Shawn Thew / EPA

Occupy D.C. protesters link arms on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 20, 2012, during protest on the two-year anniversary of the high court's Citizens United ruling.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision unleashed nearly $1 billion in new political spending in the 2012 election, with media outlets and a small number of political consulting firms raking in the bulk of the proceeds.

Spending records released by the Federal Election Commission show that throughout the 2012 election, corporations, unions and individuals that could take advantage of the high court’s ruling were responsible for about $933 million of the estimated $6 billion spent during the contest.

Nearly two-thirds of the new money — about $611 million — went to 10 political consulting firms, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis. All but one of the top 10 recipients bought advertising in various media markets on behalf of super PACs and nonprofits. Eighty-nine percent of the expenditures made to the top 10 went to spots attacking candidates, the data show.

“For some in the industry, it has been a definite boon,” said Dale Emmons, president of the American Association of Political Consultants. “This election appears to have set a new benchmark on the amount of money that could be spent, because there were no limits on what could be spent.”

The 2010 Citizens United decision and a lower-court ruling allowed unlimited donations to super PACs and nonprofits, independent groups that used the funds primarily to fund ad campaigns.

Media buyers keep only a fraction of the total spending — usually 15 percent, according to Federal Communications Commission records, with the rest going to media outlets.

The winners
The top recipient of independent spending among media buyers was Mentzer Media Services, the Towson, Md.-based media placement firm run by longtime GOP consultant Bruce Mentzer.

Mentzer attracted nearly $204 million from conservative super PACs and other outside groups. In a tough year for Republicans, only 26 percent of the candidates who were supposed to benefit from the ads won their races, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis.

The firm was the preferred vendor for the pro-Mitt Romney super PAC Restore Our Future, which paid Mentzer nearly $132 million to purchase air time in presidential battleground states.

A Mentzer employee who answered the phone declined to comment on the firm’s involvement in the 2012 election.

Second was Crossroads Media, which was paid about $163 million to buy media time for conservative super PACs and nonprofits in 2012. The firm is run by Michael Dubke, the former president of Americans for Job Security — a pro-Republican nonprofit and one of Crossroads’ top clients.

Waterfront Strategies, which worked for Democratic groups, ranked third, at $81 million.

Democratic-aligned Mundy Katowitz Media, fourth on the list, was the preferred vendor for the pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA Action, placing more than $57 million in television ads for the group.

American Media & Advocacy Group, a favorite of conservative groups, ranked No. 5 at $27 million.

Target Enterprises — a Los Angeles-based media buyer for conservative super PACs — was paid $17 million, ranking it No. 6. The firm had a dismal success rate, coming in dead last among firms catering to super PACs and nonprofits. Seven percent of its preferred candidates won on Nov. 6.

A woman who answered the phone at Target Enterprises Tuesday said both principals of the company were “mid-flight” and unavailable for comment.

The Center analyzed FEC data compiled by the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Responsive Politics. The $933 million in spending came from super PACs, nonprofits and, to a lesser extent, “527” organizations that were the favorite independent spending vehicle in past elections.

FEC coordination law a ‘joke’
The Citizens United decision opened a huge new potential market for consultants, but there was a catch. Consultants who work for candidates — but also work for “independent” groups that support those same candidates — have to be careful.

The high court’s decision did not affect the ban on donations to candidates from corporations and unions, nor did it affect contribution limits from individuals. Instead, it focused on spending by independent groups, unaffiliated with candidates.

As long as super PACs act independently of the candidate, there is no danger of corruption, the high court reasoned.

But sometimes the separation between the campaign and the like-minded super PAC or nonprofit can be hard to discern.

Waterfront Strategies, for example, in its FEC filings lists the same address as GMMB — a well-known Democratic media consulting firm and the preferred vendor for President Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns.

Waterfront was the beneficiary of $81 million paid by some of the biggest Democratic outside spending groups — including Majority PAC, a super PAC backing Democrats running for Senate, and the League of Conservation Voters.

The Huffington Post reported that Waterfront is an internal branch of GMMB. It was incorporated in Delaware, and its president is listed as Raelynn Olson, GMMB's managing partner.

Both Waterfront and its parent company, GMMB, worked to elect Democrat Richard Carmona in his unsuccessful bid for Arizona’s open U.S. Senate seat. Majority PAC hired Waterfront to purchase airtime for ads supporting Carmona and attacking his Republican opponent, then-Rep. and now Sen. Jeff Flake. Carmona’s campaign hired GMMB for its ad buys in the same race.

