He (Ace) goes a little farther than I’m willing to right now. [Oops. No he doesn’t. He goes further. Sorry, folks.] He says that this is an example of “willful blindness approaching connivance with co-conspirators.” If this were a competent forgery, one that would pass even the most cursory of sniff tests, I might agree with him. But it’s so obviously doctored, even to an inexperienced eye, that anybody who thought this photo would slip through unnoticed would have to be both malicious and incompetent. Malicious to want to participate in a fraud, incompetent to think that this scheme could ever work.
Speculation follows. Hajj has been doctoring photos for a little while now (indeed, Jeff blogged about a doctored photo of an F-16 after the block-quoted post above). He's been doing it, and doing and no one has caught him out. So he's in a hurry one day - deadlines you know - so he rushes the job. Why not? It's not like anyone at Reuters has noticed the good editing he's done so far so if you let the quality slip once or twice, what's the big deal?
It looks incompetent. It's down to sloppy work under pressure.
