond to a Western incentives package for it to roll back its nuclear program. The United Nations has given Tehran until the end of August to suspend uranium enrichment.


The supreme leader's remarks also came the day after Iran's armed forces tested surface-to-surface missiles Sunday in the second stage of war games near its border with Iraq. (Full story)

"The Islamic Republic of Iran has made its own decision and in the nuclear case, God willing, with patience and power, will continue its path," Khamenei was quoted as saying by the broadcast.

He accused the United States of pressuring Iran despite Tehran's assertions that it was not seeking to develop nuclear weapons, as the United States and several of its allies have contended.

"Arrogant powers and the U.S. are putting their utmost pressure on Iran while knowing Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons," he said.

Iran on Sunday said it will offer a "multifaceted response" to the incentives proposal.

For those who have been following these rumors for the past few weeks, the promise of a "multifaceted response" is an ominous, if uncertain, portent:


This year, Aug. 22 corresponds, in the Islamic calendar, to the 27th day of the month of Rajab of the year 1427. This, by tradition, is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to "the farthest mosque," usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back (c.f., Koran XVII.1). This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world. It is far from certain that Mr. Ahmadinejad plans any such cataclysmic events precisely for Aug. 22. But it would be wise to bear the possibility in mind.

Iranian President Ahmadinejad and the Hojjatieh movement of the ruling mullahcracy in Iran are so radical that they were banned in 1983 by Ayatollah Khomeini, and it is this sect of Shiite Islam that seek to force the return of the 12th Shiite Imam, Muhammad ibn Hasan. Followers of the three major world religions all believe that the world will one day face an End Times scenario, but only this sect feeling that forcing the hand of God is within their grasp:


...rooted in the Shiite ideology of martyrdom and violence, the Hojjatieh sect adds messianic and apocalyptic elements to an already volatile theology. They believe that chaos and bloodshed must precede the return of the 12th Imam, called the Mahdi. But unlike the biblical apocalypse, where the return of Jesus is preceded by waves of divinely decreed natural disasters, the summoning of the Mahdi through chaos and violence is wholly in the realm of human action. The Hojjatieh faith puts inordinate stress on the human ability to direct divinely appointed events. By creating the apocalyptic chaos, the Hojjatiehs believe it is entirely in the power of believers to affect the Mahdi's reappearance, the institution of Islamic government worldwide, and the destruction of all competing faiths.

Because of the belief of the Hojjatieh that they can, with human hands, bring about Apocalypse, the significance of tomorrow's date sets up in their eyes a divine opportunity that the rest of the world would be wise to treat with all due seriousness.

Considering the magnitude of the threat, I would be quite unamazed if the long-range F-15I "Ra'am" and F-16I "Soufa" and other aircraft of the Israeli Air Force were not now sitting in their hangers fully-fueled under heavy guard, wings heavy with the weight of the most terrible weapons known to man, as Dolphin-class submarines and their American counterparts patrol the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean with their own cataclysmic payloads.

It is fully consistent with the Hojjatieh sect's philosophy to try to "wipe Israel off the map" in hopes of triggering the expected result, and fully within Israel's sovereign rights to respond with all due mortal force to a nation seeking its annihilation. The Hojjatieh seek an end to their world to bring forth Muhammad ibn Hasan, and that they may be able to burn Israel to the ground in the process of bringing forth their Hidden Imam only makes the attraction of Apocalypse stronger.

Do the Hojjatieh seek to end the world on their terms? If is is indeed their plan, I pray that they now reconsider.

The three major religions that arose in the Middle East and propagated around this world all believe in a Creator, One that created All. If these major world religions are correct, then God alone is all powerful, and only God alone can chose the time and place of the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega. By attempting to force God's hand, to attempt to control the End Times, the Hojjatieh are creating a great sin on a scale never before imagined, spanning across all nations, all believers, and faiths. The Hojjatieh seem primed to seek to create the greatest blasphemy of all.

As a Christian believer in a just and powerful God, I feel certain that while millions if not tens of millions could die if the Ahmadinejad and the other Hojjatieh have their way, that their deaths and the deaths of their unsuspecting victims (growing more unsuspecting every day) will only bring an end to lives, not a beginning of paradise.

