While the bulk of the fighting in South Ossetia pitted tanks against tanks and infantry against infantry, the conflict also featured sophisticated propaganda efforts, on both sides. Russian and Georgian officials alike spun the facts to portray their respective nations as the victims of aggression. A year later, it's still not clear who fired the first shot. "We may never have an unambiguous picture of how the initial conflict unfolded," Hamilton wrote.

While the war's physical damage -- and, to a lesser extent, the global diplomatic fallout -- has mostly healed, the propaganda campaign continues to be controversial, especially in Russia. A widely viewed TV documentary produced by Russia's government-sponsored Channel 1 has sparked a bitter debate over Russia's manipulation of the media. "The War of 08.08.08 -- The Art of Deception" purported to dissect Georgia's propaganda tactics. But it did so with manipulated interviews and translations that themselves comprise propaganda, according to critics.

I know this because I was duped into providing material for the documentary. Channel 1 mistranslated comments I made to the network, and used them as "evidence" that Georgia had spun the international news media. Like most large Russian media outlets, Channel 1 is largely owned and controlled by the government.

The battlefields were practically still smoldering when Channel 1 began gathering material for its planned anniversary documentary. In September, one of the network's producers visited me at my home in South Carolina, asking me to comment on Georgia's propaganda efforts. With the camera rolling, I pointed to photographs, published online by Reuters and the Associated Press, that appeared to be faked. The photographs allegedly depicted Georgian civilians killed in Russian attacks, but the bodies were surprisingly bloodless. Both Reuters and the AP insist their photos are legitimate. Reuters provided scores of previously unpublished negatives to verify its photographers' reliability.

For comparison to the surprisingly "clean" AP and Reuters photos, I showed the producer my own photos, taken in Iraq, that showed victims of bombs. Pointing to a snapshot of a bloody, dismembered body, I said, "This is a photo I took in Iraq." Next, I highlighted photos from South Ossetia by Arkadiy Babchenko, a journalist for Russia's independent Novaya Gazeta, that also showed another bloody victim of an apparent explosion. "This is a man who has been wounded quite badly," I said. "That looks hard to fake."

When Channel 1 aired the interview as part of the "08.08.08" documentary, the producers had overlaid a Russian translation of my comments that misrepresented what I really said. The Russian voiceover has me pointing to Babchenko's photo and saying, "This is a photo I took in Iraq."

When he saw the manipulated interview, Babchenko was furious. On his Livejournal blog, he promised to take Channel 1 to court. He accused the network of deliberately obfuscating the origin of his photo, owing to Novaya Gazeta's critical stance towards most Kremlin policies. "To publicly proclaim on Channel 1 that Novaya Gazeta tells the truth, especially through the voice of an American journalist, that would be like publicly screwing yourself," Babchenko wrote.

Babchenko's views spread quickly, in the Russian blogosphere. "This has caused a fury," one Russian blogger told me. "The big question in the Russian blogosphere now is: who is lying, David Axe or Channel 1?" Some bloggers accused me of being a paid Kremlin agent.

Channel 1 producer Sergey Nadezhdin admitted my comments were misrepresented, when he wrote me to apologize. He claimed there was no deliberate manipulation. "We made a mistake," he said, "because we don't [sic] know that wasn't your photo when you show[ed] it as [an] example of [a] not-doctored photo." Nadezhdin said Channel 1 had placed the full, unedited text of my interview online, for anyone to see, but that few critics had bothered to consult it.

Making the unedited footage available was insufficient to deflect criticism. "If mistakes are made, there must be a public apology within the mass media, which would state what was incorrect and when," Irina Laptiva, a Russian media analyst, told the English-language news Web site Russia Profile. "If they do not do this, then I believe that it is a breach of human rights and copyright," she said.

**David Axe is an independent correspondent, a World Politics Review contributing editor, and the author of "War Bots."