By Neil Munro, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Monday, April 10, 2006

Amid the digitized stream of compelling photographs from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are a few that are staged, fake or at least misleading. Photo editors struggle to filter them out.

Thanks to digital technology, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the most photographed in history. Photographers with digital cameras have provided, almost instantaneously, an enormous flood of accurate, dramatic, and even shocking images to people around the world. But the daily downloads of news photos include some that are staged, fake, or so lacking in context as to be meaningless, despite the Western media's best efforts to separate the factual from the fictional.

Related Links EDITOR'S NOTE: These links offer images referenced in the story and more background information, however, some links may contain graphic content. Use at your own discretion. CPJ Profile Of Journalists Killed In Iraq · Evening Standard's Doctored Photo · Daily Mirror Hoax · Los Angeles Times's Doctored Photo · Kidnapped GI Photo · Fake Rape-Scene Photos · Camel-Spider Photo · "Campaign 2006: Candidate Admits 'Stupid' Web Error" · Online Debate About AP Photos · Online Critique Of AP Photographer Bilal Hussein · Online Critique Of New York Times' Use Of AFP Damadola Photo

On January 14, for example, shortly after unmanned U.S. aircraft fired missiles at several suspected leaders of Al Qaeda who were thought to be staying in the village of Damadola, Pakistan, Agence France-Presse distributed a picture said to be from the scene. AFP is based in Paris, and the picture was sent by one of its locally hired photographers, a stringer. The photo showed a piece of military equipment placed on a damaged stone wall, flanked by a solemn old man and a young boy. Another firm, Getty Images, also distributed the photo to picture editors at newspapers and magazines around the world. The New York Times published it in the paper's January 14 Web edition, and Time magazine ran the picture in its January 23 print edition, along with the caption "Detritus from the latest U.S. raid in Pakistan."

But the caption was wrong, the pose was staged, and the picture was, in essence, untrue. The initial AFP caption said that the military object was a piece of a missile from the U.S. strike. Later, AFP issued a correction, labeling the object an unexploded artillery shell.

But it was not a U.S. shell. It was most likely a fired but unexploded artillery shell, identical to those manufactured by Pakistan Ordnance Factories and it was brought there from somewhere else and posed atop the wall. These steel shells are used by the Pakistani military; one would not be a part of a U.S. missile. In fact, the AFP's stringer, Thir Kahn, had taken a September photo of a very similar shell seized from Islamic militants by the Pakistani military.

In contrast to the heavy artillery shells, missiles -- such as the ones that were fired at the Qaeda leaders from U.S. drones -- are lightly built projectiles that explode into tiny, barely recognizable fragments on impact.

The photo editors for Time and The New York Times' Web site declined to comment. Other publications printed images of damage from the missile strike that seem entirely accurate. For example, Newsweek and The Washington Times published wide-angle photos of locals standing beside houses that had obviously been severely damaged. The New York Times print edition published the same wide-angle photo on January 18.

Asked for comment on the whole subject of suspect images, photo directors from several U.S. publications said they do indeed worry about the reliability of images distributed by photo agencies, even the most respected ones. But they also said they want and need to trust the agencies and distributors, which include AFP, the Associated Press, Reuters, and Getty Images. In normal practice, photo directors receive a stream of digital images from the photo agencies, select the best of them, and then present them to editors, who decide which photographs to publish.

Photo editors for news publications say that, regardless of the subject matter, they routinely watch for flawed photos and inaccurate captions, and they catch many. But wartime conditions exacerbate these quality-control problems.

In Iraq in 2003, at the beginning of the war, "I felt more confident, because there were Western journalists there, and for the most part, we can believe they are pretty accurate," said Joe Elbert, The Washington Post's managing editor for photography. But because Western photographers can't enter insurgent-dominated areas without risking their lives, Elbert says, he now has to rely on local stringers. "I do have worries -- I can't deny that."

