Common Folk Using Common Sense

Trackbacked at Hot Air:

The last few days have not been good to the Mainstream Media. The blogosphere is catching them telling lie after lie after lie. This would be comical until you realize that most people, probably +95% of the people, never go to this extreme, in verifying the media; we assume that they’re telling us the entire unadulterated truth.

The original post from Reuters (SCREENSHOT):

An Israeli F-16 warplane fires missiles during an air strike on Nabatiyeh in southern Lebanon, August 2, 2006. (LEBANON)

02 Aug 2006 REUTERS/Adnan Hajj

Yep, more of those Evil Jews firing their US-built weapons of war at the poor, peace-loving Lebanese.

SHIZNIT.

Evidence Look at photo “A”, Reuter’s original. Those are not missiles. Traditionally missiles fired from a fighter jet actually go -faster- than the jet, not dropping behind it as the photo shows. Look at the three “missiles”, those tiny gray dots, and then look at the “fire” and “smoke trail” of the missiles. You don’t normally see the “fire” coming out of the missile’s engine magically appearing more that 50 feet behind the missile. So what, then, is the original photo showing? Those “missiles” are Flares and/or Chaff. Chaff is a cloud of small, thin bits of aluminum or plastic, which appear to be a target to enemy radar. Flares are a defensive countermeasure against heat-seeking missiles. And those tiny gray specks? Hard to say, although some with more experience in graphics manipulation are now suggesting that they’re blurred photos of unguided bombs, reduced in size, and pasted into the original. Either way they’re not missiles. Don’t take my word for it. The pictures at “B” show real examples of Chaff and Flares. The picture at “C” is a photo of an F-16 firing a real missile. Notice how the missile flies -in front- of the jet and not behind it, how the actual missile is -bigger- than a gray speck, and how the smoke trail coming out of the missile’s engine actually -does- come out of the missile’s engine. Therefore Reuters is wrong. Its photo shows an Israeli fighter jet deploying defensive countermeasures, defending itself, not firing down on anyone. If I, a simple country redneck, can see this then why can’t a seasoned war correspondant like Adnan Hajj spot this in a second? But there’s more. You see not only did Adnan Hajj want to lie about the jet firing missiles, but he also exaggerated the lie. Let’s go Photoshopping. Photo “D” is a magnification of the original Reuter’s photo. I’ve added a few colored dots to make your study a bit easier. Look at the ends of the three smoke trails. Notice how all three smoke trails “feather” and “dissipate” identically. Look at the way thick areas of the smoke trail appear at the same relative position in each of the three trails. Likewise with thin areas. All this means is that in the original photo there was only one smoke trail, but in the published photo that single trail was Copy/Pasted to make it look like there were three smoke trails. Not only did Adnan Hajj lie about this being a missile attack, but he also made it look like three missiles were fired. You are simply left with the question “why?”.

If this were an isloated case you could probably write this off as an “oops”. But it seems that Mr. Hajj has a habit of “stretching” the truth. Yedioth Internet has evidence of other altered photos by Hajj that Reuters used recently. Hajj also submitted photos from Qana that have a great deal of suspicion around them. He added “damaged buildings” and “smoke” to some photos making them look far worse. He uses the same photo of the same buildings with the same people in front of them – only moving the camera to a different angle – and posting them days and weeks apart making it appear that there is more devistation in Lebanon than really exists.

Is Reuters really this dumb? Or they a willing participant in propagating Hezbollah propaganda? Either way can you further trust anything from Reuters?

Reuters has removed all the photographs by Adnan Hajj from their news wires – all 920 photographs. They also now admit that Hajj is a Lebanese freelancer; a Lebanese freelancer – sure, couldn’t be any bias there, right? Reuters has tried so hard to create sympathy for Islamofascists for so long it’s now become second nature to them.

And don’t think this is exclusive to Reuters – they’re just dumb enough to get caught this easily. Certainly you remember CBS News, Dan Rather, and his “fake but true” documents?

Mainstream Media, blogosphere, REUTERS, Adnan Hajj

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