Man cannot force or control the hand of God. A Pharaoh once tried, and the firstborn of all of Egypt died as a result. If Ahmadinejad's attempt to play God is realized, then the firstborn of the Middle East will only be a fraction of the overall toll.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:22 AM | Comments (25) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Goodbye, Joe

Via CNN:

Photographer Joe Rosenthal, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his immortal image of six World War II servicemen raising an American flag over battle-scarred Iwo Jima, died Sunday. He was 94.

Rosenthal died of natural causes at an assisted living facility in the San Francisco suburb of Novato, said his daughter, Anne Rosenthal.

"He was a good and honest man, he had real integrity," Anne Rosenthal said.

His photo, taken for The Associated Press on Feb. 23, 1945, became the model for the Iwo Jima Memorial near Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. The memorial, dedicated in 1954 and known officially as the Marine Corps War Memorial, commemorates the Marines who died taking the Pacific island in World War II.


iwo-jima-flag

Update: The insipid nature of the anti-war left rears its misshapen head once more, as the malecontents at Sadly No! and their friends at Salon.com's Daou Report see my mention of Joe Rosenthal's passing as a chance to attack both myself and for some odd reason, Rosenthal. To using the passing of an iconic American photographer to attack a relatively obscure blogger betrays a pettiness I personally find repulsive and a bit unsettling, but sadly, par for the course. My response to Sadly No! in the comments of that site are as follows:


So the great “Sadly No!” catch of hypocrisy is what, exactly?

Some have postulated over the years that Joe Rosenthal somehow staged the second flag raising on Iwo Jima, yet not one human soul have ever been able to provide the first shred of proof that the allegations they raised were true, as even your own cited sources concur.

This is in stark contrast to copious evidence that some (I never said nor implied all, as you scurrilously and inaccurately charge) media photographers in Lebanon staged photos, and individual photos by several others were left suspect. No less an authority on photojournalism than David Perlmutter, a man who quite literally “wrote the book” on photojournalism, has come out strongly condemning the actions of these photographers and the media organizations that they represent in Editor & Publisher.

I've only played a small role in exposing some of the photojournalist fraud coming from Lebanon, but I am proud of the work I've done, as is Perlmutter, and at least one major combat photojournalist (a Pulitzer nominee, I may add) who has stated to me privately in e-mail that he is impressed with my ability to catch some of the things I've noticed in staged and biased photojournalism coming from Lebanon.

That you would try to make a comparison between the unproven and mostly discredited charges against Rosenthal that even your own sources cannot support, and the very real and proven charges that have been levied against some Lebanese war photographers, shows a sloppiness in thinking here that quite frankly, I've come to expect.

Not surprisingly, none of the commentors there has a substantive rebuttal.

Update 2:

Via email, from David D. Perlmutter, by permission:


The overwhelming evidence, including the testimony of everyone present at the flag-raisings--both of them--was that the photograph that has become the famous icon was NOT staged. In brief, what happened was that Rosenthal took a series of still pictures of both flag-raisings. At the same time, a movie cameraman recorded the full event. The second flag-raising occurred because the first flag was too small to be seen by Marines and other military personnel throughout the island and at sea. Joe Rosenthal did not ask anyone to raise a flag, did not pose anyone raising a flag, and the second flag would have been raised in same way even if there had been no photographers present. In other words, it was 100 percent NOT a staged photo. The complication occurred because at that time photographers rarely developed their own film in the field. Rosenthal put the role in a can and sent it off for developing. Subsequently, the picture of the second flag-raising, the shot that we now recognize as the great icon, became a sensation. Rosenthal, caught up in the battle, knew nothing about his own success. Weeks later, when told that one of his photographs had become celebrated, he assumed that the questioner referred to another photograph in which the military personnel posed around the flag and talked about it as one he helped set up. Unfortunately, even though the error was corrected very quickly, it has become a data virus in the history of photojournalism. I will add that it is also a very hurtful error, both to the men who raised the flag--some of whom were killed in the battle in the days to follow--and to a sensitive and decent photojournalist. As an added note, as any working Photog can tell you, the photo violates some basic schoolbook rules of photojournalism, so, for example, he would have gotten more faces in “staged” image.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 06:10 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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