Poughkeepsie Journal
May 1, 2004
By Nikolas Bonopartis

In early April, a photo of a Marine posing with two Iraqi boys began circulating on the Internet.

At first glance, the photo appears to be the sort of feel-good, reassuring, soldiers-as-liberators image that appeared frequently in media reports immediately after the war. In the picture, the Marine and boys are flashing thumbs-up and beaming smiles to the camera as they stand in front of a desert backdrop.

But a handwritten cardboard sign held by one of the boys in the photo has spurred an outcry by a prominent Muslim rights group and an investigation by the Marine Corps. ''Lcpl. Boudreaux killed my dad,'' the sign reads, ''th(en) he knocked up my sister!'' ''If the United States Army (sic) is seeking to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, this is the wrong way to accomplish that goal,'' said Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, in an early April press release.

Anti-war outfits and Middle East-based media picked up on the photo, and the Marine investigation was coming to a close just as two different versions of the same photo began popping up on the Internet. The other image shows the boy holding a sign that reads, ''Lcpl. Boudreaux saved my dad, th(en) he rescued my sister!''

Just as quickly, the Marine investigation was reopened, this time with the help of Naval forensic investigators, while amateur image sleuths took to the Web's many politically-focused message boards to debate the authenticity of the photos.

The images -- and several similar examples that have surfaced in recent months -- raise questions about the credibility of a medium that was once said to ''never lie.'' And they beg the question, can you believe what you see with your own eyes?

This much is known: Reservist Ted Boudreaux of the 3rd Battalion, 23rd Marines, was deployed to Iraq and returned in September to Louisiana. ''Boudreaux claims that's him in the photo, but the text on the sign was altered or doctored,'' said Capt. Patrick Kerr, a spokesman for the Marine Forces Reserve in New Orleans. Kerr said Thursday the investigation was still ongoing, with the help of the Naval Criminal Investigation Service.

So far, no one seems to be able to say definitively whether the text in the photos is real or the work of a skilled Photoshopper. Photoshop, Adobe's popular photo editing software, has become the standard for digital retouching among both professionals and amateurs.

Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at Dartmouth's Institute for Security Technology Studies, has developed a method to analyze the mathematical data behind digital images. Each pixel has corresponding code which instructs the software to display colors. Farid's research found that unaltered images have naturally-occurring patterns. Altered portions of images, on the other hand, ''make new statistics in the image, which can be detected,'' Farid said.

But the biggest problem facing analysts is the degradation of the Boudreaux images. The images have been posted, downloaded, saved and resaved -- in the process pixilating the photos and losing data that is critical to determining authenticity.

''You have these very small images that are highly compressed, and once you start doing that, you destroy the images,'' Farid said.

Compounding the problem: The most controversial part of the Boudreaux image is the text, not a person or object, which would give far more clues to analysts.

Farid, pointing to a doctored image of a British soldier in Iraq that appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Times last April, notes tampering isn't limited to the Internet. The photographer, Brian Walski, admitted he had combined two images in Photoshop to make a more dramatic frame. Walski was fired.

Indeed, ''Photoshop actually produces the same techniques photo houses were able to do 50 years ago,'' said Victor Van Carpels, a former color specialist and production manager for People and Sports Illustrated magazines who now handles publications and photography for Marist College's admissions office. ''Everything that's done with Photoshop was once done with razor blades'' in a darkroom, he said.

Van Carpels said that skepticism can be skewed by political or cultural beliefs. While Americans may be reluctant to believe a Marine would take a photo of himself bragging about potential war crimes, many in the Middle East thought the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were nothing but doctored images, Van Carpels said.

So what are casual observers to do when they can't trust their own eyes? ''I believe it's very useful to have a healthy dose of skepticism,'' Farid said. ''That's not just in looking at pictures, but it's in everything you read or see.''

Look to the source

And when one is skeptical of an image, Farid said, it's important to consider the source. Earlier this year, a black-and-white image of a young John Kerry sitting next to Jane Fonda at a 1970s anti-war rally began popping up on the Internet. But the image first surfaced on conservative-themed Web sites, and it was quickly debunked after an image analysis found that Kerry's image had been edited out of another photo and placed into another with Fonda.

As is so often the case with news, those photos mean different things to different people, regardless of their authenticity. ''If you're willing to disbelieve, you won't believe it. And if you're willing to believe, you will believe it,'' Van Carpels said. And even with photos that are genuine, ''There's a cameraman on the other side, so there's always a bias.''

At the Council on American-Islamic Relations, staff have their own theories about Boudreaux and his photo. ''The clue I go by is one of the words is obscured by the boy's finger,'' spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said. ''If you're going to manipulate something, why would you go to the trouble to put it under the boy's finger?'' But, Hooper admits, the matter won't be solved with guesswork.

''We don't know,'' he said, ''which is why we asked for the investigation and for the military to take appropriate action.''