A militant Islamic website has posted fuzzy pictures of a captured US soldier, but we don’t have any people missing. Then a toy company that makes action figures for sale at US military bases said; “Hey! That’s one of ours!”
Want to see the picture on the website, along with a pic of the action figure?
Sorry about the poor quality of the pics. I pulled them off of the AP wire story and it’s the best I could do.
Anyway, now I wanna go out and buy one of those dolls.
UPDATE
Steven den Beste sent me a link to the original Islamic website. The picture is much clearer and larger. I think it’s unlikely that anyone would ever consider this to be a real human unless they were carried away with excitement at the idea of a US soldier in terrorist hands. (Click on the photo to see it at full size.)
I think this really demonstrates just how poor a filter the media puts on claims from terrorist. Any and every pronouncement is uncritically broadcast. It is so bad that people just pretending to be terrorist, like that guy in San Francisco, can get their little fake story on the news.
If you’ve had any first hand experience with the media, you know this “Poor filtering” is not limited to terrorists. The amount the media gets wrong is astounding. And it doesn’t necessarily get corrected, either. My impression is that the verification and fact checking ability of the internet is at least as good as that of the main stream media simply because of the number of people and the probability that someone with indepth expertise is involved.
I thought the guy looked a little strange. a sign that they are getting desperate? if they’re winning they wouldn’t be doing this.
For the time being, this site has a much bigger version of the image. (But don’t be too surprised if it goes away soon.)
I’m having a hard time understanding why this was done. Was the guy who did it desperate? Or was he utterly stupid? Or was he a mole, deliberately trying to discredit the jihadis?
Is this a case where one guy created the image as a joke, and someone else thought it was real and used it? (I’m thinking of the “Evil Bert” image along with Bin Laden we saw on some picket signs in news reports in 2001.)
I have no idea who did this, but for once, I hope my tax dollars were involved through a black program.
I wrote a post last fall speculating that we could use faked terrorist events and various hoaxes to undermine terrorist media penetration.
I wonder if that is what is happening here?
If it is, Shannon, it looks like someone owes you some royalties.
James