On my computer screen, a picture pops up, one of a few thousand that stream into the Post's photo department daily. In the photo, reproduced on this page, a Palestinian man clutches his automatic rifle, aiming at an unseen target, while an old woman looks on.

Just another gritty war scene from the Middle East? Not quite. A few awkward details pique my interest: (1) the woman is casually leaning against a doorframe amidst what purports to be a gunfight; (2) the fighter holds the rifle unnaturally high, so as to conveniently hide his face from the camera; (3) the rifle's butt-end, designed to brace snugly in the shoulder joint, is held at an odd angle. Had he fired the weapon from that position, the gun's recoil would have bruised him, and the rifle might even have kicked him in the face.

All of this convinced me the photo was staged. As an additional bit of evidence, the text in the caption provided says the Islamic Jihad gunman "holds his weapon" after an Israeli attack. From experience, I know that phrases such as this are used as euphemisms for the obvious: The guy is posing for the camera.

Such a photo should never make it into mass-circulated press agency databases. But, as in this case, they do. And too often, naive photo editors end up publishing them.

A staged picture such as this must pass at least two filters before it reaches the newspaper. First, it should have been eliminated by the photographer under scrutiny of his own professional conscience. Failing that, the photo should have been disposed of by an editor at the agency that received the photo.

From my own experience as a war photographer, I know that sometimes it's impossible to avoid people posing for the camera. But that doesn't mean those images have to end up in a newspaper: Whenever confronted with posing combatants aiming their guns at an imaginary enemy, I would dutifully take a few pictures, thank them and dispose of those pictures at the earliest opportunity...