April 10, 2005

The (right, Right wing of the) blogosphere is buzzing with news of the controversy surrounding the AP's recent receipt of the Pulitzer Prize for war photos and the concurrent evidence of collusion between the MSM and the terrorist "insurgents;"
Power Line, of course, has the whole rundown, but the short version of the story behind how the AP "happened" to get a picture of the Iraqi "militants" killing election workers is that while they maintain on their own web site that their man was "300 meters" away from the murders, he was, in fact, 50 meters meters away, as they admitted to Powerline in an email.
Further, the photographer(s) confessed that they were on the scene to get the picture because the terrorists had "invited them to a demonstration," but not an execution.
John and Scott of Powerline got former NYTimes photographer D. Gorton to analyze the Haifa Street image and his expert opinion was that the AP assassination photo "had all the earmarks of a planned image."
Here's that image for the curious:

Wretchard of Belmont Club has more thoughts on the subject.
And how do we view this story in light of what happened the other day, when a CBS news reporter was taken into U.S. military custody for actually being one of the "insurgents?"
CBS stringer arrested in Iraq
The AP insists it is "deeply offended" by any charges that it might be sleeping with the enemy, yet they admit they knew they were being used for propagandistic purposes by enemy combatants.
Maybe Eason Jordan was right: our soldiers are targeting the media in Iraq because they are, in actual fact or at the very least in sympathy with, the enemy!
We all would like to know what really happened on Haifa Street, but I'd also like an answer to another question: If the AP photog was only 50 meters away from the murders, did he do anything to stop this execution from happening?
Those Iraqi election workers were, in effect, the allies and comrades of any American, including one of its MSM.
Wasn't this execution staged for the cameras and not the reverse, the cameramen just "happened" to photograph an Iraqi "lynching" "at random?"