Rusty Shackleford provides some rather compelling evidence that renowned PhotoShopper Adnan Hajj is also selling photos to Reuters–still–under the name Issam Kobeisi. It gets much, much better: Hajj and Kobeisi have been selling identical photos to Reuters!

Granting that Reuters is a large organization and that oversight over massive streams of digital photos coming in from a war zone is difficult, this doesn’t speak too highly of Reuters’ vaunted editorial standards.

Update (Chris Lawrence): Rusty has posted an update that verifies that Hajj and Kobeisi are two different people; apparently, the identical photos were the result of a misattribution of a Hajj photo to Kobeisi.

Reuters has removed all 920 photos taken by Adnan Hajj from its archives:

Reuters withdrew all 920 photographs by a freelance Lebanese photographer from its database on Monday after an urgent review of his work showed he had altered two images from the conflict between Israel and the armed group Hizbollah.

Global Picture Editor Tom Szlukovenyi called the measure precautionary but said the fact that two of the images by photographer Adnan Hajj had been manipulated undermined trust in his entire body of work. “There is no graver breach of Reuters standards for our photographers than the deliberate manipulation of an image,” Szlukovenyi said in a statement. “Reuters has zero tolerance for any doctoring of pictures and constantly reminds its photographers, both staff and freelance, of this strict and unalterable policy.”

There have been several such photos from Hajj documented in the blogosphere, so this is probably best. Of course, it has the side benefit of making it more difficult for anyone outside Reuters to go back and investigate how many other Hajj forgeries have accompanied Reuters stories.

Regardless of how one feels about Reuter’s “standards” at this point, one has to give credit where credit is due: They didn’t do a Dan Rather on this one. Once the forgery was made known, they moved quickly to admit error and distance themselves from the incident. Considering that this broke on the blogs Friday night, that the first mea culpa was issued Saturday morning, the stringer was “fired” Sunday evening, and the entire database purged by Monday morning is blazingly fast even by the standards of the digital age.

UPDATE: AllahPundit notes, “The photos are still available on the wires, of course. They’ll just no longer be offered for sale by Reuters.” Interesting.

Reuters has recalled an “altered” photograph hours after coming under assault from the blogosphere.

A Reuters photograph of smoke rising from buildings in Beirut has been withdrawn after coming under attack by American web logs. The blogs accused Reuters of distorting the photograph to include more smoke and damage.

The photograph showed two very heavy plumes of black smoke billowing from buildings in Beirut after an Air Force attack on the Lebanese capital. Reuters has since withdrawn the photograph from its website, along a message admitting that the image was distorted, and an apology to editors.

In the message, Reuters said that “photo editing software was improperly used on this image. A corrected version will immediately follow this advisory. We are sorry for any inconvience.”

Earlier, Charles Johnson, of the Little Green Footballs blog , which has exposed a previous attempt at fraud by a major American news corporation, wrote : “This Reuters photograph shows blatant evidence of manipulation. Notice the repeating patterns in the smoke; this is almost certainly caused by using the Photoshop “clone” tool to add more smoke to the image.”

Take one night off from blogging to fight a cold and all hell breaks loose. . . .

Charles Johnson, Rob @ Left and Right, Michelle Malkin, Ace, and AllahPundit are among those who got on this one early and all provide excellent roundups of the photos, evidence, and blog coverage. Johnson, Rob, and Allah, especially, dug up most of the evidence.

Updated to include the image of the “picture kill” memo itself.

UPDATE: Rusty Shackleford and Jeff Harrell have excellent rundowns of photographer Adnan Hajj’s rather checkered history.

UPDATE: Rusty catches Hajj in yet another photoshopping.

Reuters has announced that it will not use any more of Hajj’s photos. (Contrary to some reports, he hasn’t been “fired.” Stringers can’t be fired, since they’re not employed.)

Ed Driscoll has a retrospective on how Reuters changed from the world’s most respected wire service to its present unreliable state.