On Sunday, the AP ran a story on this video, which was “posted on an Islamic Web site that frequently airs insurgent messages.” The video carries the stamp of the Islamic State of Iraq and purports to show an al Qaeda terrorist planting an explosive under a Bradley armored vehicle in broad daylight. IraqSlogger and The Belmont Club are both raising questions about the authenticity of this video. A friend of THE WORLDWIDE STANDARD tells us he is almost certain the video is a fraud, but without a frame by frame analysis, it will be tough to know for sure. If any of our readers can shed some light on this, drop us a line and we will post comments below.
Our friend Stuart Koehl writes in with his analysis:
The first thing I note is the Bradley in question is sitting in the middle of a large puddle at the end of a cul-de-sac–not your usual parking place. It seems to be abandoned. The second thing I notice is one of the towing cables is attached to the front hitch ring. leading back from the right front of the vehicle to somewhere off to the left rear. The figure moving around under the vehicle is thereafter obscured, so we can’t really tell what he is doing; early on, it seems he’s carrying a tarp or something under the vehicle. The canister the man is carrying later looks a lot like a 10 gallon plastic fuel can. I don’t speak Arabic, so I can’t tell you what was being circled in red off to the right side of the vehicle; it looks like U.S. troops watching the guy under the Bradley.
The subsequent explosion, however, is definitely fake. You can see how it was superimposed over the image of the Bradley, which, given the magnitude of the explosion, somehow never moves. You’d think if a large explosion ocurred under the vehicle, it would at least bounce a little. There are also no secondary explosions, no fires, no thick black smoke that is the hallmark of an armored vehicle “brewing up”. Notice that you can’t actually see the Bradley after the explosion, and that the smoke and flames are obviously “looped”. Note also the tail of the dog sticking up from behind the traffic barrier in the lower left of the frame. There’s just been a huge explosion, and the dog is not cowering or running, but trotting along happily with its tail up in the air.
The machine gun fire after the explosion is also dubbed in. Note that the splashes in the puddle are also obviously photoshopped. Finally, note that the fire at the very end appears significantly smaller than the Bradley it is supposed to be obscuring. It looks to me for all the world that, after the Bradley moved on, they spread oil and gasoline on the surface of the puddle and lit it off–creating a rolling, smokey fire that is supposed to be caused by the cooking Bradley, but which for some reason, isn’t where the Bradley is supposed to be.
The Bradley, by the way, appears to be an A3 version with explosive reactive tiles on the side skirts and around the turret–not the sort of thing you leave unguarded, contrary to all doctrine and SOP.