In Iraq, "we keep two to three [in-house] photographers there year-round," said Elizabeth Flynn, foreign-picture editor for The New York Times' print edition, which did not publish the AFP picture of the misidentified artillery shell. "I try to rely on and use what they shoot, because we trust them, we know them." The AFP stringer's photo "is the kind of picture you desperately want to have because [the missile strike] was a big story," she said, but when people "gather around like a family photo, that should raise a hundred red flags."

Richard Curtis, the director of photography at USA Today, said, "We have a lot of confidence in the agencies we deal with." But, he added, "people in different cultures have different standards when it comes to staged photos and doctored photos ... so unless you have intimate knowledge of [the stringers], I don't know what to say," when a stringer's credibility is questioned.

For photo editors, new pressures to get it right are coming from Internet bloggers who collect and post critical comments from ordinary citizens and also from niche experts who may have intimate knowledge of the local culture, the U.S. military, or the particular news event in question, Elbert said. "We in the mainstream media have always decided what [images] we want to push out, but now people are disagreeing and questioning accuracy," he said. "This is really confounding the mainstream media."

Wartime Pressures
The photo agencies are in a difficult position. Western customers demand a constant stream of photographs from dangerous locations around the globe, said Emmanuel Dunand, AFP's bureau chief in New Delhi, but threats from terrorists or insurgents against Westerners often force the agencies to rely on local stringers to get those images. The pressure on these photographers can be very great, said Dunand, a native of France. "The entire population there says, 'Yes, this is an American shell that landed,' and this guy is being paid $5 a photo and will not go deeper, and he sends the photo with total faith."

Patrick Baz, AFP's photo director for Iraq, is based in Cyprus. He said in an interview, "We don't hire them for [their skills as] reporters; we hire them because we can't go there.... We teach them and try to explain to them what a real reporter is. Some become real reporters, some do it for money, some are involved in the insurgency ... or terrorist activities, but we stop them when we find them going too far." Baz declined to provide examples of what he considers unacceptable behavior. AFP is nevertheless well positioned to control its stringers, he said, because its editors speak Arabic, and local stringers "can't trick us the way they trick non-Arab-speaking persons."

Baz grew up in Lebanon's Christian community; he spent five years building a network of photographers for AFP in the Palestinian territories.

Although AFP's photo editors look hard for signs of fakery or staged events, "it is very hard to say what we show is the reality.... We have so many sources ... you cannot fully, fully verify them," Dunand said. Still, he added, "if I catch someone staging a photo, he is out." Baz said that in Iraq, "we fired a bunch [of stringers], and Reuters did, and AP did." But he declined to explain further or to give more details on who was fired and why.

Firings of photographers or photo editors are rare but not unheard of. In 2003, the Los Angeles Times fired a photographer after he used software to merge two photographs of refugees in southern Iraq into a more striking image that was published in The Hartford Courant and the Chicago Tribune. In the United Kingdom, the top editor of The Daily Mirror was fired in 2004 after he published several pictures of what seemed to be British soldiers beating up an Iraqi prisoner. The pictures were discredited when the people who provided them could not explain discrepancies about the soldiers' equipment and vehicles. In April 2003, after U.S. troops moved in to occupy Baghdad, London's Evening Standard published a front-page photograph of a large crowd of Iraqis celebrating. Bloggers analyzing the photo, however, quickly pointed out that parts of the photo apparently were doctored and that many members of the crowd appear multiple times in the photo. The bloggers suggested that it was altered to make the crowd seem larger than it was. The Standard's managing editor, Doug Wills, countered that that was "absolute nonsense. [The photo] was a single image taken from a television screen," and only a small piece of the image was replicated to fill in the blank space created by the removal of the TV's company logo, he said.

Compared with garish fakery, the artillery-shell photo was mundane. But the episode is emblematic of the routine hazards facing picture editors around the world as they cope with multiple deadlines and with thousands of photos -- most of them accurate and fair -- that flow through their computers.

