Wedding Party Massacre? Doubtful.....

On Wed, 26 May 2004 11:22:52 -0400, "Leslie Swartz"
wrote:

Scott, what is so elaborate about splicing x feet of wedding party footage
together with y feet of ululating widows/broken bodies of children/etc?

Splicing video? Nothing, in and of itself -- as you say, film is easy.
It's the combination of film and witnesses that would be hard to fake.
Finding different people, including eyewitnesses, in Makr al-Deeb,
Ramadi and Baghdad who say that there was a wedding going on there,
that specific people were at that wedding, that events on the video
reflect that, that the people who were killed were not insurgents,
that women and children were killed? Is the woman who says that her
children were killed there lying? The widow of the wedding singer in
Baghdad? The local chief?

At this point, interviews have been carried out in those various
places with a whole variety of different people, by AP, the New York
Times, al-Arabiya, Reuters and AFP _at least_... there may well be
other agencies involved, but I have seen reports from those agencies
in which reporters talked to folks themselves.

Not just one community, not just one family. Everyone from shepherds
to the widow of a moderately well-known Iraqi entertainer. Putting
that together with the video makes the idea that the whole thing is a
big hoax considerably harder to believe, in my opinion.

Are you saying that finding *one* unnamed person to lie about the
sourcing/circumstances of a piece of video constitutes an "elaborate hoax?"

Nope. But finding a whole bunch of them to do so about the event as a
whole certainly qualifies as an (over-) elaborate hoax. The video
itself is only part of it.

Scott