In a world where knowledge is power, a healthy skepticism is a trait worth cultivating. Pictures, after all, do lie -- a reality that's never been more true than in the age of Photoshop and the Internet, where anyone with even modest skills can turn fakery into globally accepted truth in a matter of minutes. Stark evidence of the power of fake photos most recently came to light in the wake of Osama bin Laden's violent death at the hands of U.S. special forces. Even U.S. senators were duped into believing that a rather crude photomanipulation (above, left) -- a composite of a bin Laden pic (right) and a dead gunshot victim -- was a classified picture of the al Qaeda founder's corpse. Since photography's invention, of course, pictures have been staged, misattributed, altered, and cropped, often by photo editors whose identities are never revealed. What follows are some of the most infamous, significant faked photos in history: pictures that were initially believed to be authentic; shocked the world when they were released; but were ultimately debunked.
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