Tuesday 30 April 2013

down under again . miss the little moments in nepal

I am Down Under  again.

I miss those magical moments in  Nepal already. Like this meeting of eyes in an interaction that somehow reminds me of a old Ozie Joke about  the similarity  of the Ozie bloke with  the Ozie wombat.

The bloke is like a wombat because he " eats roots and leaves"  . He roots, shoots and scoots.



purveyor of Propaganda for the powerful. -the sad reality of the bbc- again

in just over two days I came across  two stories that show the sad reality  of the biggest, publicily funded, news organisations in the world.  The beeb shows what it is really about. It is the purveyor of Propaganda for the  powerful.



BBC criticised for dropping film with 'severe ramifications' questioning the mass exodus of Jewish people after fall of Jerusalem in AD70

  • Film maker Ilan Ziv accuses the BBC of succumbing to political pressure
  • Jerusalem: An Archaeological Mystery Story was due to air last Thursday
  • BBC claims the documentary was axed because it 'did not fit editorially'
  • Viewers attack the Corporation for dropping the show
  • Academic Dr Siam Bhayro says axing of the show is strange, given the BBC's past record of airing controversial documentaries






Film maker Ilan Ziv accused the BBC of 'incompetence' and suggested they succumbed to 'conscious or subconscious political pressure' after they decided not to broadcast it.
In a blog post, Mr Ziv said the decision to axe the programme was: 'Ultimately a sad saga of what I believe is a mixture of incompetence, political naiveté, conscious or subconscious political pressure and, I believe, a lack of courage of broadcasters when they are faced with the complexity of the Middle East issue and the intense emotions, fears and aggression it generates.'






'Ridiculous pandering to a small interest group! The BBC used to ask the tough questions.....now they cower in fear due to some fundamentalist Zionists whose world vision is as warped as any other fundamentalist religious group.'


Controversial documentary: Jerusalem: An Archaeological Mystery Story questioned whether the Jewish exile from Jerusalem in AD70 ever happened
Controversial documentary: Jerusalem: An Archaeological Mystery Story questioned whether the Jewish exile from Jerusalem in AD70 ever happened
The BBC denied that the film had been dropped because it was controversial and said it 'did not fit editorially' with a series of historical archeology films.
However, Israeli-born Mr Ziv claimed a 'mini political storm was brewing' at the Corporation in the days before the documentary was due to broadcast.



http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2316492/BBC-criticised-dropping-film-severe-ramifications-questioning-mass-exodus-Jewish-people-fall-Jerusalem-AD70.html




Apologists for Israel take top posts at BBC

23 April 2013

130423-israeli-occupation.jpg

Israel’s occupation is airbrushed from the BBC’s coverage.
 (Issam Rimawi / APA images)
The American poet T.S. Eliot wrote that “April is the cruelest month.” The phrase springs to mind in April 2013, the month that a new director-general took up his post at the BBC and, within two weeks, had installed a line-up of hardline Zionists at the top of the world’s largest publicly-funded news organization.


Soon after his own appointment, Hall named James Harding as the BBC’s new director of news and current affairs. Until December, Harding was editor of The Times, an avowedly right-wing, pro-Israeli paper owned byRupert Murdoch’s News International group.
In 2011, Harding spoke at a media event organized by The Jewish Chronicle, telling his audience: “I am pro-Israel. I believe in the State of Israel. I would have had a real problem if I had been coming to a paper [The Times] with a history of being anti-Israel. And, of course, Rupert Murdoch is pro-Israel.”


Glee

The strongly Zionist Jewish Chronicle reprinted those words with glee as news of Harding’s BBC appointment broke. And it also took the opportunity to remind its readers that, during the Israeli massacre in Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009, when more than 1,400 Palestinians were slaughtered, Harding wrote a Times editorial titled, “In defense of Israel” (“Signs of The Times at JCC,” 14 April 2011).




http://electronicintifada.net/content/apologists-israel-take-top-posts-bbc/12395

Sunday 28 April 2013

images in the interests of Authority.

Controlling images is  what authorities want to do. All the time.  They want to 'Manage' Perception and make manipulating the masses, a fact of life in our connected age.

 The article below gives one an interesting insight into how images are controlled in the  interests of those in power.   Controlling their spread and their reading, though, is something that will not be easy in our increasingly digital age.





The Multiplier Effect and the Role of the Photograph in Boston

FBI
In this image released by the FBI on April 18, 2013, two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing walk near the marathon finish line on April 15, 2013 in Boston, Massachusetts.






