Missile Envy

Agence France just retracted a photograph that appeared on the cover of many national newspapers this morning, which showed what was supposed to be an inflammatory Iranian missile test. It appears, as the orange outlines make clear, that this evidentiary image was digitally altered by a program like Photoshop. According to The Lede at The New York Times, the Iranian government has been known to rely on the clone stamp tool before. It's also interesting to note that the source of the item about the previous forgery is the right-wing blog Little Green Footballs, which is now apparently running spoiler stories regardless of implied political ideology. The original story from the French news source no longer shows the ballet of mass firing and now only displays less compositionally interesting one-shot wonders. A blog at The Los Angeles Times admits the mistake and includes a "before" version of the photo, which explains that the motivation for the alteration may have been to obscure a failed rocket station in the center of the group.