For those of you who just can't get enough...

Kevin Drum seems to be giving the story on the Information Clearing House and the single photo much more weight than it deserves. Mainly, he's not sure what to think, but he's miffed at the media for not doing a better job of digging into this crank story.

Bottom line: I'm still inclined to think that the TV shots (and everyone else's) were deliberately cropped to make the crowd seem bigger, either for propaganda purposes or simply because photo editors generally like dramatic, closely cropped photos. On the other hand, I can't see the statue in the wide angle Indymedia photo, so it might not be honest either. Or maybe the picture is just fuzzy and I can't see it through the crowd. I dunno.

But why do I have to guess? Why doesn't our media just tell us?

Tell us what? Whether or not it was staged?

There were tons of press there, on the ground, and plenty of foreign press. If Chalabi's goons were trucked in, wouldn't this be a pretty big scoop, especially for some European or Arab press?

Or maybe, just maybe, there is no conspiracy, and the whole thing happened just as the hundreds of media outlets around the world said it did.

Is it the media's role to play whack-a-mole with every crackpot accusation that flares up on-line? Well no...that would be the job of bloggers.

Josh Chaftez thinks the ICH's story is crap too.

Okay, let's try this one more time.

Here's the ICH photo.

For one thing, it's pretty shitty quality. It's blurry, and it's dark. There's no time stamp. There's no indication of who took it. Or when. Or from where. Fills me with confidence as to its reliability. How about you?

For more comparison, here's some video of the toppling (and there's a video capture along with the story). It's the widest angle shot I could find).

Now, it's plain as day that these images are not taken anywhere near the same time.

I don't know how many people were there, and I'm not gonna count the heads of everybody I see. But this was a massively-covered story, but lots of people who would simply love to report malfeasance and subterfuge on the part of the U.S.

Will somebody tell me why anybody in their right mind should give even a shred of credibility to a dark, fuzzy, uncredited, undated, untimed photo on a third-rate website?