Fake Pics Abound On Web

(CBS)  It looks like just one more example of American misdeeds - an Internet photo showing a U.S. Marine, Lance Cpl. Ted Boudreaux, not torturing Iraqis, but making fun of them.

"Lance Cpl. Boudreaux killed my dad, then knocked up my sister," reads the child's cardboard sign. The Marines are investigating.

But, as CBS News Correspondent Lee Cowan reports, Boudreaux claims the photo is a fake.

"I wouldn't have done a thing like that in a joking manner to insult the people that we were actually there to try to liberate," he says.

He says the sign actually read: "Welcome Marines" until someone doctored it.

The camera may not lie, but today's digital technology certainly can. That picture has been doctored nearly a thousand times. There's even a Web site that offers Boudreaux's sign as a blank, so that anyone can write anything, and claim it's real.

"A joke is one thing, but that's just, it's blown out of proportion," says Boudreaux.

Some versions are so outrageous that they've brought Boudreaux's family death threats.

"One says, 'Your mother deserved to die for letting you live and not killing you when she had a chance,'" says Boudreaux's mother Ellen Gustafson.

David Mikkelson runs a Web site called Snopes.com dedicated to debunking doctored images. More and more, he says, photos from the front are coming into question.

"They're not censored, and they're getting back immediately," says Mikkelson.

The day after these pictures were published showing British troops abusing Iraqi prisoners -- calls of forgery were heard loud and clear.

Some published in an Egyptian newspaper as proof of more American abuse were later traced to a porn site - the uniforms added with a few clicks of a mouse.

"I think this is part of the problem of what's possible," says photographer Ken Light.

Light knows the problem firsthand. His picture of John Kerry was recently altered to put Jane Fonda next to him at an anti-war rally. It never happened.

"The scary part is that it can be sent out into the world, particularly over the Internet, in which people see it and they believe it's real, when it's a fairy tale."

Whether it's a whopping fish story or the president reading to children from an upside down book, proving a picture is fake these days, seems harder than proving its real.

And in Boudreaux's case, there's always going to be that doubt in people's minds.

For Boudreaux, that may be the only thing that's true about a picture he says isn't worth one word, let alone a thousand.