DOES THIS SOUND FAMILIAR?

Stop me if you've heard this one before. Eleven foreign students from a Muslim nation get off a plane in New York, walk down the street, and turn into a national security problem (via Flopping Aces):

U.S. authorities are searching for 11 Egyptian men who arrived in the United States last month but failed to turn up at Montana State University for a scheduled academic program.

According to the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, the men were among a larger group of students who arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York from Cairo on July 29 with valid visas.

FBI Special Agent Richard Kolko said there is no threat associated with the men.

A law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity said the men are between 18 and 22 years old.

Now we have eleven young Muslims from a country known for producing radical Islamists walking unattended in the US, obviously uninterested in higher education goals. The Muslim Brotherhood, the forerunner to violent groups such as al-Qaeda, bases its operations in Egypt, and among their alumni are luminaries such as AQ #2 Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The FBI wants to assure us that none of them represent a threat, but this sounds rather disconcerting to me. All of them disappeared at the same time, and all of them listed as their school of choice ... Montana State University? None of the eleven bother to show for their class -- not just one or two who may have gotten themselves caught up in partying or sightseeing, but all eleven.

It sounds like a joke with a very bad punchline. Considering how many of the 9/11 plotters got into the US from Saudi Arabia on student visas, it sounds like a very old and tiresome joke. Instead of trying to blow smoke about the lack of a threat, perhaps the FBI should publish the names and photos of the missing talib and let us help them find the little truants.

HALF OF US BELIEVES IRAQ HAD WMD

Well it would appear finally the American people are starting to believe the truth about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. You do know that weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq since the invasion in 2003, don't you? The media and the Democrats like to push the lie that none have been found, but that's not true.

A recent poll says a full half of Americans believe Iraq had the WMD when troops invaded 3 1/2 years ago. This of course leaves the left wringing their hands. How could people believe such lies! Well, for the uninitiated, here is a list of the weapons of mass destruction that have been found in Iraq since Operation Iraqi Freedom began:

1. A 155-millimeter artillery round containing Sarin nerve agent was found, which is a weapon of mass destruction.
   
2. U.S. military units have discovered mustard gas that was used in an IED, or improvised explosive device. Mustard gas is a weapon of mass destruction.
   
3. In all, some 500 weapons containing mustard gas or Sarin nerve agent have been found in Iraq since the invasion. Again, both of these are weapons of mass destruction.

What sort of a lame excuse does the left come up with to explain away these findings? Try this .... These were weapons Saddam had before 1991 ... so they don't count. Now does that make sense to you? We have nuclear bombs we've had since before 1991. Do they not count? If we dropped on on Iran, do you think the world would give us a pass because we had the weapon before 1991?

The mainstream media and the left just can't let go of the lie that there were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq. Go ahead, write this one down and enrage your liberal friends!

A SMOKE CLEARING BLOGSWARM

A smoke-clearing blogswarm

By Michelle Malkin

***scroll for updates...keep sending your finds and i'll keep adding to this post (which I'll send to Reuters' global picture editor tomorrow for comment)...second Hajj Photoshop unmasked below involving Israeli F-16...will Reuters address the second photo? Contact info here...1120pm Eastern: another catch from Power Line...Beth at MyVWRC has a caption question...***

Thanks to reader THX -42

Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs has unleashed an Army of Photo Debunkers and Scrutinizers.

Dan Riehl does a big dig here, here, and here.

DFH at Drinking From Home looks at two reaction shots, two weeks apart. Jim Hoft sees more Reuters theater.

Ace of Spades spots a too-good-to-be true bit of good luck in another Adnan Hajj shot of a burning Koran--and much more.

Jawa Report is looking closely at more smoky photos, including this one credited to Adnan Hajj:

Update 845pm Eastern: Rusty at Jawa Report nails the fakery of the above photo, which was captioned "An Israeli F-16 warplane fires missiles during an air strike on Nabatiyeh in southern Lebanon, August 2, 2006."