One Majority PAC ad used the same childhood photo of Carmona that was featured in an official Carmona campaign ad.

GMMB did not reply to requests for comment.

Setting up spinoffs is more about “optics” than skirting coordination rules, said Paul S. Ryan, senior counsel for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.

Under current law, as long as a firm assigns each client separate consultants — and those two don’t coordinate their activities — that constitutes a satisfactory firewall, according to Ryan.

“That’s a pretty ridiculous and modest constraint on campaign coordination,” Ryan said.

Texas two-step
American Media & Advocacy, which also has no website, received nearly $27 million to buy media for super PACs and other outside groups.

The organization worked for the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC that paid for ads attacking Pete Gallego, a Democrat who defeated Republican Francisco Canseco in the race for U.S. House of Representatives in Texas’ 23rd District. The firm also worked for Canseco’s campaign.

Records show that at least one of American Media’s buyers purchased media in the San Antonio market for both the Congressional Leadership Fund and the Canseco campaign.

Records show that American Media shares an Alexandria address with the high-profile, bipartisan consulting group Purple Strategies. Purple Strategies failed to respond to the Center’s repeated inquiries about any affiliation that it might have with American Media & Advocacy Group.

American Media and Advocacy is “well aware of the FEC coordination rules, including the common vendor rules,” said Jim Kahl, the group’s attorney, “and they have procedures in place to comply with them.”

In Ohio, American Media & Advocacy Group was paid by the Congressional Leadership Fund to purchase ads slamming Democrat Betty Sutton in the House race for District 16. American Media was also working for Sutton’s Republican opponent, Rep. Jim Renacci.

The same person was listed in records as buying media in the Cleveland market — at the same TV station in at least one case — for both the Renacci campaign and the Congressional Leadership Fund.

Candidates and super PACs can avoid charges of coordination altogether by sending up smoke signals in cyberspace.

For example, one of Target Enterprise’s top clients was Freedom PAC, a super PAC that paid the firm nearly $3.4 million for ad buys supporting Rep. Connie Mack, the unsuccessful Republican candidate in the Florida Senate race.

Freedom PAC released an ad containing some of the same footage that was on the Mack campaign’s YouTube channel.

Under FEC coordination rules, campaign committees and the outside groups that boost their candidates may share material as long as it is publicly available.

The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit independent investigative news outlet. To read more of its stories on this topic go to publicintegrity.org

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Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth

Researchers cited this vodka ad from Blender and OK! magazines as an example of ads that reach a disproportionate number of African American youths.

African American youth culture is steeped in alcohol. References to booze have long been rife in rap music, and Jay Z, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs and Ludacris are among the hip-hop luminaries who have promoted alcohol.

A new study puts some fresh data behind long-standing concerns about alcohol marketing to black kids. Young African Americans ages 12 to 20 see far more alcohol ads on television and in magazines than youths in general, according to the report published Thursday by the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Researchers said two key factors are at play: Many alcohol ads specifically target African Americans and African American youth consume more media than youth overall. For example, African American youths watched 53 percent more television than youths in general in 2010, according to Nielsen data cited in the study.

Frank Coleman, senior vice president of the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, a leading trade group, said he hadn’t seen the study and couldn’t comment on it. But he said the industry does not target youth. “The beer, wine and spirits industry (is) totally opposed to underage drinking and spends millions of dollars a year fighting it,” Coleman said.

Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth

Study found that young African Americans see more alcohol ads in magazines, like this one that appeared in Vibe.

Despite the study findings, young blacks drink less than youths of other racial and ethnic groups. Researchers say this may be linked to factors such as poverty, social norms and religion that temper some of advertising’s impacts.

But African Americans who drink seem to suffer more serious consequences, said David Jernigan, director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth, perhaps because they tend to have less access to health care and substance abuse treatment, live in poorer neighborhoods and are incarcerated more frequently.

Alcohol consumption is linked to three leading causes of death among young African Americans – homicide, suicide and accidental injury. “There’s rationale for being extra careful,” said Jernigan, whose group receives funds from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and has put out dozens of reports on alcohol marketing to youths over the last decade.

Coleman said the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth’s research on the topic is flawed. It “has repeatedly issued press releases saying the industry’s advertising is increasingly targeting youth,” he said, even as statistics show that underage drinking is declining.

