Tuesday, January 5, 2010

War tricks


Military censorship and information warfare 
In the modern world you cant wage a war just with your tanks and planes. You have to use media. In Germany during WWII they would say "Truth is not what happened, truth is what we tell people".

In a 1994 photograph we see U.S. soldiers invading Haiti, lying on the airport tarmac pointing their rifles at unseen enemies. The heroic image supports the claim of U.S. government that it is invading to support democracy, liberating a neighboring country from a dictatorship.
Another photographer appears and we see the same scene from another angle. U.S. soldiers are pointing their guns not at potential enemy but at about a dozen photographers who are lined up in front of them and photographing them. in fact, photographers are the only ones doing the shooting.


People need to understand that a large percentage of photographs pretending to depict something significant are showing only a simulation.
The U.S. invasion of Haiti in 1994 as it was reported and 
the same scene viewed from the side. 
Bottom photograph by Alex Webb/Magnum. 


Information warfare: Reuters lies
Several blogs are reporting that images by wire-service photographers from the conflict between Russia and Georgia were staged. The faked pictures, the blogs contend, helped spread pro-Georgian propaganda.
The images in question were made by Reuters photographers David Mdzinarishvili and Gleb Garanich, as well as George Abdaladze of Associated Press.


Certain details in the images have spurred the speculation. For instance, the same grieving Georgian man appears in several separate series of pictures. Reuters has released a statement denying the charges. 

Reuters agency posts a horrible pictures of Russian bombardments of allegedly civilian residential buildings. But what if you take a closer look?
For instance on this picture you can see one obviously dead body of a person in a checkered shirt. The other body is carried by medics, carried as if it was a dead body, but you can notice that the hand of a person is holding a woman medic's sleeve. Well so far everything looks pretty real, except maybe for one guy in black who doesn't look anyhow concerned.

Now on this picture we see a crying man and a body in his hands. But look closely! This is the same checkered shirt, same trousers and shoes, the same person. So does it mean that the crying man took the body brought it some place else? Hardly so, this is just one of the participants of the show. And again if you look close enough you can notice that the guy crying is the person in black from the previous picture.

Now here he is again, alone still with some clothes on, or may be he got changed.

Generally if you see the pictures you can notice that nothing happens around the scene. No people running, and there are actually not a lot of people for a big residential building area if it was really bombed.

In 2006 the same agency faked photos of Israeli forces bombing the city. Altered Reuters news photoReuters News Pictures is in the ethics hot seat for publishing at least two doctored news photographs taken during the current clash between Israel and Lebanon.
The photographs, by Lebanese freelancer Adnan Hajj, show thick smoke rising from downtown Beirut after an Israeli bombing raid on Saturday, and in a second doctored photo the number of flares dropped from an Israeli F-16 have been increased from one to three and misidentified in the caption as "missiles."
In the first picture the smoke appears to have been awkwardly doctored using the cloning tool of photographic editing software in order to make it look more intense. After a series of Web sites displayed the picture on Sunday and discredited the image by showing how it had been manipulated, Reuters issued a statement removing the picture from their archives and apologizing "for the inconvenience." The statement also said, "A corrected version (of the picture) will immediately follow this advisory."

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