Insurgent Imagery
It is not just photographers or their editors who can manipulate images. Terrorists anywhere, and insurgents in Iraq specifically, can and do manipulate photos for their own uses. In Iraq, insurgents have displayed and passed around, for example, pictures said to show U.S. soldiers raping Iraqi women. They have also circulated photos of "giant spiders" supposedly sent by Allah to save Falluja from the Americans. The pictures were, in fact, crude photocopies of an American soldier's souvenir photo of two connected solifugids, also known as camel spiders, which are native to Iraq. In the photo, a soldier was holding up the two connected arachnids before an audience of other soldiers, according to Nir Rosen, a writer and a fellow at the New America Foundation, who stayed with insurgents in Falluja.

"If you went into anyone's house in Falluja, they had pictures of it.... People believed," Rosen said of the camel spiders. In the photograph, the arachnids, which are about the size of a human hand, seem larger than life because the two look like one large insect and because the soldier's hand holding the creatures is unseen. Without the hand as a visual reference, viewers are prompted to compare the camel spiders' size to the soldier's leg in the background, making them look three or four feet long.

The supposed rape pictures were far more important, Rosen said. In a February article for The New York Times Magazine, Rosen quoted a Jordanian Islamist's testimony that the pictures helped to galvanize insurgent activity in Falluja. "In the beginning, [the Fallujans] had said to the insurgents, 'Go make jihad in your own country.' After the rape story, they said, 'OK, we want to start now, or tomorrow we will find our mothers or daughters or sisters raped.' This story exploded the resistance in Falluja. They called us for a meeting and said, 'You were right.'" Rosen told National Journal that the rape pictures resembled those now displayed on a Web site maintained by a radical U.S. Hispanic group, La Voz de Aztlan Communications Network. The men in those pictures have their faces concealed, they are wearing a hodgepodge of military clothing, and they do not carry any weapons or equipment worn by U.S. soldiers. According to a January 2004 article in The Boston Globe, these rape photo claims were repeated in the Turkish Islamist press, possibly contributing to at least one suicide bomb attack in Turkey that killed 11 people. The State Department worked hard, and successfully, to rebut the claims. "It was such an obviously bogus story, we came out pretty well," said a spokesman for the American Embassy in Turkey. Since then, "the atmosphere here is much improved."

One Story, Two Versions
Journalists and photo editors face still another challenge when accounts of a single incident differ dramatically, making it hard to place photographs in their proper context. This problem is especially acute in Iraq. The U.S. military will give one version of events; local Iraqis will give another, very different story. Sometimes, residents -- even doctors and hospital officials -- sympathize with, or fear, the insurgents, and they simply lie or exaggerate to make Iraqi forces or U.S. troops look bad. Other times, local eyewitnesses give an account of an incident that is more accurate than the official government or military story.

The problem sharpens when no Western reporter is on the scene, but a photographer, usually an Iraqi stringer, is. Photo editors, or even local Western bureau chiefs, have trouble judging the veracity of the images that come from such an event. Last October, for example, The Washington Post printed a striking image of four caskets, purportedly containing dead women and children, and a line of mourning men on a flat desert plain outside the town of Ramadi, west of Baghdad. The photo, provided by the Associated Press, accompanied an article that began this way:

"A U.S. fighter jet bombed a crowd gathered around a burned Humvee on the edge of a provincial capital in western Iraq, killing 25 people, including 18 children, hospital officials and family members said Monday. The military said the Sunday raid targeted insurgents planting a bomb for new attacks.

"In all, residents and hospital workers said, 39 civilians and at least 13 armed insurgents were killed in a day of U.S. airstrikes in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, a Sunni Arab region with a heavy insurgent presence.

"The U.S. military said it killed a total of 70 insurgents in Sunday's airstrikes and, in a statement, said it knew of no civilian deaths."

The story, datelined Baghdad, pointed to the sharply divergent accounts of the incident, and it quoted both Ramadi residents and hospital officials as saying that many civilians had been killed. The photograph, shot by an Iraqi stringer for AP, presumably was a scene of a funeral for some of the dead civilians.

