Topic: Newsmax
An Aug. 4 NewsMax article by Kenneth Timmerman (posted Aug. 3) buys into the purported Qana conspiracy, repeating claims that photos taken after the bombing were staged.
Timmerman first makes a big deal out of Human Rights Watch revising down its estimate of the death toll in Qana: "It made no apology to Israel for its earlier inflated claims." But inflated death tolls in a mass-death situation like this are not unheard of; a 2003 USA Today article points out that the death toll of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center was listed as more than 6,000 at one point before ultimately arriving at the final toll of less than 3,000. Timmerman further asserts without evidence that Human Rights Watch "appears to have played along with the Hezbollah media manipulation."
Timmerman then cites instances of Associated Press and Reuters photos from Qana that a "British blogger" claimed were "staged." Timmerman makes no apparent attempt to contact AP or Reuters for their response -- or even to bother to excerpt their Aug. 1 response to the "staging" claims, in which they claim that such staging is unlilkely, if not impossible. In fact, that AP article detailing their response to the conspiracy charge appears nowhere on NewsMax, which is an AP client.
Apparently, NewsMax is having a flashback to the Clinton years, when conspiracy theories were rampant and the truth was secondary.