For more than 100 years,” said special agent DesLauriers, “the FBI has relied on the public to be its eyes and ears. With the media’s help, in an instant, these images will be delivered directly into the hands of millions around the world. We know the public will play a critical role in identifying and locating them.” As soon as the images appeared online, the site was inundated with tips and inquiries. The size of the net cast in the search for the as-yet-unnamed suspects had instantly increased by a factor of millions.
At the same time, the FBI agent tried to control the multiplier: “For clarity, these images should be the only ones—the only ones—that the public should view to assist us. Other photos should not be deemed credible and unnecessarily divert the public’s attention in the wrong direction and create undue work for vital law enforcement resources.”
The overall coverage rate of images has increased considerably since 9/11. The volume of data files, of unstructured digital imagery from mobile devices and ubiquitous surveillance cameras, for any given event, is staggering. From the moment of the blasts in Boston, and before, the number of still and moving images recorded provided nearly complete coverage. At this point, analysis technology is struggling to keep up with collection technology. The often-repeated claim by law enforcement officials that “there’s no such thing as too much evidence” is being sorely tested.







It appears that crowd-sourcing did not lead directly to the apprehension of the suspects, but the barrage of images may have flushed them out into the open.
Terror, like its father, war, is all about destroying bodies. If bodies are not distressed, maimed, and killed, it’s not doing its job. The Brothers Tsarnaev did most of their infernal work all at once, with two timed explosions of low-tech shrapnel-packed IEDs spraying mayhem into a crowd of onlookers. Whereas the 9/11 terrorists hit high and rained down destruction, the Boston bombers hit low and spread out, crippling victims from the waist down, an especially horrific assault tactic in the context of a running event.
Afterward, the images of Boston under siege showed most Americans, for the first time, the face of the new post-9/11 Homeland Security state, with military-level armaments and armored vehicles, surveillance helicopters equipped with thermal imaging technology to detect human bodies under cover, and overwhelming firepower. Shock and Awe had come home to our own backyards, mobilized in the end to track down one 19-year old college student. This was a different kind of multiplier effect: an attempt was made to clear the streets of the city, to get everyone to “shelter in place” and become spectators alone in front of their screens.

Afterward, the images of Boston under siege showed most Americans, for the first time, the face of the new post-9/11 Homeland Security state, with military-level armaments and armored vehicles, surveillance helicopters equipped with thermal imaging technology to detect human bodies under cover, and overwhelming firepower. Shock and Awe had come home to our own backyards, mobilized in the end to track down one 19-year old college student. This was a different kind of multiplier effect: an attempt was made to clear the streets of the city, to get everyone to “shelter in place” and become spectators alone in front of their screens.



April 19, 2013. Police officers surround a house in Watertown, Massachusetts during a manhunt for suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing.
Samantha England—Reuters
April 19, 2013. Police officers surround a house in Watertown, Massachusetts during a manhunt for suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing.
After the older brother was killed in a ferocious firefight, and law enforcement was closing in on the younger brother, someone made a grisly autopsy image of the slain terrorist, naked, battered, and bloody, and emailed it around to first responders, to act as confirmation. Then it went viral on the Net and had a different effect, as vengeance pornography, unleashing a torrent of sneers and slurs in an orgy of virtual vigilantism.
The larger autopsy has only begun, of course, and the questions are many. Some of the most pressing are about how images are operating now, in a changed environment, and how the new faces of terrorism are mirroring or tracking the features of our relation to images—shifting from the organized and coherent structures of institutional bodies to atomized, alienated individuals acting alone.

David Levi Strauss is the author of From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (Aperture 2003), Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (Autonomedia 1999), and the forthcoming Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow. He is Chair of the MFA program in Art Criticism & Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York.


Read more: http://lightbox.time.com/2013/04/22/the-multiplier-effect-and-the-role-of-the-photograph-in-boston/#ixzz2RlEaIDcO



http://lightbox.time.com/2013/04/22/the-multiplier-effect-and-the-role-of-the-photograph-in-boston/?iid=lb-gal-viewagn#1

Saturday 27 April 2013

"Zionism is a colonisation adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force."

Colonisation was , is and will always be, the most obnoxious and dangerous of all human behaviour.  It should not be allowed to exist. Not anywhere.




Re-turning rights

Like everything else with Zionism and Israel, their conception of rights is never universal but always particular.

