Sixty Four Dollars

Salon claims that "conservative bloggers suggested Monday that an Associated
Press photographer was complicit with militants who executed three Iraqi
election workers on Baghdad's dangerous Haifa Street on Sunday." A picture taken
by the Associated Press photographer is posted on the Salon site. The photo
itself raises more questions than any conservative blogger ever could. It shows
traffic backed up behind the killers, afraid to proceed further. The attack,
according to the

Associated Press's own account was carried out by "about 30 armed
insurgents, hurling hand grenades and firing guns", but the photograph itself is
taken from a fairly elevated position, as from a standing person. Here are
excerpts the account of Abdul Hussein Al-Obedi of the Associated Press:

In Baghdad, dozens of gunmen-- unmasked and apparently unafraid to show
their faces-- executed three election officials on Sunday, part of their
campaign to disrupt next month's parliamentary ballot.  ... The deadly
strikes Sunday highlighted the apparent ability of the insurgents to launch
attacks almost at will, despite confident assessments by U.S. military
commanders that they had regained the initiative after last month's campaign
against militants in Fallujah. ... Meanwhile, in a message passed on by
lawyers who visited him in his cell last week, Saddam denounced the elections
as an American plot. ...

During morning rush hour, about 30 armed insurgents, hurling hand grenades
and firing guns, swarmed onto Haifa Street, the scene of repeated clashes
between U.S. forces and insurgents. They stopped a car carrying five employees
of the Iraqi Electoral Commission and killed three of them. The other two
escaped. The commission condemned the attack as a "terrorist ambush."

It was the surely the most amazing of coincidences that placed
an Associated Press photographer in a position to openly photograph an
execution, where we are reliably informed, no less than 30 armed men were firing
guns and hurling hand grenades. The AP photographer is not in a situation
comparable to a defendant in a criminal case, who is entitled to be presumed
innocent until proven guilty. He is not in any court at all. But like the
situation involving Dan Rather and the infamous Texas National guard memorandum,
readers are entitled to wonder about the provenance of the evidence served up to
the viewers. Asking how the photographer happened to be there and take those
photographs in a shooting situation is not unlike Buckhead wondering about the
Times Roman font in the 'typewritten' memorandum. (Buckhead was the internet
poster who first spotted the discrepancies in Dan Rather's supposed evidence.)
They are legitimate questions, which as Dan Rather proved, the Associated Press
is not compelled to answer. There may be a perfectly plausible explanation for
everything, but for the record let me wonder:

1. 
   

   How the Associated Press photographer happened to be at the
   attack site at the time. Was it on his route to home or work?



2. 
   

   How he photographed the execution sequence in the midst of an
   attack by 30 persons from the middle of the major road (see the photo provided
   by Salon).

Just asking. We need to go the "country mile" to reach the
standard of proof that any responsible reader would need to form an opinion on
the issues. The best way to do that is to ask questions and though one may wait
in vain for the answers, one must ask them all the same in the same manner that
Salon is asking questions about "conservative bloggers" who "suggest" that an
"Associated Press photographer was complict". You can hardly do one and not the
other.