April 21, 2004
Behold, I am the angel of death
Via one of Atrios's readers comes this staggering photo of John Negroponte, the Bush administration's new ambassador to Iraq. Negroponte has a dirty little history of sponsoring death squads in Central America, as several bloggers have pointed out.
In this photo, we see an aristocratic Negroponte leering out at us with Picasso's "Guernica" in the background. Note also the Fox microphone in the foreground.
The photo looks authentic. A cropped version is up on the CPA site, and it matches this uncropped one fairly well. I also don't see any obvious paste lines, pixellation mismatches, or lighting shifts. If real, this is Pulitzer-quality photography. No wonder Colin Powell didn't want to appear in front of the painting before the war started last year.
Actually, this exact, uncropped picture was briefly available on the CPA home page. (I saw it with my own eyes...) It was replaced with the cropped version after Atrios posted a link to the page and someone at the CPA realized they had fucked up.
Posted by: Aristotle at April 22, 2004 03:57 PM