He pointed to a recent federal government survey showing that teenage drinking fell to a historic low in 2011, when 25.1 percent of 12 to 20-year olds reported using alcohol in the past month.

David Jernigan, executive director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth.

Jernigan’s study, however, stops short of claiming that advertisers are targeting black youth. “I can’t call it targeting because targeting implies intent and I can’t prove intent,” Jernigan said.

Marketers’ messages are increasingly reinforced by hip-hop culture, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, reported last year. An analysis of rap lyrics showed 64 percent of the most popular songs released from 2002 to 2005 referenced alcohol. This marked a steep rise; an earlier analysis of rap songs from 1994 to 1997 showed 44 percent contained alcohol references.

Booze ads are also common in magazines read by black Americans, said Lorreen Pryor, president of the Black Youth Leadership Project in Sacramento, Calif. “You keep flipping the pages and the (alcohol ads) are back to back.”

The study comes amid efforts to ban alcohol advertising on public property in some cities. A Los Angeles coalition has asked the City Council to ban alcohol ads on property such as bus shelters; last year, the company that manages the city’s bus benches agreed to not sell alcohol ads. Boston recently stopped advertising booze on public transit and advocates hope to extend the ban in other public areas. Minority youth frequently use public transportation and this would help shield them from alcohol ads, said Bruce Lee Livingston, executive director of Alcohol Justice, an industry watchdog.

The new study suggests marketers are falling short on limiting youth exposure to alcohol ads. Young blacks saw 32 percent more booze ads in magazines and 17 percent more on television than youth overall in 2009, researchers found. While African American youth were exposed 26 percent fewer radio ads for alcohol than youth in general, they heard 32 percent more radio ads for hard liquor.

Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth

This Skyy Vodka ad ran in Blender magazine.

In magazines, African American youth were 92 percent more likely to see ads for “alcopops” -- cheap, sweet, fizzy alcohol drinks that are of particular concern to advocates because they appeal to youth.

Alcohol advertising in magazines, overall, declined by nearly 20 percent between 2003 and 2008, researchers found, likely due to a general decline in magazine advertising.

In contrast, cable television has seen a “major ramp up” in alcohol ads – particularly for hard liquor, Jernigan said. The four largest television networks -- ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC -- do not advertise distilled alcohol. But African American youth saw 20 percent more ads for hard liquor than youth overall. “TV is going in the wrong direction,” Jernigan said.

Members of the beer, wine and distilled spirits trade associations have agreed to avoid placing ads during TV programs with audiences made up of 28.4 percent or more people under age 21. Still, advocates say these voluntary standards are poorly enforced. “The self regulation pledge has not worked,” said Alcohol Justice’s Livingston, who would like to see government regulations.

While advertisers often say they can’t keep youth from seeing messages that are intended for adults, Jernigan isn’t buying it: “The industry knows quite precisely what they are doing.”

FairWarning is a nonprofit, online investigative news organization focused on safety and health issues.

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When President Barack Obama arrived Tuesday in Afghanistan on the first anniversary of the killing of Osama Bin Laden, it was supposed to be a secret, like his earlier visits to the dangerous region. But news of the trip leaked out hours earlier, raising new alarm bells about the president's security.

The Afghan news station TOLONews reported early Tuesday that Obama had arrived in Kabul, hours before the White House's embargo on reporting the news was lifted. Other news organizations, including The New York Post and the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, cited that report, which was attributed to unnamed Afghan officials.

The U.S. National Security Council and the U.S. Embassy in Kabul both denied the report, and Obama's official schedule indicated that he was still in Washington, meeting with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta in the Oval Office:

President Barack Obama's official schedule for Tuesday indicated that the president was remaining in Washington all day.

In fact, he had left Joint Base Andrews, Md., aboard Air Force One shortly after midnight Tuesday morning.

M. Alex Johnson is a reporter for msnbc.com. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

In the face of the official denials, the Post removed its report, as did Buzzfeed, which deleted a tweet noting the news after an NSC official called it to argue that its report endangered Obama's life, it said.

Obama's previous visits to Afghanistan, in March and December 2010, were unannounced for security reasons, and news of them didn't leak out. And strict security measures were in place Tuesday as well, including a White House embargo that prevented journalists traveling with the president from reporting the trip until Obama arrived at the Afghan Presidential Palace about 11:30 p.m. (2:30 p.m. ET), hours after the TOLONews report was published.