Rusty points out: "The F-16 in the photo is not firing missiles, but is rather dropping chaffe or flares designed to be a decoy for surface to air missiles. However, a close up [of] what Hajj calls "missiles" reveals that only one flare has been dropped. The other two "flares" are simply copies of the original." Check out his replication (see post for enlarged image):

Rusty notes:

So, the original photo of the Israeli F-16 was probably of a single anti-SAM chaffe flare being dropped. In other words, the F-16 which Reuters proports to show firing missiles at Lebanon, was taking defensive measures.

But what about the "bombs" that are in the photo?

Here is a close up of them. Notice anything? That's right. The top and bottom "bomb" are the same...

Go check out the rest.

I suppose Adnan Hajj will tell us he was just trying to "remove dust marks" in this photo, too.

***

At INDCJournal, Dorkafork (gotta love that name!) dissects exactly how the Hajj digital smoke photo was altered with overlays of the original and Photoshopped images.

Thomas Lifson calls for an outside investigation of Reuters:

Since Reuters now acknowledges that it has been hoaxed, and in turn has hoaxed the world’s media, doesn’t it owe us a detailed explanation of its standards? Shouldn’t the review of the Qana pictures be put into the hands of an independent panel of experts.

Shouldn’t Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs be part of that independent review panel? After all, Reuters owes him a debt of gratitude for uncovering a mistake their own quality assurance standards were inadequate to detect.

I second that. It's especially necessary given this pathetic excuse:

“The photographer has denied deliberately attempting to manipulate the image, saying that he was trying to remove dust marks and that he made mistakes due to the bad lighting conditions he was working under,” said Moira Whittle, the head of public relations for Reuters.

“This represents a serious breach of Reuters’ standards and we shall not be accepting or using pictures taken by him,” Whittle said in a statement issued in London. Hajj worked for Reuters as a non-staff freelance, or contributing photographer, from 1993 until 2003 and again since April 2005.

Ed Driscoll has an excellent big picture explanation of how we got here (required reading for MSM photo editors and johnny-come-latelys to the story).

Also superlative: Jeff Goldstein, who concludes:

[W]hat this should remind everyone is that modern wars are as much about propaganda as they are about battles being fought in the trenches. Which is why an ideological media that believes themselves to be part of the story—and that believes themselves responsible for revealing “larger truths” (which, naturally, they decide upon, and which flow conveniently from their ideology)—is so very dangerous to a democracy, particularly when they pose as objective or neutral observers but are not, in fact, constrained by any sense of journalistic ethics redounding to that pose. Which is problematic precisely because when the information from which the people are being asked to form their judgments is being massaged and finessed through a front-ended ideological filter in an effort to help us reach the “correct” conclusion, then democracy becomes nothing more than the righteous mask placed over a sham in order to disguise its ugliness beneath a veneer of moral authority.

And Thomas Lifson at always must-read The American Thinker has a link-rich analysis.

Kit Jarrell has submitted the new term "Reutered" to the Urban Dictionary. LOL.

Ed Morrissey has good questions for Reuters:

Reuters owes us an explanation -- in fact, a couple of them. First, how did the editors at Reuters manage to miss the crude alterations Hajj made to the image in question? Is it because his doctoring helped bolster their own agenda in covering this war? Second and even more importantly, why has Reuters not pulled all Hajj images from their service? If he was willing to doctor his photos with Photoshop, why would anyone trust him not to stage his other efforts at photojournalism for his own political purposes?

11pm Eastern update: A Power Line reader looks carefully at the captions and dates in these two photos:

The question for Reuters: Which date was the building on the left flattened: July 24 or August 5?

Cox and Forkum weigh in:

***

Previous:
Reutergate: Picture kill
Where there's smoke, there's Photoshop?
Hot Air: The worst photoshop I've ever seen

IG: DoD DID NOT LIE TO 9/11 COMMISSION

Despite complaints made public by 9/11 Commission members and staff this week, the Department of Defense did not knowingly lie in testimony to the panel, according to the Inspector General. The New York Times reports this morning that the IG's report blames the inaccuracies on poor record-keeping:

The Defense Department’s watchdog agency said Friday that it had no evidence that senior Pentagon commanders intentionally provided false testimony to the Sept. 11 commission about the military’s actions on the morning of the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The agency, the Pentagon’s office of inspector general, said the Defense Department’s initial inaccurate accounts could be attributed largely to poor record-keeping.

