On Saturday (January 14, 2006), the New York Times published a story about the last week's strike in Pakistan that included this photo.

The caption says (emphasis mine), "Pakistani men with the remains of a missile fired at a house in the Bajur tribal zone near the Afghan border."

As knowledgeable readers at Free Republic saw, as well as Jeff A. Taylor and Thomas Lifson, that item in the middle of the picture is not "the remains of a missile." It's an old artillery shell - possibly the kind that hasn't been used since the Vietnam era.

Writes Lifson,

"So the formerly authoritative New York Times has published a picture distributed around the world on the home page of its website, using a prop which must have been artfully placed to create a false dramatic impression of cruel incompetence on the part of US forces. Not only did the editors lack the basic knowledge necessary to detect the fake, they didn’t bother to run the photo past anyone with such knowledge before exposing the world to it."

Doh! By the way, the original story now carries a different accompanying photo.

(Big HT to Michelle Malkin, who added, "The only thing that would have made this staged news better: A canoe." That's a reference to Newsbusters' Mark Finkelstein's hilarious catch last October.)