The blunt Instruments of Propaganda

When it comes to the coverage of weapons of war, the incompetence of journalists becomes obvious time and again. On January 16, 2006, The American Thinker caught the New York Times running a staged propaganda picture allegedly showing “Pakistani men with the remains of a missile fired at a house in the Bajur tribal zone near the Afghan border.”

For every reader with a residual knowledge of weaponry it was immediately clear that this picture doesn't show the remains of a missile fired by an American armed drone (or UCAV, Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle) - but an unexploded artillery shell, probably a leftover from the Russian Afghanistan campaign or the ensuing civil war.

Today, the same picture showed up again in my letter box: TIME magazine paired it with the required dumb headline and a misleading caption. See below.



For the service of our readers, we are below posting a picture of an MQ-1 Predator armed with Hellfire missiles - the kind of weapon system that was probably used in last week's attack which may have decisively weakened Al Qaeda's capability of producing chemical weapons. Please mind the proportion between the soldiers and the missiles mounted below each wing.


Picture (c) Flug Revue

Update on January 19, 2006, 6:47 PM: Thanks to The American Thinker for linking to this post.