What goes is an account of one such elaborated fake. It concerns the following picture:
Many people know it: "Green Helmet picking up the body of a baby from the debris". The general positions of people at the photo and their lookings are seen by some as the most striking evidence of posing for a camera. People use this photo as a proof that events at Qana were staged.
In fact, most of the picture is an attempt to produce a very elaborated fake.
I will not go after all the details I know now. First because I am writing about them on my debunk of Mr. North's article "Milking It? (it is at the end of the current version of the work)". Second, because there are details still demanding some further analysis. Third, because there is one single detail that shall be remarked apart of everything. As it turns us into a wild path of speculations. But first I give a generic account of what I saw:
1. The hand seen at the foreground. Someone tried to wipe it out of the picture. The "ghost" seen around it are not the result of blurring due to the hands movement, but the consequences of using tools to clear it from the photo.
2. However, the arm was sharpened and a strong coloration of red, specially at its border. One may visually see this at its upper edeg, where it "contacts" Green Helmet's jacket.
3. Green Helmet's left arm seems distorted. Yes, his arm complexity is slightly uncommon, and on other pictures one can see his arms with same sort of "Popeye effect". But, no matter this fact, it seems that the lower section of the arm and upper are not in positions one may expect.
3. I tried to scale the picture to have a better view of it. For this, I used a tool that uses 2D DCT algorithm for scaling as it gives much better results than the Cubic Interpolation seen on Photoshop or Gimp. The result was amazing. Green Helmet's jacket, sections of the face, the radio and part of the tee-shirt were sharply pixelized, with clear visible squares in place of soft changes of colors. The phenomena could not be seen at the remaining picture, which pattern correlates to the usual results of 2D DCT algorithm. This highly suggests two things: either these sections were submitted to rough enhancements or these sections came from other photo which had a slightly different resolution. Noting that the radio's antenna seems to "cut" the frontier of the jacket in a suspect way, the last hypotesis has a reason to exist.
However, there is one detail that is more shocking than the above ones. On the picture one sees the hand ofthe baby. It seems slightly behind Green Helmet's blue pants.An enhancement gives a more questionable view, but, still, it seems behind the pants:
The detail of the hand
However:
Blue channel
Green channel
Red channel
For the average people I explain. The large majority of computer pictures are in fact greyscale pictures divided on three channels: Red, Green and Blue. Much like the TV sets most people have. Now on the Blue channel we can see a remarkable shadow over the hand. This shadow is nearly visible at the Green channel, however, the hand seems more over this side of the pants. But on Red channel we can clearly see that the pants ARE behind the hand. Besides the grays gradations, on all channels, are always suggesting that the hand is, in reality, in front of the pants. However, Blue channel shows clearly a mask over the fingers of the baby. Considering that the pants are dark blue, there is a clear evidence that someone tried to mask the hand behind them.
Here is an animation showing the sharp contrast seen at the channels:
Now a question. Why would Adnan Hajj give himself the touble to push the baby's hand behind Green Helmet? An attempt to give him a full "star spot"? Or to mask the contrasts made by other pastings over the picture? Several questions may arise but there is one quite troubling:
This picture comes from Mr. North's article "Act 1, scene 1". Here we clearly see that the hand is in front of Green Helmet's pants. In fact, this and several other details are the basis for people to consider that these pictures were "staged" for the press.
Personally, I agreeded with Mr. North's views on this specific set of pictures, no matter my sharp criticism on many other things he does. On a preliminar analysis of the pictures, made before he published his article, my conclusions were nearly dot to dot with his analysis of this set. However, I knew that one of the pictures was made by Adnan Hajj and I knew that his "Green Helmet rising the baby for the photo" is also widely retouched. So when I went on the detailed analysis of his article "Milking It?", I decided to run every possible analysis before giving a result.
While doing it, I noted the wide retouches, stopped the analysis and went for a picture better than the one published by Mr. North. And, this is the result.
Mr. North is not to be blamed whatsoever on this makeup. The photo I analysed came from sources not related to Mr. North in any way. Specifically: Yahoo!News. Besides it came to me when Hajj's works were still not known to everyone, and we still were under the massive whoopla of Mr. North "times debunking".
Why Hajj would take the trouble to "push" the baby under Green Helmet? Did he know the other picture? And if so, for what purpose he "pushed" him behind? Yes, the baby is not on the same position on the pictures. And Mr. Green Helmet does seem to have made a step behind on one of them. Besides, it seems that he rose and sat between pictures, if one considers the folds at the pants and hypotesis that we are part of the "genuine" photo. But what is real here? Why people moved? And what does it mean all these retouches? An attempt to give them "more visual efffect"? Then, why the hand?
Are we seeing an attempt to "stage" the staging? For whom?
No matter this, I highly recomend to everyone: be very suspect of Qana's photos. We have fakes there. Deliberate ones. Yes, we are seeing, again, Adnan Hajj "trademark". However I know that some photos were subjected to enhacements, one carries a signal of possible blurring. And we have "White Tee-shirt" over many pictures without his bloodied tee-shirt but with a strange brownish spot instead.
Yes, there are ways to find out things and everyone has a right for it. But if you don't have some little knowledge of imaging don't try to interpretate what you see at Qana. First learn a little bit and then go for the hunt. But, never forget to hold up that little bit of scheptics at the backyard and don't run to fast conclusions. Even I, nearly missed the hand. Fortunately one channel showed the pixelization of the jacket more sharply than the others (thanks for the jacket being poisoning orange). And that's when I noted the "blicking" at the hand while crossing the RGB channnels.
PS: I am really against advertisings but spread this news as possible as you can. We may have something much more complex than Hezbollywood's and Mr. North's "Plan 9's" scripts. Whatever it is, people, keep the faith on that famous phrase:
"There is no spoon..."
Frankly, it was the very first thing to come to my mind when I saw the jacket.
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