When Your Eyes Tell You Lies

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 16, 2000 | by Timothy W. Maier

"Some of the stuff from the Czechs and China was pretty damn good" says Brugioni. "While in the Middle East the Palestinians would always show Israelis as a bunch of thugs. An Israeli would have a hand raised in a photograph, and they would put a club in it to show brutality."

After the assassination of President Kennedy, the United States was accused of doctoring photographs of Lee Harvey Oswald. Brugioni was asked by the Warren Commission investigating the assassination to determine whether the shot was real. Brugioni was given the negative, he says, and his investigation "proved beyond a doubt that the shot of Oswald with the rifle was real. No doubt about it" he says. Of course having the top CIA experts claiming the photos were not altered only created more conspiracy theories, Brugioni laughs.

With the arrival of digital computers, says Brugioni, photo technology has seen great advances which have, in turn, opened the door to ready manipulation. "What concerns me about this is its effect on our legal system. Judges I have talked to about it say they are amazed how easy it is to manipulate a photograph. Yet photos are readily admitted into evidence without serious examination as to their authenticity. The legal profession is back in the Neanderthal age on this stuff. They say, `You mean it's that easy?" I say, `Photography shouldn't be accepted prima facie in court anymore.' If you have pictures of an auto accident, for instance, you should be aware that a computer technician could have wiped out the skid marks. A photo technician could have skewed the car to make it look like the accident was somebody else's fault. With 3 million accidents a year--that's a lot of photographs" to be validated.