F for Fake

Have you seen the latest about the one-size-fits-all nuke plant photo?

CNN has used a photo of the same damn facility to illustrate stories about North Korean and Iranian nuclear weapons development. Then the same aerial shot turned up on government-run sites. Now we discover that the photo -- labeled "Iraq_nuclear.jpg." -- has been used to illustrate Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty stories on Iraqi nuclear weapons in the run-up to the current war.

The same plant apparently exists in three different countries. Let's see Charles Fort explain THAT one!

The best coverage of this outrageous example of news management comes to us by way of good old Brad Friedman.

You know what's really outrageous? Almost nobody is covering this matter. It has rated not one mention (to my knowledge) on cable news. Do a little Googling, and you'll find that the only non-blog recognition of this affair can be found on an anti-occupation Iraqi site -- and THEY lifted it from Brad!

If this story hurt the credibility of a Democratic administration, you know full well that the pundits would make enough hay out of it to feed a thousand horses.

Does anyone have any idea just where this facility actually is? I'm guessing either the U.S. or Russia. Maybe it's a shot of Barbra Streisand's house.

What we have here is another clear example of a conspiracy to manufacture news. The same can be said of the "reportage" offered by Scottie McClellan's "Top" man, Jeff Gannon. How does our modern press differ from Pravda in the bad old days? Ya got me!

This is a good opportunity to repeat a story that I may have told earlier on this blog. On the day the famed statue fell in Baghdad, the local ABC affiliate ran some striking footage showing the anti-American forces at work "up close and personal." According to the anchor -- Christine Lund, if memory serves -- the footage showed "Iraqi Republican Guards" opening fire on Ameircan troops "elsewhere in Baghdad" on that very day.

I recognised the footage. It had run two days earlier on a French-language newscast that my local cable company broadcast on one of those high-end channels that nobody watches. The soldiers were irregulars from Syria, not Iraqi Republican Guardsmen. (The Guard appears to have stayed home during that battle.) They were in another city entirely. They never got a chance to open fire on U.S. troops. The encounter had not happened on the same day the statue fell.

Every single detail of the report was incorrect.

Of course, as we now know, the falling statue incident was itself staged. The early footage should have given the game away -- the revellers in the street were obvious plants. They waved pictures of Achmed Chalabi, who was then unknown in Iraq.

Those shots of rent-a-revellers holding up hagiographic Chalabi images were snipped out of later broadcasts of the falling-statue footage. That kind of careful editing does not happen by accident.

By the way: Fox News still hasn't apologized for their fake report that the Third Infantry Division wiped out two whole divisions of the Iraqi Republican Guard in a massive battle a couple of days before the entry into Baghdad.

And yet the right-wingers dare to criticize Dan Rather for presenting phony news!

What's next? Maybe the Conintern will take to airbruhing Chalabi and other disgraced figures out of old photographs, just as Stalin's henchmen used to erase images of Trotsky...