The New York Times fake photo lives on. Once in the bloodstream of the left wing media, staged pictures acieve immortality because they are so useful. Slate uses* the posed pic (without comment) to illustrate an araticle questioning the legality of the air strike aimed at al Zawahiri.

As clueless as the New York Times editors, the Slate folks do not realize that an artillery shell could not have been fired by a Predator drone, nor by a helicopter, Slate cites as having attacked another site in a separate incident.

Hat tip: Adolfo Fabregat 

UPDATE:

*Slate has taken down the photo. That was quick! They don't have the decency to acknowledge the change or admit their sloppiness, though.**

** An alert reader notified me that Slate now has an explanation for running the picture:

Correction, Jan. 18, 2006: The photograph of an Afghan man holding a piece of ordnance that originally ran with this story was removed after readers brought our attention to a New York Times correction that pointed out the caption information provided by Agence France Presse was inaccurate. The unexploded ordnance was not the remains of a missile fired at a house.

Thomas Lifson  1 18 06