About two weeks ago, Boston City Counselor City Councilor Chuck Turner (Green Party) and Nation of Islam representative Sadiki Kambon held a shameful press conference. They distributed photographs, allegedly of American soldiers raping an Iraqi woman, and said “The American people have a right and responsibility to see the pictures.” The pictures were fakes, taken from a pornographic website, and it was extremely irresponsible and offensive to make such a serious accusation without a more careful double-check. (This is assuming that they made an honest mistake.)
The Boston Globe ran a story about this press conference. Here’s the link. The story is 316 words long. By my count, 191 of those words are a sceptical discussion of the authenticity of the photographs. Here are those 191 words:
The images, depicting men in camouflage uniforms having sex with unidentified women, bear no characteristics that would prove the men are US soldiers or that the women are Iraqis. And there is nothing apparent in the images showing they were taken in Iraq. Unlike the photographs widely publicized last week, the images appear to have been taken outdoors in a sandy area with hills in the background.
A woman who answered the phone at Nation of Islam’s US headquarters in Chicago declined to give further information about the photographs, Muhammad, or his whereabouts. Local Nation of Islam minister Don Muhammad did not return messages left at his place of business.
A spokesman for the US Department of Defense, Lieutenant Colonel Joe Yoswa, said the department could not confirm the authenticity of the photographs.
“I would caution that there are many fake photos circulating on the Internet,” Yoswa said.
Turner and Kambon said they don’t know where or when the photos they distributed yesterday were taken. But Turner said they came from a “very legitimate person.”
“We cannot document their authenticity,” he told reporters. “But you have the ability to do that.”
The Globe ran a photo with this story. They did not run any of the pictures that Turner and Kambon handed out. Instead, they ran a photograph of Turner and Kambon holding a posterboard with four of their pictures. In this photo, pornographic details are visible, with only a little imagination. With a moment’s reflection, it seems obvious that the editors made an error in running this picture. Here’s a scan of it: if in doubt, don’t click.
This photo was run in the early edition of the paper. In later editions, the photo was shrunk to obscure the details in the photo, and finally dropped. They apologized for running the photo the next day. Here’s the apology.
My take is that the Globe made a legitimate choice to cover an incendiary story about the accusations made by a local politician, expressing scepticism as they did it. They also made a serious error in judgement by running this photo, which was compounded by their decision to shrink it, instead of remove it, when they realized that they had made a mistake. I’d think that we can question the judgement and attention to detail of these editors without calling them un-American.
Like I said, that’s my take. For an opposing point of view, here are exerpts from ten Instapundit posts which have referenced the subject.
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