Last Modified: 20 Apr 2013 11:02
Joseph Massad

Joseph Massad is Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University.



The Palestinians have neither died away nor forgotten their rights, and those among them who remain on the land continue to be steadfast in the face of Israel’s colonial expulsion policies [AFP]
Since its inception, the Zionist project was clear in its goals and the strategy required to achieve them. In order for Jews to colonise the lands of the Palestinians and establish an exclusivist Jewish state, Zionist strategists insisted, the natives must be driven out of the country. For Zionism, colonisation and expulsion were to be simultaneous processes that could not be decoupled from one another: indeed, they would become the very same process. 

Colonisation as expulsion
At the same time, Zionism insisted, following Millenarian Protestant Restorationist claims, that European Jews, rather than being descendants of European converts to Judaism, were actually descendants of the ancient Hebrews who had been allegedly exiled by the Romans in the 1st century AD. Based on this double fiction, Zionism claimed that European Jews were in fact "returning" to Palestine in order to colonise it, indeed that European Jews had the "right" to return to their original "homeland". Thus Jewish colonisation was one and the same as Jewish "return" to Palestine, just as it was one and the same as the Jewish expulsion of the Palestinians from the country.

Once Zionism had political control of Palestine, it followed two policies to ensure that its colonial project continued unhindered. On the one hand, it insisted that the Palestinians it expelled had no right of return to Palestine and that it would prevent their attempt to return by military means while expelling as many as possible of those who remained; on the other hand, it decreed in 1950 a "Law of Return" for Jews, endowing them with the right to colonise Palestine, which it presented as a right to recolonise it. Turning the rights of the Palestinians to their homes and homeland into the rights of European Jews to "return" to Palestine was and continues to be the main political, legal and ideological strategy of Zionism and the principal policy of the state of Israel. This translates into the only political formula that Zionist and Israeli leaders as well as the Palestinian people agree on, namely that Jewish colonisation means expulsion of the Palestinians, and Palestinian return means Jewish decolonisation. What the two sides disagree on is which part of the formula they want to enforce.






Return as decolonisation
Rhetorically, Zionism has understood the power of the right of return, not only in its legal and ethical dimensions, but also in its ability to undermine the meaning that Zionists attributed to that very same conept. After all, it was Zionism which insisted that European Jewish descendants of European converts to Judaism were in fact descendants of the ancient Hebrews who had been allegedly expelled from ancient Palestine and whose "repatriation" and " return" was a moral and political imperative 2,000 years later. Note that Zionism's argument is not a historical one, wherein it was and is not claiming that the alleged Hebrew exiles of the first century should have had the right to return to Palestine then, but rather that their fictional descendants should have the right to do so two millenia later. These ideological premises would be enshrined in Israel's very own "Law of Return" passed by the Knesset in July 1950. Yet, it is the same Zionists who insist that the return of the Palestinian refugees, whether immediately following the expulsion in 1949, or every year since is imparctical and impossible. Today, they express shock that refugees should have a right to return to their homeland a mere 65 years after their expulsion while they insist on the rights of Jews to "return" after 2,000 years. 


Thursday 25 April 2013

why they do it.


another Greenwald article  that is worth the reading.  



The same motive for anti-US 'terrorism' is cited over and over

Ignoring the role played by US actions is dangerously self-flattering and self-delusional
Islamic Society of Boston mosque
A banner reading 'United We Stand For Peace on Earth' outside the Islamic Society of Boston mosque in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photograph: Allen Breed/AP



"The two suspects in the Boston bombing that killed three and injured more than 260 were motivated by the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, officials told the Washington Post.
"Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 'the 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, has told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack,' the Post writes, citing 'US officials familiar with the interviews.'"
In the last several years, there have been four other serious attempted or successful attacks on US soil by Muslims, and in every case, they emphatically all say the same thing: that they were motivated by the continuous, horrific violence brought by the US and its allies to the Muslim world - violence which routinely kills and oppresses innocent men, women and children:

Attempted "underwear bomber" Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab upon pleading guilty:

"I had an agreement with at least one person to attack the United States in retaliation for US support of Israel and in retaliation of the killing of innocent and civilian Muslim populations in Palestine, especially in the blockade of Gaza, and in retaliation for the killing of innocent and civilian Muslim populations in Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan and beyond, most of them women, children, and noncombatants."