But this time the news did get out, and at an uncomfortable time for U.S. security officials.

The apparent breach comes in the wake of an incident last month in which members of the president's advance security team were reported to have picked up prostitutes in Cartagena, Colombia, before Obama's visit to the Summit of the Americas. Eight Secret Service agents have been forced to leave the agency as a result of the scandal.

The Defense Department said it couldn't discuss the incident, and the White House didn't immediately return calls for comment. Editors at TOLONews did not respond to an email seeking comment.

Ronald Kessler, a longtime political reporter who interviewed more than 100 active and former Secret Service agents for "In the President's Secret Service," a book on presidential security arrangements, told msnbc.com that an early report on a surprise visit "clearly endangers the president when he's going into a war zone."

The biggest concern, he said, "is the possibility of attacks on the ground when (Obama) lands and thereafter."

NBC News and other news organizations learned about the trip Tuesday but withheld reporting it until Obama arrived at the palace. But "the fact so many U.S. reporters knew about it made it easier for it to disseminate," Kessler said.

Kessler suggested that the Obama administration follow the example of the administration of former President George W. Bush, "which did not let reporters know beforehand at all" when Bush traveled to Afghanistan.

"They told the press pool that they were going to go on a trip, (but) they weren't told where," Kessler said. "It was not until they got on the airplane that they were told they were going to Afghanistan."

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It's never too late to solve a mystery, or to set the record straight. In the 70 years since the attack on Pearl Harbor, a dramatic photo of female firefighters has been published many times in magazines, history books and online as a depiction of action on Dec. 7, 1941. We published it this past week on msnbc.com. Now, with the help of our readers, we've located one of the women, who says the photo was definitely not taken on that day.

Three Lions / Getty Images

The photo as distributed by Getty Images.

She's the second from the right in the iconic photo, Katherine Lowe, still living in Hawaii at age 96, where she has great-great-grandchildren and goes bowling twice a week. She can take us back to a time and place that few remember.

Marco Garcia for msnbc.com

Katherine Lowe, 96, right, looks at the photo of firefighters at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, with her daughter Yvonne Hernandez, at their home, Sunday, Dec. 11, in Laie, Hawaii, on the island of Oahu.

Here's a photo of Lowe made at her home on Sunday.

Lowe said the wartime photo was certainly not taken on Dec. 7, 1941, the day the Imperial Japanese Navy shocked the United States into joining World War II. On that Sunday morning she was headed to church when the bombing started, and she went ahead anyway because she wasn't sure what else to do. But she and her friends from the Dole pineapple factory did soon go to work as civilian workers at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, and one of their duties was to fight fires. She said the photo was probably taken at a training exercise during the war. She said she had no idea that her photo was in history books.

So the bottom line: These women were female firefighters at Pearl Harbor, the place. To that extent the photo is authentic. But they weren't fighting a fire when this photograph was taken, and they weren't fighting any fires on Dec. 7, the day we remember every year on Pearl Harbor Day. In addition to Lowe's account, there is strong documentary evidence that this is a Navy publicity photo taken to showcase the roles of women during the war.

Here's the story of the photo and the female firefighters of Pearl Harbor.

"If only we knew more..."
This past Wednesday, on the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor,  msnbc.com's PhotoBlog published a selection of historic photos provided by photo agencies. Many readers commented on the photo of the female firefighters, which they had not seen before. The photo came to us from Getty Images with the caption, "Women firefighters direct a hose after the Japanese attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor."

The photo certainly wasn't new. One can find it online on the History Channel and in several books of war photos, including Fit to Fight: Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard 1908-2008 published by the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard Association with the caption "Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, female shipyard workers manned fire hoses to extinguish the blazes at the piers." Other examples of books containing the photo are here and here and here, all depicting the photo as if it was taken just after the bombardment. The online successor to LIFE magazine goes further, placing the women fighting the fire "during the Japanese attack."

"That photo moved me to tears," wrote an msnbc.com reader with the screen name Impatient Girl. "I would love to hear about them."

"Put the picture of the women firefighters next to the famous photo of the flag being raised at Iwo Jima," wrote reader JKiff. "The resemblance is amazing. Heroism on all fronts. ... If only we knew more about the women in that photo."

Other readers raised questions. They wondered, were female firefighters really working at Pearl Harbor before the war began? Could the photo be a fake, recreated in Photoshop software?

