And why was it so blatant? The picture at their news conference supposedly showing villagers recently killed by U.S. forces was actually taken four years ago. Nice “allies,” eh?

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Afghan government brought the seven men to a news conference Sunday morning to bolster its claims that American forces were responsible for the deaths of civilians in a remote village last week. In addition to a dossier of grisly photographs and video clips released earlier, reporters would now hear firsthand accounts from residents of the village.

It was all going according to plan until one journalist handed the men a copy of a photograph from the government’s dossier. Alif Shah Ahmadzai, one of the villagers, declared that the photo showed people at a funeral held in his village on Jan. 16 for civilians killed by American airstrikes the day before. “I know all of them,” he said.

The trouble was that, as many of the reporters at the news conference already knew, the photograph had been taken four years earlier, in a village hundreds of miles away.

The briefing with the villagers was hastily arranged by the Afghan government specifically to rebut a report in The New York Times on Sunday that much of the evidence in the dossier, assembled by President Hamid Karzai’s aides, had been misrepresented or could not be verified, including the four-year-old photo.

Now, the seven villagers were pointing to the photograph, which was actually taken at a funeral for victims of a NATO airstrike in northern Afghanistan in 2009 and was distributed then by Agence France-Presse and Getty Images.