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

Chemical Agents Found Near U.N. HQ

FINALLY WE KNOW THE REASON WHY NO WMDs WERE FOUND IN IRAQ.

READ ON (And this is no joke!):

Via CBS News:

Chemical Agents Found Near UN HQ

Potentially Dangerous Chemicals Removed From Iraq A Decade Ago Found At U.N. Office In NYC

New York Aug. 30, 2007

(CBS/AP) U.N. weapons inspectors said Thursday that vials of potentially hazardous chemical agents removed from Iraq more than a decade ago were discovered near the world body's headquarters in New York.

"There is no immediate risk or danger," U.N. deputy spokeswoman Marie Okabe said.

She said there was no evacuation of the office of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, known as UNMOVIC, about a block north of U.N. headquarters on New York's east side, and U.S. authorities were called in to dispose of the material.

Okabe said one of the substances, identified Wednesday, was phosgene suspended in oil, "whose present state is unknown but which could be potentially hazardous."

Phosgene can be used as a chemical weapon - and was used extensively in World War I - as a choking agent. Both phosgene gas and liquid can damage skin, eyes, nose, throat and lungs.
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A joint U.S.-U.N. investigation will delve into how and why the highly toxic chemicals got into the office, and although they have been there for more than a decade, a spokesman said they posed no risk to public safety...

HUH?

theteach

WMD dumping sites

Here's a map of the dumping sites that the Army used for WMDs:

Deep Sea News

theteach

Hans Blix and the Iraq War

From Time.com and according to AP:

Blix: Britain Embellished Iraq Intel.

LONDON — The British government embellished intelligence used to justify the decision to invade Iraq in 2003, the former U.N. chief weapons inspector said in an interview broadcast Monday.

Hans Blix, who led the U.N. search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq until June 2003, said a later discredited dossier on Iraq's weapons programs had deliberately embellished the case for war.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair's government published a dossier before the invasion that claimed Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and could deploy some within 45 minutes.

"I do think they exercised spin. They put exclamation marks instead of question marks," Blix said in an interview with Britain's Sky News television broadcast yesterday. (Taipei Times, Mar 13, 2007)

Blix said that Blair and US President George W. Bush had "lost a lot of confidence" once failures in intelligence were exposed, according to interview excerpts released in advance.