In the first picture, published in the Turkish newspaper, notice the ”peace activist” holding a knife in the lower right corner:

My initial reaction was to avoid hasty accusations against Reuters as this was a fairly unique set of circumstances and one that I felt needed a bit more investigation before pointing fingers began.

My understanding was and still is that the images were taken by someone onboard the ship and deleted by the security services before being returned to the IHH activist who then had the images retrieved through special software in Turkey upon their return and then passed to the newspaper to help embarrass Israel even further.

It’s not clear at this point whether Reuters took them as some kind of screen grab or were offered it in a more conventional way for distribution. What is clear, however, is the picture was obviously cropped. One could play Devil’s advocate to say that it was not done intentionally – perhaps the knife was not spotted by the Reuters picture desk or someone may have innocently, through overwork or tiredness, just made a mistake. After all, the original images had not come from Reuters staff or freelance photographers but an activist on the ship with an agenda.

However once LGF highlighted the second image that was lightened and run through Photoshop, not only did this highlight the knife that was cropped out in the Reuters image, it also showed a seriously wounded soldier who had also been removed from the image to deliberately hide the true intentions of the terrorists.

It is crystal clear that someone at Reuters has deliberately hidden key parts of the original images. What we do not know at this stage is, who at Reuters did this and more importantly why?

The use of imagery in the media war is becoming more and more widespread. There has to be a responsibility from the bloggers, website hosts and especially from the international news wire services in the way they use the images.

This appears to be a deliberate attempt to change images for a specific reason. Reuters needs to investigate this and act in an appropriate manner.