- sekufu dgn utusan meloya & tv3

Celebrating Palestinians: Scene was not old, but was staged

The Independent Media Centre, 12 September 2001

A few days ago a Brazilian student, Marcio, claimed CNN was showing old scenes of celebrating Palestinians, claiming they were celebrating the WTC disaster. Well, the scenes were not old, but were manipulated!

"In a recent statement CNN insisted that the famous footage was shot on the day of the WTC blast. Meanwhile, German reporters of the prestigious "Panorama" TV magazine investigated how the scenes were shot. What they found out was amazing. On German TV they aired, supposedly for the first time, parts of the entire 4-minute footage not previously shown.

"It became clear that a person was animating a couple of children to cheer in front of the camera. The woman cheering was offered a candy to act cheerful. She later said she was shocked that her pictures were shown in the context of the terrorist attacks. She had no idea what they were for. A total view of the scene shows a street largely full of at best apathic people doing business as usual. Only a handful of people standing in front of the camera are celebrating.

"You can see the video online on http://www.ndrtv.de/panorama/sendung/index.html. The link is below the second picture and in German. But you can still see the pictures in the report. Forward to 7 minutes 45 seconds and watch it until the end.

"Furthermore, the highly regarded German magazine "Der Spiegel" has had an article on this. The article shows the picture of the woman getting candy and another one people showing more people in the background of the cheering kids. These people are passing by as usual.

"Read the article on: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,158625,00.html

Unfortunately, in German as well. You can still see the pictures, though."

Here's a little synapses of the article in Der Spiegel (titled "What is the truth?"):

Der Spiegel reports on the analysis conducted by Panorama. They point out that the pictures that went around the world only showed close- ups, never the whole street full of people celebrating. What Panorama found out, when watching the whole thing, was that there were shots of the street surrounding the cheering groups. These shots indicated that there were only a handful of people cheering while the majority of people passed by without participating (the second picture in the Spiegel article shows that).