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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
CAIR received its version of the Boudreaux picture in an e-mail from a subscriber to its listserv -- in other words, someone who likely shares the group's point of view regarding the war. Beyond that, CAIR has no idea where the picture came from. Yet the group's press release reads as if CAIR is certain of the photograph's authenticity. Nowhere does CAIR suggest that there may be some reasonable explanation for the scene in the picture, or that the image could be a complete fabrication. Instead, the group's director implores the government to "take action to let military personnel know that such offensive behavior harms America's image and will not be tolerated."
Did CAIR jump the gun? Perhaps. But it's hard to blame the group; this is the power of a photograph. Maybe CAIR could have been more cautious, but as Rabiah Ahmed, a spokeswoman for the group, points out, CAIR has no way to determine whether a picture was doctored. And caution is hard to summon when you're faced with something so real. Since before the war in Iraq began, CAIR has been warning that an invasion would "harm our nation's image and interests in the Middle East and throughout the Muslim world." Now, here was a picture that appeared to prove just how American soldiers were hurting our standing in the Muslim world. Of course CAIR believed it was true.
This is how it goes with pictures. The Internet, many of us know, is mostly garbage. You're not supposed to believe anything you see online. CAIR probably knows that. Still, every so often a picture or a video pops up on the Internet that is so compelling -- so unbelievable -- that you can't help but believe it. You want to believe it. You want to believe that George W. Bush (or Bill Clinton) didn't have sense enough to remove the lens cap before looking through a pair of binoculars. You may want to believe that Tom Daschle pledges allegiance to the flag with the wrong hand, or that Bush reads books upside down. A series of pictures that appears to show the Israeli police summarily executing a Palestinian may confirm your worst fears about Israeli justice; if it does, you're going to believe what you see. And if you already suspect that the American military is doing much more bad in Iraq than good, your reaction to a picture of a Marine cruelly mocking Iraqi children will be predictable. You would, as CAIR did, err on the side of it being true.
In an age in which a picture is never quite what it seems to be, the opposite reaction -- one of complete skepticism when faced with a photo you desperately hope is fake -- is also evident. Immediately after CAIR sent out its press release, right-wingers at the Free Republic discussion site began picking the picture apart, looking for flaws in its design. Some pointed out that the soldier appeared to be wearing Army fatigues, which didn't fit with the Marine Corp's ranking of lance corporal. Many also said that the text on the sign seemed digitally manipulated. "I'm no handwriting expert, but this writing appears a bit too curvilinear for someone who's a native user of the Roman alphabet," one person wrote. But beyond anything in the image, for many Freepers the biggest clue that the picture was fake was that CAIR was saying it was real. The Freepers don't trust CAIR; why should they trust a picture that it says it received by e-mail?
Several Freepers created their own doctored versions of the photograph in order to show how easily digital images could be manipulated. But all of their home-brew photos were pretty much obviously doctored. Indeed, of all the alternate versions of the Boudreaux picture to show up online, only one (besides CAIR's version) seems believable -- the one that claims that Boudreaux "saved" the boy's dad and "rescued" his sister.
The source of this image is a mystery. It seems to have first been posted on Image Dump, a site that allows people to submit pictures for others to rate. The picture was posted anonymously, but was accompanied by this caption: "Grateful Kurdish children thank a marine, Lcpl Boudreaux. An obviously doctored version of this photo with an offensive statement clumsily pasted on has been floating around the internet as part as some sort of cowardly smear campaign. Let's hope Boudreaux gets to tell his story and how he helped this family."
The caption is signed by someone who calls himself doggod91. Doggod91 seems to be the same person who runs a blog called Heretic 2004, a site that espouses a curious blend of political positions. The proprietor is a fan of John Kerry and an opponent of Bush, but he's also a critic of "pacifists," of Palestinians, and of antiwar types in general. Interestingly, doggod91 also likes Photoshop tricks.
Several experts, including those in Salon's art department, could not say definitively which picture -- doggod91's or CAIR's -- was real. Some believed that the one with the "positive message" was authentic; others believed just the opposite. Almost everyone suggested that both could be fake.
The Marines say they have called in the Naval Criminal Investigative Services for help in the investigation of the picture, and detectives there could finally get to the bottom of the story. Digital forensics is said to be a new science, but there has recently been much interest in the detection of forged digital pictures, and some tools provide hope in the effort to pin down fakes. For instance, Hany Farid, a computer scientist at Dartmouth College, has been developing ways to analyze the actual code that makes up a digital photograph in order to check its authenticity; altered images can look quite different, statistically, from natural images, Farid has found. Other researchers have come up with algorithms for detecting when one part of an image has been copied and moved over another part of an image, a popular method of forging pictures. (See a PDF of this research here.) It's possible that NCIS could use any of these -- and probably even more advanced -- techniques in finding the truth behind the Boudreaux picture.
But until there's a formal conclusion, your decision on the photograph would seem to come down to whom you trust. Doggod91 did not respond to several e-mail inquiries sent to the address posted on his blog, so it's impossible to tell where he found what he calls "the real picture." But given his politics, believing that doggod91's photograph is authentic is at least as difficult as believing that CAIR's is authentic, and you are free to choose whichever version of reality you're happier with. This is perhaps the ultimate message in the controversy surrounding the Boudreaux picture: In the digital world, a picture isn't assessed on its own terms. You are no longer responsible for believing your own eyes; only if you trust the person who produced the photograph should you conclude that it shows what it purports to show. Otherwise, you can guiltlessly dismiss it as a fake.
