Misleading Arms Photograph of the Week.

Today is only Tuesday, but this one may still hold the crown on Friday: A New York Post image, in an article claiming that new American Stinger missiles have reached the Taliban, and downed an American helicopter in 2012, showed two Talibs with two Stingers.

The article asserted that new Stingers “signed out by the CIA recently” were given to Qatar for surreptitious re-issue to rebels in Libya in 2011, and that the Qataris passed some of the stock on to the Taliban. The Taliban then used one of the missiles to strike and disable a CH-47, according to the article, and the USG covered it all up.

All of this was presented as fresh spice in the stew of allegations about the United States’ involvement in Libya, and the Benghazi affair.

For supporting art, The New York Post published ~~a judicially~~ an aggressively cropped image, which had been stripped of its context visually and via a minimalist caption.

The photo shows what it shows: Two Talibs with what clearly do look like two Stingers. Impressive, right? Readers understandably might look at it and see evidence that the Taliban has new Stinger missiles, as the article claimed.

Now look at the original, filed by AFP and available from Getty Images, below.

The photograph, as it happens, is not recent. It was shot by Saeed Khan in December 1999, during the standoff surrounding Indian Airlines Flight 814.

The airplane, in the Post’s image, was edited out. The caption – “Taliban militia stand in the back of a pickup truck with heat-seeking Stinger missiles” – made no reference to the context or the time, which was two years before the United States began its ongoing military operations in Afghanistan. (The airfield shown is now an American base.)

Whatever the merits of The New York Post’s claims, they are not supported by using a 15-year-old photograph in a manner that could lead readers to believe that the photograph showed something it did not.