The latest video attributed to the Islamic State was produced in a studio with a green screen backdrop and not shot at an outdoor location, according to the Associated Press.
The video, supposed produced by the Islamic State’s al-Furqan media arm show two Japanese men, Kenji Goto, a journalist, and Haruna Yukawa, who runs a security company, kneeling beside a black-clad “Jihad John” who demands the Japanese government pay a $200 million ransom for the release of the men.
The deadline for the ransom passed on Friday without incident.
Veryan Khan, editorial director for the Terrorism Research and Analysis Consortium, said a number of things reveal that the video is fake.
The lighting is obviously staged, he said, and a wind fluttering a hostage’s jumpsuit is noiseless.
Previous videos purportedly showing the execution of James Foley, Steven Sotloff, Peter Kassig, David Haines and Alan Henning were produced in similar fashion.
In August, an international forensic science company concluded that the video allegedly showing the execution of James Foley was a fake using “camera trickery and slick post-production techniques.”
The Steven Sotloff beheading video was supposedly obtained by SITE Intelligence Group, an organization linked to the Department of Justice, the Department of the Treasury, and the Department of Homeland Security.
In 2006 Neal Krawetz did an image-compression analysis on an al-Qaeda video released by the Intelcenter and concluded its logo was added at the same time as the As-Sahab logo. As-Sahab is supposedly the video production house of al-Qaeda.
“Al-Qaeda have a long and fruitful history of miraculously releasing video tapes at the most opportune political time for the Bush administration,” Paul Joseph Watson wrote the following year. “Both Kerry and Bush attributed the President’s 2004 re-election to Osama Bin Laden’s appearance in a video tape just days before the vote.”
The same process was used with the James Foley and Steven Sotloff videos. Both were timed to coincide with the Obama administration’s scripted response to ISIS and the alleged threat of super-terrorism begging American retaliation, Infowars.com reported in September.
The fact the latest video is an obvious fake prompted the Associated Press to speculate that “the hostage-holders are less free to move about than the Islamic state group would have its enemies believe. It could also be a way for the hostage-takers to further cover their tracks and not give experts any reliable signals to indicate where they are.”
More likely, it reveals that the video was not filmed in an area south of Raqqa in northern Syria, as claimed, and lends credence to the probability the videos are not produced by al-Furqan and are in fact creations of an intelligence agency or one of its contractors.
The videos are “part of the ISIS strategy to increase the cost of participation in the U.S.-led coalition for anyone who opposes them,” according to J.M. Berger, who wrote a forthcoming book on ISIS.
Rather the fake videos are intended to support a propaganda campaign used to exaggerate the terror threat and ramp up support for a government and military response to it.
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