More News From The Enemy?
Posted by Curt
In my post yesterday I updated with a story put out by the AP in which our troops killed 20 terrorists after calling in a airstrike on a house. The report said a supposed Mayor claimed women and children were killed. Now Al-Jazeera is claiming to have photo's of the dead children:
Al Jazeera has obtained exclusive footage that confirms children were among the victims of a US air raid northwest of Baghdad. Local officials said that the bodies of 17 civilians, including six children and eight women, had been pulled from the debris of two houses in al-Ishaqi.
The US military had issued a statement on Friday saying that two women were among 20 suspected "al Qaeda terrorists" killed in the operation.
Al Jazeera's footage showed the bodies of men, women and children wrapped in blankets after they had been pulled from the rubble.
The Agence France Presse news agency said it passed its own photographs of the dead children to Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Garver, a US military spokesman, who said: "We've checked with the troops who conducted this operation - there were no children found among the terrorists killed.
"I see nothing in the photos that indicates those children were in the houses that our forces received fire from and subsequently destroyed with the air strike."
Lets leave out the fact that this is Al-Jazeera for a minute, but once you go look at the pictures you can instantly get the feeling your looking at another Green Helmet Guy production:
[images]
Now as disturbing as those pictures are you should recall this post by a photographer sometime ago about the use of long dead bodies to stage a incident:
i have been working in lebanon since all this started, and seeing the behavior of many of the lebanese wire service photographers has been a bit unsettling. while hajj has garnered a lot of attention for his doctoring of images digitally, whether guilty or not, i have been witness to the daily practice of directed shots, one case where a group of wire photogs were choreographing the unearthing of bodies, directing emergency workers here and there, asking them to position bodies just so, even remove bodies that have already been put in graves so that they can photograph them in peoples arms. these photographers have come away with powerful shots, that required no manipulation digitally, but instead, manipulation on a human level, and this itself is a bigger ethical problem. ...
So lets look at the evidence. The Military issued this press release:
BAGHDAD, Iraq – Coalition Forces killed 20 terrorists Friday morning while targeting al-Qaida terrorists in the Thar Thar area.
Coalition Forces targeted the location based on intelligence reports that indicated associates with links to multiple al-Qaida in Iraq networks were operating in the area.
Ground forces were searching buildings at the targeted location when they began receiving heavy machine gunfire from one of the buildings. The ground forces returned fire, killing two armed terrorists.
Despite efforts to subdue the remaining armed terrorists, Coalition Forces continued to be threatened by enemy fire, causing forces to call in close air support. A Coalition aircraft performed the air strike, resulting in 18 more armed terrorists killed. ...
and have gone on record stating NO children were found amongst the dead. But we have a AP source (cough) saying children were indeed among the dead. Now we have Al-Jazeera showing supposed pictures of dead children.
Let's just say I'm a bit suspicious. ...
Read the whole thing.