In December, The Post did a follow-up story about the differences in accounts of civilian casualties in Anbar province during the U.S. Marine offensive there. Ellen Knickmeyer, The Post's Baghdad bureau chief, who wrote both the October and December stories, went back to the Marine Corps, whose officials insisted that the October air raid had not killed civilians but had in fact destroyed a cell of insurgents responsible for setting off roadside bombs.

The December story included this passage: "Analysis of video footage shot by the plane showed only what appeared to be grown men where the bomb struck, [Marine Col. Michael] Denning said. After the airstrike, he said, roadside bombs in the area 'shut down to almost nothing. That was a good strike, and we got some people who were killing a lot of people,' Denning said."

Knickmeyer declined to respond to an e-mail seeking comments.

These articles clearly present the two, largely incompatible, versions of the air-raid story. If AP's picture is true and accurately shows a funeral for women and children killed in the October air raid, then U.S. officials are pushing a false story. But if the U.S. military's story is true, then AP and The Post may have published a staged, or at least misleading, photo. Maybe it wasn't a real funeral. Or maybe insurgents had killed the victims.

"Were we sold a bill of goods?" asked Elbert, The Post's managing editor for photography. "We may have been. I don't know."

Defense Department officials, contacted by National Journal, declined to declassify the video taken by the raiding airplane. "We looked at the video and we felt it was in the best interests to be classified," Navy Cmdr. Terry L. Shannon, who reviews classified videos for possible release, said on March 22. But declassification wouldn't make much difference, said another Defense official, because the video is of such poor quality that "it does not show what the Marines say they found."

The funeral photograph was taken by Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi stringer working for the Associated Press. AP officials declined to make Hussein available for an interview, and National Journal was unable to contact him directly in Iraq.

Cameras Affect the News
In an interview, Santiago Lyon, AP's New York-based, Irish-born, director of photography, said of AP photographers in Iraq and Afghanistan, "For the most part, they were journalists before the war." When checking into prospective employees' bona fides, he said, AP applies "the same standards as we apply to the rest of the world." Once a stringer is employed, "we make it very clear that we expect them to maintain journalistic standards" and to act professionally, even under possible pressure from family and friends. Lyon said he did not know of any episodes where AP editors had fired stringers for improper behavior or rejected their photos as staged or fake.

Hussein is the AP's lead photographer in Ramadi, the largest town in the Sunni-dominated Anbar province, which has been the main base for the Sunni insurgency against the Shiite-dominated Iraq central government. Hussein, who grew up in Falluja, has personally experienced the intensity of the fighting in Iraq. In November 2004, an AP reporter interviewed him about his escape from Falluja, which was then under attack from U.S. Marines.

"I decided to swim ... but I changed my mind after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river," Hussein said. He watched, horrified, as a family of five was shot dead as they tried to cross. Then, "I helped bury a man by the riverbank, with my own hands.... I kept walking along the river for two hours, and I could still see some U.S. snipers ready to shoot anyone who might swim. I quit the idea of crossing the river and walked for about five hours through orchards." In 2005, Hussein was part of an Iraq-based team that won a Pulitzer Prize for news photography.

A series of Hussein's photographs illustrate another dilemma for photo editors -- whether to publish images that may have been created for the photographer. Last September 17, in Ramadi, Hussein took pictures after a battle at a dusty intersection. At least one U.S. armored vehicle had been damaged and towed away, leaving behind its 40-foot dull-gray metal track tread. Hussein's photographs showed the locals piling debris and auto tires onto the tread, and then celebrating as they lit a fire. Without the fire, smoke, and added debris, the photo would have presented a pretty uninteresting image of people looking at a leftover tank tread. With the smoke, fire, and debris, the image seemed to convey that a major battle had just taken place.

Weeks later, USA Today published a similar Hussein photograph from a different incident in Ramadi, which featured celebrating Sunnis, burning car tires, and a tank tread pulled over on its side.

