The al-Reuters agenda unmasked.
And what agenda is that? Looking at the photos side by side, I don't see how one makes any political point more forcefully than the other. One of my favorite maxims is "never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence," and this seems like a good case for that.
I once noticed -- and pointed out to the AP -- a pair of faked photos that were later retracted. They were faked by the U.S. Army. They were photos of two soldiers killed in Iraq, and appeared to be the photos from their ID badges. The soldiers had been photoshopped in front of a U.S. flag. There were harsh jagged lines around the silhouette job, and the flag background was pixel-for-pixel identical in both.
My best WAG -- and it's a pretty weak one, but as good as any I can come up with -- is that some newbie screwed up cropping the photo, and in a vast overestimation of his photoshop skills, thought he could fake the cropped-out parts rather than embarrass himself by asking someone up the line to resend.
The more I see, the more I'm inclined to believe that it was not the photographer, because Reuters had the unaltered version readily at hand. In any case, at least two people screwed up -- the person who doctored the image and the person who approved it.