The story that ran spoke of the devastation being wrought upon Pakistani people in failed U.S. attempts to capture Zawahiri. To hammer the point home, the story feature the following photograph, which was said to depict the remains of a missile amidst the ruins of a Pakistani house, complete with a deeply saddened family.
The object picture above turns out not to be a missile at all (which is actually quite clear to someone with any knowledge of military hardware). It is in fact an old artillery shell that has been used as a prop in a staged photograph, designed to illicit anger against a seemingly inept and dangerous Bush administration. And it was a staged photograph that the New York Times was happy to publish without any indication of fact-checking.
Thankfully, bloggers did notice the mistake, and the Times has a corrected caption under the photograph here.
Correction: A picture caption on Saturday with an article about a U.S. airstrike on a village in Pakistan misidentified an unexploded ordinance. It was not the remains of a missile fired at a house.But isn't the damage already done?
