Sudan Uncovers "Fake Rape" Video Ring: August 21, 2004
"Sudanese authorities have arrested seven people in Darfur for producing fake video footage of villagers being raped by soldiers, prosecutors said. [...] Sudan has maintained that the allegations of rape were used systematically as a political tool during the nearly 18-month-old conflict in Darfur. A 19 July report by London-based watchdog Amnesty International alleges widespread rape in Darfur, but made no mention of rebel involvement or atrocities committed by them, said the official. Reports followed soon thereafter citing rebels camouflaged as Janjawid, committing atrocities against Darfurians in an attempt to discredit Sudan internationally."
[Aljazeera]
"A tech-savvy young San Francisco man who staged his own mock beheading on the Internet duped international media on Saturday into believing Islamist kidnappers had executed an American hostage in Iraq. The video, which appeared on a Web site used by Islamic militants, showed a man who identified himself as Benjamin Vanderford appealing to the United States to leave Iraq. The Web format was that used by al Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and was introduced by a headline that said it showed Zarqawi killing an American. "If we don't (leave Iraq), everyone is gonna be killed in this way ... I have been offered for exchange for prisoners here in Iraq," the terrified-looking man said, rocking back and forth in his chair, his hands tied behind his back. 
The video showed a hand with a large knife apparently slicing through the neck of a limp body. But it was all a hoax. The blood was dye, the setting was a friend's garage, the Koran reading was a tape and the knife was held by a friend. Mutilated bodies and sound effects were edited in from photos on Web sites and the video was purposefully blurred to make it seem even more amateur, Vanderford said. A major motivation for his action, an unrepentant Vanderford told Reuters, was to see how the world media would react and to see if they would be fooled. "It really illustrates the potential that this kind of thing would happen," he said. [...] He said the video parody of actual beheadings of hostages in Iraq posted on Islamist Web sites was made and posted on the Web about three months ago, intended as an experiment into how quickly videos spread on the Internet. He was surprised at how long it took."
"First, images portrayed in the photo were overly graphic. Second, as the story clearly pointed out, those images were never authenticated as photos of prisoner abuse. There was a lapse in judgment and procedures, and we apologize for it.'' The "lapse'' came after City Councilor Chuck Turner and perennial pot-stirrer Sadiki Kambon called a press conference in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal to display more purported abuse photos. Turner claimed they came from "a very legitimate person'' but admitted they hadn't been authenticated. Kambon said he got them from a representative of the Nation of Islam. The Globe ran a picture of Turner and Kambon displaying the images. In a large shot in the paper's early editions, pornographic details are clearly visible. In later editions, the photograph was reduced, making the images slightly more obscure."
"There was a time when photographs were synonymous with truth—when you could be sure that what you saw in a picture actually occurred. In today's Photoshop world, all that has changed. Pictures are endlessly pliable. Photographs (and even videos) are now merely as good as words—approximations of reality at best, subtle (or outright) distortions of truth at worst. Is that Jane Fonda next to John Kerry at an antiwar rally? No, it isn't; if you thought so, you're a fool for trusting your own eyes. Some photographers welcome the new skepticism toward images; it's good that people are learning not to automatically believe what they see, they say. But many fear that we're losing an important foothold on reality. Without trustworthy photographs, how will we ever know what in our world is real?"
When the paper was called out on this by Indymedia.org in the UK, the Editorial Manager of the Evening Standard forwarded this denial:
"A number of readers have expressed concern that our front page picture on 9 April, showing Iraqis celebrating the liberation of Baghdad, had been enhanced to dipict a larger crowd than actually existed. As it was taken from TV footage, some extra people were added to the image in order to fill the space left by the removal of logos from the picture. In our opinion this did not alter the clarity of truth of the picture's message but we are happy to make this clear."
Walski combined two photographs taken moments apart to create a more dramatic composition, a practice in violation of the paper's policy. 
Ken Light, photographer of the original Kerry picture, publishes an editorial in the Washington Post
Recent Comments