Thursday, July 17, 2008

TALIBAN AND AP USING THE SAME PHOTOGRAPHER?

From The Jawa Report:

A "new" video released by the Taliban's Ummat Studios shows two alleged American spies kidnapped in Afghanistan and then taken over the border and murdered by Pakistani Taliban sympathizers last month. The two were accused of helping the U.S. in an airstrike in Damadola, near the border, which killed several Taliban leaders.

However, the video released by Ummat Studios is identical to video released earlier by the Associated Press.

Look at these two screen grabs. The first is from a CNN International news report from late June of this year, the original video (seen here thanks to Kafir) is credited to the Associated Press (for instance, see AP marked images here). The second is a screen grab from the "new" Ummat Studios video. The two are obviously the same. I've stretched the image from CNN to match the dimensions of the image from the Taliban video.



So, what's the explanation here? Since the AP obviously had the video before the Taliban, we have a few possibilities.

1) The Taliban simply stole the AP video.
2) Whoever took the video sold (or gave) it to both the AP and the Taliban.
This is not the Taliban we once knew.

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