Questions Surround Haifa Street Video

(AP)

What I'm interested in is the footage of dead Iraqi soldiers that Lara Logan claims was "obtained by CBS." But this footage was first released by Al-Qaeda!

Al-Qaeda's Islamic State of Iraq released 8 minutes of cell phone footage through its media arm, the Al-Furqan Institute for Media Productions, under the title 'Some of the Casualties of the Heretics in Haifa Street After Sunday's Fighting, January 7, 2007, in Baghdad.' The grainy images were of six or seven bodies wearing Iraqi military fatigues with 'carry-out' lunch boxes strewn about them. The images were probably taken by a cell phone, judging by quality. In one scene, a close up is shown of a soldier shot through the head, probably executed.

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The footage "obtained by CBS" is identical to that put out by Al-Qaeda. But Logan makes no mention of Al-Qaeda's video and does not address the implication that the footage she used was off an Al-Qaeda video. And if it's not off the Al-Qaeda video, then how did she get footage identical to the one used by Al-Qaeda? This needs to be explained.

"I can assure you this was not from Al-Qaeda," said Friedman, who declined to identify the source. "Whenever we can identify the source of information or video, we want to do that," he added. "There are some rare cases when we have to protect the source. In this case, we needed to do so, because it's literally a matter of life and death."

"The fact that same video shows up in more than one place is something that happens every day," said CBS News spokeswoman Sandra Genelius. "We occasionally use video from an Al-Qaeda Web site and we identify it. In this case, we didn't get it from Al-Qaeda, so we didn't identify it as such."