I just spoke with Dana Goldstein from The Daily Beast, who has been trying to get more information from Reuters about the photos; so far Reuters isn’t sharing anything.

And serious questions remain.

The photographs that came from the IHH in Turkey were never attributed to a particular person, for starters. Who took these photos? Shouldn’t there be more transparency, in a case so loaded with controversy?

There’s also the issue of the “chain of custody” — whose hands did these photos pass through? Who actually did the cropping? Did Reuters receive digital RAW files of the images, or were they already processed?

And it’s reasonable to ask if the editor was a Turkish stringer or Turkish Reuters employee who took an opportunity to do a little creative cropping, in order to give the propaganda effort a little nudge. It’s not like these kinds of things haven’t happened before, and feelings are running at a fever pitch against Israel in Turkey.

Reuters, however, has been very terse and unresponsive. The only statement they’ve released was a brief post at their blog a few days ago, and now they seem to be stonewalling further inquiries. But as I mentioned yesterday, since the photo cropping was exposed LGF has had well over 2,000 visits from the Reuters Canary Wharf offices in London.

Meanwhile, the US mainstream media seem to be completely ignoring it, with the exception of Fox News; there’s actually quite a bit more interest in European media at this point. So Reuters may be able to duck accountability for this one.

UPDATE at 6/9/10 3:57:27 pm:

One question has an answer; the New York Times Lede blog has identified the person who took the photos that were cropped by Reuters as Turkish journalist Adem Ozkose: Photographs of Battered Israeli Commandos Show New Side of Raid.