U.S. Muslims [CAIR] seek Pentagon probe on Iraq photo (Is it fake?)

CAIR ^ | April 2, 2004 | CAIR

[lonewacko_dot_com]

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today called for a Pentagon investigation of a photograph circulating on the Internet that apparently shows an American soldier mocking an Iraqi child.

The photo sent to CAIR seems to be of an American soldier standing next to two Iraqi children who are giving the thumbs-up sign. One child holds a hand-lettered sign in English that reads: "Lcpl Boudreaux killed my Dad, th(en) he knocked up my sister!" ("Knocked up" is American slang for making someone pregnant out of wedlock.)

[Docbarleypop]

Plus arent all marines over there in the new cammies anyways?

[Gringo1]

[lonewacko_dot_com]

I'm no handwriting expert, but this writing appears a bit too curvilinear for someone who's a native user of the Roman alphabet. Look at the tails of the 'd's. The segment in the lower right goes down at a 45 degree angle, much like the Greek alpha. Look at the lower legs of the 'K's. They're too horizontal, and they don't match the upper legs. The 'S' in "Sister" looks almost like an Arabic letter. I also noticed a period after "Killed my Dad." However, "then" is not capitalized; most English speakers would consider that disconcerting.

[vp_cal]

bookmark

[Gringo1]

Hmmmm....my ability to post html code seems to be impeded.......any clues?

[scarface367]

It almost looks to me as if the area around a lot of the writing is fuzzy. Kind of like was photoshoped on.

[Gringo1]

[MrBambaLaMamba]

Who cares if it's faked?

9/11 and 3/11 weren't.

CAIR is a terrorist org and should be destroyed.

End terrorism, kill terrorists.

[JeepInMazar]

[fso301]

Don't forget "Knocked" being capitalized either.

[aft_lizard]

Its an obvious fake, I think the person in the picture might be a contracter or something else, all the marines over there are wearing digi's. Plus were is his country, unit or rank? he is possibly special forces, but like i said also could be a contractor.

[RushLake]

".....when this is proved to be fake, will CAIR issue an apology?"

The fact is that CAIR doesn't care about the truth. CAIR only cares about supporting the terrorist murdering trash. This was highlighted in an article in the people's Detroit News about a month ago which told about financial support for hezbollah, hamas, and other terrorist groups by CAIR and middle easterners living in the United States of America. These middle easterners include, according to the article in the people's Detroit News, those who were born here, and those who are naturalized US citizens. CAIR, ACCESS, and those muslimhyphenamericans who support Kerry are our modern 5th column.

[numberonepal]

Beat me to it. There also seems to be a font set embedded into the hex code which means it has been doctored in some program that used a font. The font set was probably used when that arabic stuff at the bottom of the picture was created. The handwriting in the pic does indeed look like handwriting and not like a font because all four e's are different, but that doesn't mean it wasn't drawn in someone's hand.

There are also places in the card board part that were obviously "stamped" from another part it.

It's a fake - case closed.

[jocon307]

Wow, you folks are great detectives. I wouldn't want to try and put a phony photo over on this group.

And the many additional fakes are very amusing also.

[TXnMA]

Anybody knows that writing on cardboard with a pencil, especially as dark as this printing appears, will cause the pencil point to puncture the cardboard at various points. There are no pressure points or puncture points shown on this piece of carboard, which leads me to believe that the original message was removed and a new one put in its place.

It seemed to me that the answer would lie in the corrugations of the cardboard, so...

I put the image into a 'technical' image processing program that allows one to build custom convolutions (filters). After boosting the contrast, I applied a 80% 5X5 LaPlacian convolution, followed by a narrow-spatial shadowing filter in the axis of the sunlight direction. This made the corrugations stand out very sharply.

You are right: the corrugations do not appear to be distorted appreciably by pencil pressure. Furthermore, the corrugations do extend into the "shadow" cast by the boy's hand.

This, and the fact that the corrrugation shadows appear to match the incident light angle, makes it unlikely that a photo of another piece of lettered cardboard was 'pasted' in atop the original. And it is certain that the image was not "cut in" around the hand shadow, as suggested earlier.

Of course, the "shadow" (whose outline looks suspect to me) could have been (using transpqrency) added with a simple editor like Photoshop.

However, my opinion is that the entire photo is a posed fake.

[new cruelty]

Fascinating. I always thought a picture was a picture was a picture. Where can I learn more about hex editors?

[agitator]

A good programmer's editor will do it, Ultraedit a good example:

http://www.ultraedit.com/

Text is not normally embedded in .jpg files however, it's common in .gif files and can serve to hide copyright information.

[clamboat]

My guess is that it's fake. Lance Corporal is a Marine Corps rank; the uniform worn appears to be Army fatigues.

Wrong. Not a fake at all. Just a scumbag that did not have the necessary grace to wear the marine uniform.

Boudreaux is a reservist with Headquarters and Service Company, 3rd Battalion, 23rd Marines, according to Capt. Jeff Pool, a Marine Forces Reserve spokesman. The New Orleans-based infantry unit deployed to the Kut area of Iraq in May and returned home in mid-September.
[...]
Investigating officers have spoken with Boudreaux and are working to determine whether the claims on the sign are true and what, if any, charges to bring against him, Pool said.

[A.A. Cunningham]

the uniform worn appears to be Army fatigues.

Incorrect. That pattern has and continues to be worn by some Marines. All Marines aren't wearing the new, exclusive to the Corps, digi pattern yet.

[dila813]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1115829/posts

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