Attempted Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, the first Pakistani-American involved in such a plot, upon pleading guilty:


"If the United States does not get out of Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries controlled by Muslims, he said, 'we will be attacking US', adding that Americans 'only care about their people, but they don't care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die' . . . .
"As soon as he was taken into custody May 3 at John F. Kennedy International Airport, onboard a flight to Dubai, the Pakistani-born Shahzad told agents that he was motivated by opposition to US policy in the Muslim world, officials said."
When he was asked by the federal judge presiding over his case how he could possibly have been willing to detonate bombs that would kill innocent children, he replied:
"Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don't see children, they don't see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody. It's a war, and in war, they kill people. They're killing all Muslims. . . .
"I am part of the answer to the US terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people. And, on behalf of that, I'm avenging the attack. Living in the United States, Americans only care about their own people, but they don't care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die."








There seems to be this pervasive belief in the US that we can invade, bomb, drone, kill, occupy, and tyrannize whomever we want, and that they will never respond. That isn't how human affairs function and it never has been. If you believe all that militarism and aggression are justified, then fine: make that argument. But don't walk around acting surprised and bewildered and confounded (why do they hate us??) when violence is brought to US soil as well. It's the inevitable outcome of these choices, and that's not because Islam is some sort of bizarre or intrinsically violent and uncivilized religion. It's because no group in the world is willing to sit by and be targeted with violence and aggression of that sort without also engaging in it (just look at the massive and ongoing violence unleashed by the US in response to a single one-day attack on its soil 12 years ago: imagine how Americans would react to a series of relentless attacks over the course of more than a decade, to say nothing of having their children put in prison indefinitely with no charges, tortured, kidnapped, and otherwise brutalized by a foreign power).
Being targeted with violence is a major cost of war and aggression. It's a reason not do it. If one consciously decides to incur that cost, then that's one thing. But pretending that this is all due to some primitive and irrational religious response and not our own actions is dangerously self-flattering and self-delusional. Just listen to what the people who are doing these attacks are saying about why they are doing them. Or listen to the people who live in the places devastated by US violence about the results. None of it is unclear, and it's long past time that we stop pretending that all this evidence does not exist. 




http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/24/boston-terrorism-motives-us-violence

more on the language americans use. . again, its frightening for the rest of us.


Language  can  be a weapon.  One does not need  Orwell  to point  that  out.  The new speak pouring out of America is frightenting. 


IED=WMD?

Why the Justice Department’s charge against the Boston bomber is ridiculous.

BY TIMOTHY NOAH | APRIL 22, 2013

Maybe Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction after all.
An 11-page federal criminal complaint charges Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving alleged Boston Marathon bomber, with "unlawfully using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction ... against persons and property." The WMD in question was, the document explains, "an improvised explosive device."
Give me a break. Even granting that the language of the law is not the same as the language of everyday speech, it's ridiculous to call the bombs that went off in Boston "weapons of mass destruction." If any old bomb can be called a WMD, then Saddam most definitely had WMDs before the United States invaded Iraq 10 years ago. And if an IED is a WMD, then Iraq actually ended up with more WMDs after the U.S. invasion than before (and isn't entirely rid of them yet).


The linguistic fault lies not with prosecutors but with Congress, which in the interest of expanding prosecutorial powers broadened the legal definition of "weapon of mass destruction" until, as Spencer Ackerman of Wired put it, federal statute could no longer distinguish "dangerous weapons from apocalyptic ones." Under 18 USC §2332a, a weapon of mass destruction might be what it's always been understood to be -- a nuclear, biological, or chemical weapon. But it can also mean any bomb, grenade, or mine, any rocket with a propellant charge exceeding four ounces, or any missile with an explosive charge exceeding one-quarter ounce. A July 4 cherry bomb, if deployed with sufficient malice, would suffice.
No one minds the hyperbole when it comes to the Boston attacks because the perpetrators of this crime committed an unusually gruesome murder. But the term "WMD" also applies to international relations. Mere possession of WMDs has, in the recent past, been used to justify invading a country and overthrowing its leader. Does the United States really want to put on notice every nation whose military arsenal includes bombs, grenades, and/or mines that they could be next? If we did, our only allies might end up being Andorra, Lichtenstein, Monaco, and the Vatican. (How many WMDs does the pope have?)



