Showing posts with label Colin Powell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Colin Powell. Show all posts

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Never Trust a Photograph!

From an article by Errol Morris in the NY Times: "Photography As a Weapon"

The following photograph is the real photograph that Colin Powell described and showed to convince the American public that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in 2003. And now look at the one below it:


Photographs presented by Colin Powell at the United Nations in 2003. (U.S. Department of State)


Reinterpretation of photographs presented by Colin Powell, by Daniel Mooney.

ERROL MORRIS
: No. Not that I’m aware of. But doctored photographs are the least of our worries. If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don’t need Photoshop. You don’t need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don’t need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption.

[The photographs presented by Colin Powell at the United Nations in 2003 provide several examples. Photographs that were used to justify a war. And yet, the actual photographs are low-res, muddy aerial surveillance photographs of buildings and vehicles on the ground in Iraq. I’m not an aerial intelligence expert. I could be looking at anything. It is the labels, the captions, and the surrounding text that turn the images from one thing into another.[6]

Look again if you missed the International House of Pancakes!

theteach

Monday, June 11, 2007

Close Guantanamo Now says Powell


From Sydney Morning Herald:

Guantanamo should close now: Powell
June 12, 2007


WASHINGTON: America's high security prison at Guantanamo Bay should be closed immediately and the military commissions scrapped, because they were harming the reputation of the US justice system, George Bush's former secretary of state has said.


Speaking on MSNBC's Meet the Press program on Sunday, Colin Powell said it was time to move all inmates from the military prison in Cuba into the US justice system.


"We have shaken the belief the world had in the American justice system by keeping a place like Guantanamo open," Mr Powell said. " It's caused far more damage than anything we get from it."


Right on, General Powell.


theteach


Guantanamo photo: Detainees upon arrival at Camp X-Ray, January 2002