The Daily Mail was one of the newspaper websites to publish the fake picture of Osama bin Laden's body.
The bloodied image of a man with matted hair and a blank, half-opened eye has been circulating on the internet for the past two years. It was used on the front pages of the Mail, Times, Telegraph, Sun and Mirror websites, though swiftly removed after the fake was exposed on Twitter.
It appears the fake picture was initially published by the Middle East online newspaper themedialine on 29 April 2009, with a warning from the editor that it was "unable to ascertain whether the photo is genuine or not".
© twitpic
An image purporting to show Osama bin Laden's bloody corpse, right, is a composite of two separate images, left and centre.
An image purporting to show Osama bin Laden's bloody corpse, right, is a composite of two separate images, left and centre.
The Guardian was one of the few sites to hold back from using the manipulated image on its front page, reporting the picture's existence in its live blog but questioning its legitimacy.
The image is based on a genuine photograph of Bin Laden taken in 1998 and used by the Reuters news agency.
On Twitter, a composite including the other photograph used to make the image was posted by @HannahMarbina and other users showed how easy it was to find the image already online with a simple search.
It doesn't matter that it is faked (of course). It doesn't matter that it is an old fake (of course). What matters is that media outlet after media outlet will parade this shot; and thus, despite later small print retractions, this is the image that will be planted in the minds of the vast majority of observers, trained as they are to accept the first thing they are told as truth and cling to it. The very same people who will also tell you categorically that Bin Laden claimed he under took 9-11 (something he never did) and that it has been proven that commercial jets laden with fuel can bring down high rise buildings (which they can't - especially in the case of WTC7 when a plane didn’t even hit it!) will then go on to say it is categorically proven that pigs can fly! Everything to do with 9-11 is a fake – the event, the personnel, the cover up, the world that it has created… so we should all just sit back and observe with rye irony the fake death and the fake evasion of the fake death by the fake world media.