This may seem a pedantic point, but the Bush administration used the WMD label to muddy the question of whether Saddam Hussein merely had chemical and biological weapons (a proposition for which it was thought there was much evidence, though it turned out he didn't), or whether he also had nuclear weapons (a proposition for which there was no plausible-seeming evidence even at the time). The confusion level got so high that the New Republicin an editorial, demonstrated that it had come to think of chemical and biological weapons as the only weapons of mass destruction. The magazine justified invading Iraq on the grounds that Saddam was "the only leader in the world with weapons of mass destruction who has used them." In fact, as I noted at the time, U.S. President Harry Truman had possessed a much more fearsome category of weapon in 1945 and had, ahem, used it. Twice.


frightening amercia.



Is this for real?? Is she real?????
To think that a former Governor and potential  American President actually believes this  is just frightening. More than frightening , actually. And these are the people who want to run the world. Run it, actually.  Run it to one big Ruin. 



"We don't know everything about these suspects yet," Palin told Fox and Friends this morning, referring to Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who allegedly carried out the Boston Marathon attacks. "But we know they were Muslims from the Czech Republic.
"I betcha I speak for a lot of Americans when I say I want to go over there right now and start teaching those folks a lesson. And let's not stop at the Czech Republic, let's go after all Arab countries.
"The Arabians need to learn that they can't keep comin' over here and blowing stuff up. Let's set off a couple of nukes in Islamabad, burn down Prague, then bomb the heck out of Tehran. We need to show them that we mean business."



Monday 22 April 2013

boston bombings. conspiracy theory or just facts to face up to?


More homegrown "Columbine" than anything connected to Al Qaeda ??



Chechen Terrorists and the Neocons

April 19, 2013
The revelation that the family of the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings was from Chechnya prompted new speculation about the attack as Islamic terrorism. Less discussed was the history of U.S. neocons supporting Chechen terrorists as a strategy to weaken Russia, as ex-FBI agent Coleen Rowley recalls.

By Coleen Rowley

I almost choked on my coffee listening to neoconservative Rudy Giuliani pompously claim on national TV that he was surprised about any Chechens being responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings because he’s never seen any indication that Chechen extremists harbored animosity toward the U.S.; Guiliani thought they were only focused on Russia.

Giuliani knows full well how the Chechen “terrorists” proved useful to the U.S. in keeping pressure on the Russians, much as the Afghan mujahedeen were used in the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan from 1980 to 1989. In fact, many neocons signed up as Chechnya’s “friends,” including former CIA Director James Woolsey.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
For instance, see this 2004 article in the UK Guardian, entitled, “The Chechens’ American friends: The Washington neocons’ commitment to the war on terror evaporates in Chechnya, whose cause they have made their own.”

Author John Laughland wrote: “the leading group which pleads the Chechen cause is the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). The list of the self-styled ‘distinguished Americans’ who are its members is a roll call of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusiastically support the ‘war on terror.’

“They include Richard Perle, the notorious Pentagon adviser; Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame; Kenneth Adelman, the former US ambassador to the UN who egged on the invasion of Iraq by predicting it would be ‘a cakewalk’; Midge Decter, biographer of Donald Rumsfeld and a director of the rightwing Heritage Foundation; Frank Gaffney of the militarist Centre for Security Policy; Bruce Jackson, former US military intelligence officer and one-time vice-president of Lockheed Martin, now president of the US Committee on Nato; Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, a former admirer of Italian fascism and now a leading proponent of regime change in Iran; and R. James Woolsey, the former CIA director who is one of the leading cheerleaders behind George Bush’s plans to re-model the Muslim world along pro-US lines.”









Shifting Lines
But officials can get confused when their former covert “assets” turn into enemies themselves. That’s what has happened with al-Qaeda-linked jihadists in Libya and Syria, fighters who the U.S. government favored in their efforts to topple the Qaddafi and Assad regimes, respectively. These extremists are prone to turn against their American arms suppliers and handlers once the common enemy is defeated.

The same MO exists with the U.S. and Israel currently collaborating with the Iranian MEK terrorists who have committed assassinations inside Iran. The U.S. government has recently shifted the MEK terrorists from the ranks of “bad” to “good” terrorists as part of a broader campaign to undermine the Iranian government. For details, see “Our (New) Terrorists, the MEK: Have We Seen This Movie Before?”

Giuliani and his ilk engage, behind the scenes, in all these insidious operations but then blithely turn to the cameras to spew their hypocritical propaganda fueling the counterproductive “war on terror” for public consumption, when that serves their interests. Maybe this explains Giuliani’s amazement (or feigned ignorance) on Friday morning after the discovery that the family of the alleged Boston Marathon bombers was from Chechnya.

