The news wire services are circling the wagons around their propaganda photos from Qana: News agencies stand by Lebanon photos.

NEW YORK - Three news agencies on Tuesday rejected challenges to the veracity of photographs of bodies taken in the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon, strongly denying that the images were staged.

Photographers from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse all covered rescue operations Sunday in Qana, where 56 Lebanese were killed. Many of their photos depicted rescue workers carrying dead children.

A British Web site, the EU Referendum blog, built an argument that chicanery may have been involved by citing time stamps that went with captions of the photographs.

For example, the Web site draws attention to a photo by AP’s Lefteris Pitarakis time stamped 7:21 a.m., showing a dead girl in an ambulance. Another picture, stamped 10:25 a.m. and taken by AP’s Mohammed Zaatari, shows the same girl being loaded onto the ambulance. In a third, by AP photographer Nasser Nasser and stamped 10:44 a.m., a rescue worker carries the girl with no ambulance nearby.

The site suggests these events were staged for effect, a criticism echoed by talk show host Rush Limbaugh when he directed listeners to the blog on Monday.

“These photographers are obviously willing to participate in propaganda,” Limbaugh said. “They know exactly what’s being done, all these photos, bringing the bodies out of the rubble, posing them for the cameras, it’s all staged. Every bit of it is staged and the still photographers know it.”

The AP said information from its photo editors showed the events were not staged, and that the time stamps could be misleading for several reasons, including that web sites can use such stamps to show when pictures are posted, not taken. An AFP executive said he was stunned to be questioned about it. Reuters, in a statement, said it categorically rejects any such suggestion.

These are just the first cracks in the facade.

UPDATE at 8/1/06 3:02:32 pm:

If the wire services truly want to settle the timing issue, all they need to do is release the actual timestamps from when the photographs were taken. Digital cameras automatically record this information in the photograph itself, so it would be a simple matter for the wires to provide it.

Will they? Or are we simply supposed to take their word for it?

UPDATE at 8/1/06 4:30:31 pm:

For me, by the way, the timing issue is actually not the most damning thing about the photos, or the thing that most convinces me they were staged. It’s appallingly clear when you examine all the photos that children’s bodies were posed deliberately for photo ops, and that the Green Helmet Guy was doing this for quite a long time, in several different locations often with the same body.

It’s one of the most repellent exhibitions of blatant, in your face, inhumanly calloused propaganda I’ve seen in quite a few years of exposure to the stuff.

In this post, EU Referendum collects some of the most questionable pictures and examines them without regard to their timestamps—and there is obviously very good reason for suspicion.