Military forces AP photographers to delete images
Cory Bergman March 10th, 2007
A U.S. soldier forced two freelance AP journalists to erase photos and video they took of the aftermath of a suicide bombing and shooting in Afghanistan. The AP, of course, has objected. A top ranking military official in Afghanistan said photographs or video taken by “untrained people” might “capture visual details that are not as they originally were.” Afghan witnesses say U.S. troops had fired on civilians in cars and on foot following the suicide bombing attack on a U.S. Marine convoy.
3 Comments Add your own
1. Doug | March 11th, 2007 at 12:28 pm
Of course the details would not be “as they originally were.”
There was an explosion between that time and the time the photographer took the picture.
2. ae | March 11th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
If those photogs didn’t write anything else to those cards in their cameras, the images are recoverable.
People don’t realize that just because you tell your computer/camera/etc. to delete it, it doesn’t mean its gone forever.
3. Rob | March 12th, 2007 at 10:48 am
“Untrained?” That’s horse manure. The Army is so keen on controlling the flow of information but they can’t even clean their own house.
The Army on any given day is dealing with tens of thousands of untrained photographers, videographers and writers but can’t corral all of them and force them to toe the line.
Who are those untrained people? Why they’re the riflemen, cooks and clerks that make up the Army who were trained to shoot rifles, fry spam and shuffle papers and yet they’re out there shooting digital stills and uploading them to Flickr, recording video to upload on YouTube and blogging on MySpace and the Army can’t get a stranglehold on all of them and prevent them from giving an honest, sometimes gut-wrenching glimpse at life in the mud.
As for controlling the flow of information from these AP reporters in Afghanistan, hey, good job Army. What would have been just another suicide bomb of the day (pardon the cynicism) has been given new legs with the military’s ham-fisted attempts at squelching the Fourth Estate from trying to give the world an objective, third-party view of what’s going on in that region.
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