Lyon said that AP bars photographers from asking people to change a scene, but that a crowd's spontaneous decision to change a scene in front of a cameraman presents a different situation. "You have this [dilemma] every day all around the world," he said. "There's nothing new there."

Other publications say they keep an eye out for photos that look staged. The New York Times will not publish a picture "if it feels like it was done for us," said Flynn, and she cited an occasion when one of her photographers set aside dramatic photos taken in Africa because the crowd had reacted to an audience of 17 cameras and photographers. "People perform for the media.... [They] are very media-savvy; they know what will attract attention."

David Schlesinger, the London-based global managing editor for Reuters, said, "We try to tell the story, so the more [that] people are playing to the camera, the less it is the real story. There is a line where it is difficult to tell, but we try to tell the story straight in pictures, so we don't pose photos."

The Post's Elbert suggested that one solution to the problem of stringers submitting photos that aren't quite up to Western journalistic standards would be for the photo agencies to deliver more photos from each event, including pictures that show the entire context of a scene. Better captions for each photo would help, too, he said. Moreover, the agencies should fire the unprofessional photographers, and the U.S. military should get its pictures and press releases out to the news media faster, Elbert said.

Choosing Sides
But even these remedies would not solve the deeper problem. Because images can have a powerful impact, all sides in the Iraq war are using and pressuring photographers to tell their story, making it difficult for the photographers to act as strictly neutral observers. Iraqi insurgents, for example, frequently use videotape and photographs of their attacks on U.S. forces to magnify the propaganda impact. Insurgent groups will then distribute these images on CDs throughout the Arab world and worldwide through the Internet. The videos, usually shot at some distance from the attacks, typically show a fiery explosion enveloping a U.S. armored vehicle, but the cameras rarely show the extent of damage to the vehicle or the fate of the passengers.

According to Washington Post reporter Jackie Spinner, insurgents have invited Western reporters to accompany them. But taking up such an offer would entail great danger. At least one Reuters photographer was killed when filming an insurgent ambush of U.S. soldiers in 2004, said Baz, who was riding with the ambushed convoy and witnessed the photographer's death. U.S. gunners shot the Reuters photographer, Baz said. In a statement, Reuters said it does not accept implications that the stringer was working with insurgents. Five Reuters journalists have died in Iraq.

In 2005, the U.S. military announced that it had arrested an Iraqi stringer for CBS, whose videotapes showed his presence at several bomb strikes against U.S. forces. The cameraman was acquitted on all charges on April 5 by an Iraqi court after being held at Abu Ghraib prison for exactly a year. The exact charges were never made public, but the U.S. military accused him of siding with insurgents. When hiring locals, "you look for recommendations from people you have worked with ... and you make the best judgment you can," said CBS spokeswoman Sandy Genelius.

Clearly, terrorists and insurgents know the value of images. In an undated letter from Osama bin Laden to the Taliban's leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, bin Laden wrote about how important the media was in Al Qaeda's war with the West. "It is obvious that the media war in this century is one of the strongest methods; in fact, its share may reach 90 percent of the total preparation for battles." The translated letter was provided by the U.S. Army's Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point.

Baz said that, today, unlike in wars past, journalists are constantly pressured to choose sides, and that many combatants on either side don't believe that journalistic neutrality exists. This wartime pressure on photographers is "terrible," Baz said. "It is absolutely unbelievable that you are automatically branded East or West, Muslim or Christian, and you have [to] go on one side or the other." The Post's Elbert echoed the lament: "We're part of the story, and that's wrong."

Still, the flawed, faked, and staged photos are only a small slice of the daily download. Harried editors and photo directors will continue trying to filter them out, yet inevitably they won't catch them all.

Need A Reprint Of This Article?
National Journal Group offers both print and electronic reprint services, as well as permissions for academic use, photocopying and republication. Click here to order, or call us at 877-394-7350.