My observations are not meant to be a direct comment about the motivations of the two Boston bombing suspects whose thinking remains unclear. It’s still very premature and counterproductive to speculate on their motives.

But the lies and disinformation that go into the confusing and ever-morphing notion of “terrorism” result from the U.S. Military Industrial Complex (and its little brother, the “National Security Surveillance Complex”) and their need to control the mainstream media’s framing of the story.

So, a simplistic narrative/myth is put forth to sustain U.S. wars. From time to time, those details need to be reworked and some of the facts “forgotten” to maintain the storyline about bad terrorists “who hate the U.S.” when, in reality, the U.S. Government may have nurtured the same forces as “freedom fighters” against various “enemies.”

The bottom line is to never forget that “a poor man’s war is terrorism while a rich man’s terrorism is war” – and sometimes those lines cross for the purposes of big-power politics. War and terrorism seem to work in sync that way.



http://consortiumnews.com/2013/04/19/chechen-terrorists-and-the-neocons/

cameras and conspiracy theories. more on the boston bombings.

All those photographs and video images from the Boston bombings , did more than help the authorities  quickly track down  the alleged bombers.  They are being touted as proof that will keep any 'conspiracy theorists' who think of challenging the official version of  what happened, quiet.  They are proof  of what actually happened, you are told. Amateur interpreters of the images are not to be trusted . Only the so called  "experts" will read them right.
What is forgotten, very convienently, is that many of 'amateurs' challenging official narratives are highly qualified professionals . The fact that they do not work for the Authorities does not make their reading  any less worthy of attention  or belief than  the official 'Experts" so carefully praised in the article that follows.


The spin is in .


Having more photographic evidence from a scene does not necessarily tamp down outlandish theories.
Having more photographic evidence from a scene does not necessarily tamp down outlandish theories. Photo: Reuters
Minutes after the Boston bombing, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube began filling up with pictures and videos documenting the attack. There were clips showing the explosions, graphic images of the injured and chilling photos of the gruesome aftermath of the scene.

The images were captured by bystanders with mobile phones and digital cameras, by professional photographers working for news organisations and companies that sell souvenir pictures to runners, and even by the runners themselves. It's likely that the attackers were counting on this imagery: Marathons are public monuments to thousands of moments of personal triumph, the sort of moment that now commands us to pull out our phones and press record. Whoever they were and whatever their larger aims, the people who did this wanted us to witness it.

My Slate colleague Dave Weigel sees a small silver lining in these photos. Photographic evidence, he argues, will tamp down conspiracy theories about the attack. There are already some irrational people arguing that the government planned this attack as a kind of "false flag" operation, but unlike truthers who glommed on to previous catastrophes, Boston conspiracy theorists will have to confront photos and eyewitness accounts that contradict their theories about what happened.









Compared to the Kennedy assassination – which was documented by a single iconic film reel of terrible fidelity – there were so many pictures of what happened on 9/11 that it seemed unthinkable that anyone would question the official story in the same way people doubted that Oswald had killed Kennedy alone. But doubts about 9/11 began immediately, and pictures were a key part of the alternative storylines.

If you watch Loose Change, the touchstone 9/11 truther documentary, you'll see lots and lots of photos that purport to prove that the government was somehow involved in the attack. Yes, the pictures don't tell the full story – there were lots and lots of pictures taken on 9/11 that call the conspiracy theories into question – but that's not apparent in the film, which picks and chooses just the ones that support the conclusions it wants to make.

I suspect we'll see the same thing in Boston. Pictures of real life after an attack are messy – people and objects are often in places that don't seem to make sense, especially when examined by amateurs who don't understand the context in which the photos were taken.
By scrutinising enough shaky, blurry pictures and videos closely enough, sceptics are sure to spot little things that seem off. Look, there's a man on the roof of a building – why? Why is this garbage can here rather than there? Does the man in the gabardine suit look like a spy? After finding enough of these little things that don't make sense, the conspiracy-minded often paste them into a larger storyline that, to them, makes a whole lot of sense if only people would consider it.

None of this is to say that pictures aren't valuable. They are; trained investigators who spend hours scrutinising all the documentary evidence from the Boston bombings may well find clues pointing them to the culprits. But let's not expect anything more than that. Conspiracy theorists believe what they believe because they believe it. Pictures aren't going to stop them.









http://www.canberratimes.com.au/technology/technology-news/photos-wont-stop-boston-conspiracy-theories-20130418-2i22j.html