The Pentagon initially suggested that the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the military’s domestic air-defense operation, had reacted quickly to reports of the hijackings and had been prepared to intercept and possibly shoot down one of the hijacked planes.

The Sept. 11 commission, which uncovered the inconsistencies in the Pentagon’s account, made a formal request in July 2004 for the inspector general to investigate why senior military officials who testified to the commission had made so many inaccurate statements.

This investigation lasted two years, and yet suddenly it made news this week when the 9/11 Commission members went public with their accusations of perjury. The media jumped all over this, playing up the frustration of the truth-seekers of the panel with the dastardly witnesses determined to keep the truth from them. Now we find out that no one did anything of the sort, but that they had poor record-keeping -- another scandal, but not a conspiracy -- and didn't do enough to correct their assumptions based on those records.

Does anyone else smell a plan to get ahead of the IG's report? Why would the Commission suddenly make this a big issue just before the release of the investigation they themselves requested? It certainly looks like a pre-emptive attack on the DoD by panel members hoping to get the public's blood boiling regardless of what the report would finally indicate. It certainly gave them yet another opportunity to burnish their own image as truth-seekers, when the ABLE DANGER fiasco showed otherwise.

The DoD has problems it needs to fix, and hopefully the report will expedite that effort. However, this cynical ploy by the 9/11 Commission should remind everyone yet again how the members exploited their positions for their own aggrandizement and to shelter the bureaucrats from blame.

WHEN WILL WE FINALLY GET IT?

The leaders of some of the most powerful Islamic governments in the world, all members of the 56-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference, have had a little meeting and decided to make some demands.

They want the U.N. to implement an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon (yeah, right) and then to investigate what they are calling flagrant human rights violations by ..... guess who? Hezbollah? No .. Not Hezbollah. After all, Hezbollah is only firing hundreds of rockets a week into Israel trying to kill civilians. Nope. These grand Muslim leaders want Israel investigated. For what? Defending itself?

Israel steps forward to defend itself against the Hezbollah raids and attacks and these Islamic goons issue a statement saying "We hold Israel responsible for the loss of lives and suffering ... and demand that Israel compensate (Lebanon) and its people for the losses sustained resulting from Israeli aggression,"

What utter nonsense!

My hope is that --- slowly but surely --- more and more people are coming to the realization that there is a war going on here .. a war between Western civilization and the darkness that is the Islamic religion. Islamic radicals are feeling stronger with every sunset ... and we're still sitting around listing to a lot of weird-beards call for cease fires and investigations of Israel.

U.N. OFFICIAL: HEZBOLLAH NOT TERROISTS

Our old buddy U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown is back in the news today. Remember him? This was the guy that complained not too long ago about how the United Nations was being perceived in Middle America. He was upset at how the Bush Administration wasn't defending the good works of the U.N. Anyway the same guy has come out from behind his rock to make some more interesting statements.

Brown was quoted in a British newspaper yesterday saying that he doesn't think Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. Here's the exact quote: "It's not helpful to couch this war in the language of international terrorism. Hezbollah employs terrorist tactics; it is an organization, however, whose roots historically are completely separate and different from Al Qaeda." Well isn't that nice.

The condemnation from the State Department was fast and furious. A spokesman called the comments "misguided and misplaced." But really, this is the position of the United Nations from way back. And it's not just Hezbollah. The U.N., including Kofi Annan, regularly takes the side of the Palestinians against Israel. In fact, the U.N. has historically been anti-Israel. They've let Islamic terrorism slide for decades. If Al-Qaeda hadn't crossed the line and blown up the World Trade Center, they'd probably be on their side too.

It would be tempting for people to think this is just one rogue U.N. official making wild statements, but it's not. This is what they believe over at the U.N. Which further proves the point that the organization is a complete waste of time and valuable New York real estate.