"I agree with the few people on here who think the photo of the women is BS," wrote reader Roodles. "It looks nothing like other photos from the attack on Pearl Harbor. No smoke, no fire, no burning battleships in the background, no soot on the women and the photographer had time to get a perfect close-up."

On Wednesday evening we republished the photo on our Open Channel investigative blog at msnbc.com, asking readers to help us identify the women and to locate them or their families.

One reader, Marieange Dobresk, even speculated that the women must have worked at Jean O'Hara's brothel in the Hotel Street area of Honolulu and hurried over on the morning of the attack to help put out fires.

Finding the original
But it didn't take long to track down the real story.

One of our readers, James Collins of Washington, D.C., wrote that night to say that, although he didn't know who was in the photo, he knew who would know: Dorothea "Dee" Buckingham, a novelist and former librarian who has written extensively about the lives of women during the war. She had hoped to get a book published, but gave up and started posting her material on a free public blog instead. She's concentrating now on teaching restorative and therapeutic yoga in North Carolina, but still fields questions frequently about Hawaii and the war.

Librarians are amazing. It took Buckingham only minutes on Thursday to find the photo in the Hawaii War Records Depository, which includes a collection at the University of Hawaii of more than 2,000 photos taken by the Honolulu daily newspapers, the U.S. Army Signal Corps and the U.S. Navy between 1941 and 1946. Here's the link to this photo in the war depository.

Here's a higher-quality scan of that photo from the library's print. It's clearly the same photo, apparently made from an image closer to the original negative, because you can see detail in more areas of the photo.

U.S. Navy / University of Hawaii / Hawaii War Records Depository

A scan made last week of a Navy print of the undated photo.

And there were names! The  caption: "A crew of women fire fighters, all crews having been chosen from personnel working in the immediate vicinity of the pumper stations. From left to right: Elizabeth Moku, Alice Cho, Katherine Lowe, and Hilda Van Gieson."

A second photo
As we browsed through the online photo collection, we saw there was a second photo of these same women. The caption identifies other women in the foreground (Mary Ornellas, Minnie Cooke, Dolores Himenes, Elizabeth Raymond), and in the background our familiar four, from left, Lowe, Van Gieson, Cho, and seated holding the nozzle, Moku.

U.S. Navy / University of Hawaii / Hawaii War Records Depository

The next photo in the university archive, also from the Navy, shows the same women, in the back center.

It appears to have been taken on the same day, doesn't it? The women are dressed the same, clearly posing in groups with fire hoses shooting out streams of water, as sailors and others watch casually from a distance, relaxing by their bicycles and cars.

But what happened to the women? Might any of them still be alive?

"We were rugged"
One of the public records services that we subscribe to, Accurint, includes an address for a Katherine Lowe in Hawaii, born in August 1915, which would have made her 26 at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack. The public records gave her address in Laie, about an hour's drive from Honolulu, and gave us a cell phone number that turned out to belong to her daughter, Yvonne Hernandez. We e-mailed the daughter a copy of the photo.

"Yes, that's my mother! And my Auntie Moku!" Hernandez said, referring to Elizabeth Moku, the woman at the nozzle of the fire hose. "I am overwhelmed. My mother never mentioned any of this to me. She's shocked."

She put her mother on the phone and we talked a while about the war.

In 1941, Katherine Lowe and Elizabeth Moku were best friends, both already married with children, and working together at the Dole pineapple factory in Honolulu. "I was a trimmer," Katherine said. "It was hard work."

On the morning of Dec. 7, "We were ready to go to church. We didn't know we were at war. We went to church anyway. We were looking at all the planes bombing."

Lowe remembered the nights of fear that followed. "There was a blackout. We couldn't go nowhere. No more lights. We had to blacken up our house."

With the nation at war, she applied for one of the new civilian jobs at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, in a storage facility. For fun the women played volleyball and basketball. Another photo in the archive shows Elizabeth Moku with an undefeated basketball team. "We were rugged," Lowe said. "We carried heavy stuff, oil drums, bags, anything that needed to be stored."

Fires in the storage areas were common, and could be devastating, so "they trained us for firefighting." She said she recalled at least one time when they put their skills to use at an actual fire, but she remembers it mostly for the recreation it provided. "It was a lot of fun. We'd shoot water at one another."

Lowe said she had no memory of anyone taking a photograph, but she can tell from the two photos that they're not at a fire, probably a training exercise at the Pearl Harbor shipyard.

