On October 25 2023 CNN ran a story “Before and after satellite images show destruction in Gaza” CNN. (Update; also run on euronews 10/27/23) The story shows 5 before and after images of destruction in Gaza said to be from before and after October 7th.
It is difficult to figure out how the images on the right match a place in the image on the left. This includes turning the images on the right around. The one below is the third image in the set.
Presumably the green farm area in the upper right quadrant, image on the left, matches the green farm area in the upper right quadrant of the image on the right.
If this is correct there is a problem. The red rectangle in the image on the right would be the approximate position of the apartment bloc in left image. Trees grow mighty fast in Gaza.
None of the other four image pairs in the article seem to show the same terrain at all. What is the motivation for this fraud?
These images were given to CNN by a company called Maxar Technologies (Wikipedia). Maxar, formerly based in Westminster CO, was bought by Advent International in May 2023 (Wikipedia). Advent is a private equity firm with international holdings and as of 2022 was worth $89B.
On May 31, 2017, Advent and Bpifrance completed the acquisition of Safran Identity & Security (Morpho, now renamed IDEMIA), after receiving clearance from antitrust and regulatory authorities. “Didier Lamouche was appointed President of the Executive Board and Marwan Lahoud Chairman of the Supervisory Board of OT-MORPHO. This acquisition raised a series of concerns: Wikipedia
IDEMIA is a multinational technology company headquartered in Courbevoie, France. It provides identity-related security services, and sells facial recognition and other biometric identification products and software to private companies and governments. In the 2020 report Out of Control Amnesty International criticized Morpho (IDEMIA) for supplying “facial recognition equipment directly to the Shanghai Public Security Bureau in 2015.”
IDEMIA provides products to various federal and state government entities in the United States and is the leading provider in the issuance of driver’s licenses. (Wikipedia). Various civil rights organizations have criticized the government’s contracts with IDEMIA, expressing concerns about sharing sensitive biometric data with a private and unregulated third-party company. However, in April 2020 the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), now part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, that provides technology, measurement, and standards that impact a wide range of products and technology, ranked IDEMIA 1st for iris recognition underlining its algorithms performance and accuracy.
Marwan Lahoud is a Lebanese Maronite who lives in France. Before his appointment at IDEMA he worked as the deputy managing director of strategy for Airbus. “His unexpected February 2017 departure from AIRBUS seems linked to the corruption scandal in which AIRBUS was involved from 2012. “Airbus ran ‘massive’ bribery scheme to win orders” (title of the article in the Financial Times of January 31, 2020 in which he is mentioned).” (Wikipedia).
Hmm. What we do know is Hamas has Russian weapons from Vlad Putin delivered compliments of Iran’s Ayatollah Khameini. Right now attention has been diverted from Ukraine’s so far successful advance into Russian held territory.
Some supposedly patriotic politicians wanted to cut aid to Ukraine. They said Ukraine could never successfully breach Russian defenses. The House just selected a new President that formerly didn’t want to back Ukraine. Breaking the US-NATO alliance would be very helpful to the Chinese and Russian regimes. Ukraine’s gains are being overshadowed thanks to Hamas’ terrorist attack.