Why bother enhancing photos, when you can just lie and get away with it?
"In July, respected news organizations like AP, the BBC, Time Magazine, ITN, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and thousands of others broadcast the shocking news that Israeli forces had fired missiles at two clearly marked Red Cross ambulances, igniting intense fires that injured their passengers. Accompanying photographs and then later footage taken by somebody described as a "local cameraman" showed a badly damaged ambulance with a hole in the dead centre of the roof.
Yet as the blogger Zombietime.com has demonstrated, the whole story is a crude hoax. Photographs of the ambulances in question show no signs of blast or burn. Nor was there any damage to the floor of the ambulance -- as one would expect if a missile had smashed through the roof. The badly "wounded" and heavily bandaged ambulance driver who appeared in the stories resurfaced in other news footage six days later without so much as a scratch upon him. The hole in the roof was not only perfectly round, but it matched exactly the size and placement of the ambulance's missing siren. The siren must have been removed some time before, because the edge of the hole was corroded by rust.
Although journalists were not allowed to inspect the ambulances themselves -- and had to rely on images supplied by Hezbollah -- and although the ambulance drivers' stories changed and changed again, becoming more dramatic with each retelling, every single Western reporter who covered the story accepted it as unquestioned fact.
So are reporters just gullible? The most troubling of all the blog reports, this posted at EUReferendum.com, strongly suggests a more disturbing explanation.
The authors of the EUReferendum blog painstakingly studied all the available photographic evidence of the damage done by the Israeli bombing of a Hezbollah compound near the village of Qana on July 30. According to many press reports, the Israeli bombs struck a three-storey building, trapping civilians and childrens in the rubble. The toll was estimated at some 60 people, later reduced to 28. The photographs and television footage from this sad scene became some of the most famous footage of the whole Lebanon war.
At the EUReferendum site, you can see over many Web pages a compilation of evidence that proves beyond all reasonable doubt that the images from Qana were not merely staged -- but staged with the active knowledge and complicity of the Western journalists on the scene.
Scenes were enacted and re-enacted; dead bodies were carried from point to point and then back again; Hezbollah spokesmen chatted on cellphones when they believed the cameras were turned away from them -- and then erupted in tears and anguish when they believed the cameras had turned on again."