Lowe lost a young son during the war years. While she was at work at the shipyard, and her 3-year-old Joseph Kauhi was at a babysitter's, another child kicked him in the stomach. They didn't know what had happened until it was too late, and he died during surgery.

After the war
The women stayed friends after the war. Katherine Lowe's children called Elizabeth by the name "Auntie Moku." Moku retired as a Navy commissary cashier, and died in 1986.

Lowe went on to work as a clerk in a Navy office at Pearl Harbor, moved to Okinawa with her second husband to work for the U.S. Army, and then moved back to Pearl Harbor before retiring. She had eight children altogether (her second husband died 41 years ago), and has six children surviving now, with too many grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren to count.

She lives with her daughter and a great-grandson. She walks with a cane, and has to take her blood-pressure medicine, but she's up at 4 a.m. to hitch a ride to breakfast with friends and then twice a week to her bowling league. She said her bowling average is "145, going down," and she's rolling a smaller ball these days, just 10 pounds.

When our photographer visited, she had flowers in her hair and volunteered to do a bit of a traditional hula dance.

Marco Garcia for msnbc.com

Katherine Lowe, of Hawaiian and Chinese ancestry, demonstrates a traditional hula dance at her home on Oahu.

Lowe said she doesn't know what happened to the other women in the photo, Alice Cho and Hilda Van Gieson.

Many of our readers speculated about the ancestry of the women, noting the variety of ethnicities represented in the photograph. Katherine Lowe is native Hawaiian (Polynesian) and Chinese. Her friend Elizabeth Moku was native Hawaiian and German. Judging from surnames, Cho might be Chinese or Korean, and Van Gieson might be Dutch. In any case, a typical Hawaiian potluck.

As for Cho and Van Gieson, women of the same name are listed in the Social Security Administration's public records of Americans who have died and for whom survivors collected a death benefit. The list is indelicately called the Death Master File. We can't be certain, but the listings are for women from Hawaii and of approximately the right age.

• Hilda Van Gieson, born June 12, 1915, would have been 26 at the time of the bombing. Died in 1990.

Alice Cho is a more common name. There are two possibles:

• Alice Cho, born June 6, 1923, would have been 18. Died 1987.
• Alice K. Cho, born May 28, 1913, would have been 28. Died 1999.

Or maybe it's neither. The Cho and Van Gieson in the photo might not be the same women listed in death records.

A few historical loose ends
Getty Images lists this photo as having been taken by a stringer, or freelance photographer. It's included in Getty's Hulton Archive. Edward George Hulton Archives owned Picture Post, the popular British photo magazine, whose photo archives were eventually bought by Getty. A vice president at Getty in London, Matthew Butson, said its archives have a negative of the photo, what's called a "copy negative" made from a print.

The caption in the Getty archives takes the emotion to a new high, perhaps a fantasy from a Picture Post editor: "On that fateful December 7th, 1941, these girls of Pearl Harbor helped extinguish the flames that were raging at the naval base. They were the first women defense workers of America."

At the University of Hawaii photo depository, archive technician Sherman Seki helped us out by looking at the writing on the backs of its prints of the two photos. The women's names are on the back. The photos are not dated, but they are stamped as belonging to the 14th Naval District, Office of Public Relations, Navy Department. That suggests that a Navy photographer took the photos for publicity, to show how women were doing their part in the war effort. (Not unlike the posters used by America's wartime ally, the Soviet Union.)

W.W. Norton & Company

Soviet propaganda poster: "Women workers! Take up the rifle!"

Another note of history: The researcher Dee Buckingham points out that there were firefighters from the Honolulu Fire Department at Hickam Field on the morning of Dec. 7. All were men. Three died when a Japanese bomb fell on them. Here's her blog post about their deaths and compensation for their widows.

And there were women serving in the military at Pearl Harbor at the time of the attack, including nurses. The chief nurse, Annie G. Fox, received the Purple Heart (which at that stage of World War II could be awarded for merit or bravery without wounds) and then received a Bronze Star.

And we'll end with this, anticipating some of the comments: No, Joe Rosenthal's famous photo of the flag on Iwo Jima was not staged, though the photo was taken when a second, larger flag was raised on the island's Mount Suribachi. You can, as they say, look it up.

Joe Rosenthal / AP

U.S. Marines of the 28th Regiment of the Fifth Division and a Navy corpsman raise the American flag atop Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima, on Feb. 23, 1945.