BB FANS

Appeal court quashes media gag over White House meeting



An attempt to prevent the press from repeating British concerns about US military tactics in Iraq, including the killing of civilians in Falluja and President Bush's alleged suggestion that the offices of the Arabic satellite TV station al-Jazeera should be bombed, was quashed by the appeal court yesterday.

The issue arose during the trial of David Keogh, a Whitehall communications officer, and Leo O'Connor, a former researcher to a Labour MP, jailed under the Official Secrets Act in May for disclosing the contents of minutes of a White House meeting between George Bush and Tony Blair on April 16 2004.

The contents of the minutes were discussed in camera - in front of the Old Bailey jury but with the press and public barred. Speculation had been published about the document's contents, including claims that Mr Bush wanted to bomb al-Jazeera.

The trial judge, Mr Justice Aikens, imposed a sweeping injunction preventing the media from repeating speculation, already published, about the contents of the documents.

Yesterday, in a case brought by the Guardian and other newspapers and broadcasters, Lord Phillips, the lord chief justice, and two appeal court judges ruled the allegations could be repeated by the media.

However, they also ruled that suggestions that those allegations accurately represented evidence given in secret during the trial risked being in contempt of court. The judges also said the media could not publish a particular phrase uttered in open court by Keogh when he was asked about the document. The media can, however, say Keogh was said to have described the contents as "abhorrent" and "illegal", and that he believed the memo exposed Mr Bush as a "madman".

The court heard that April 2004 was a particularly delicate period in Iraq. It is known, and was widely reported, that British officials and military commanders were expressing concern about US tactics. The British were concerned in particular about the US assault on Falluja, including the use of white phosphorus.

guardian

US offers $20bn arms deal to isolate Iran Timesonline

It's easy for soldiers to score heroin in Afghanistan

Simultaneously stressed and bored, U.S. soldiers are turning to the widely available drug for a quick escape. www.salon.com

By Pascale Harter 59 minutes ago
"Galactic Suite," the first hotel planned in space, expects to open for business in 2012 and would allow guests to travel around the world in 80 minutes.


Its Barcelona-based architects say the space hotel will be the most expensive in the galaxy, costing $4 million for a three-day stay.

During that time guests would see the sun rise 15 times a day and use Velcro suits to crawl around their pod rooms by sticking themselves to the walls like Spiderman.

Company director Xavier Claramunt says the three-bedroom boutique hotel's joined up pod structure, which makes it look like a model of molecules, was dictated by the fact that each pod room had to fit inside a rocket to be taken into space.

"It's the bathrooms in zero gravity that are the biggest challenge," says Claramunt. "How to accommodate the more intimate activities of the guests is not easy."

But they may have solved the issue of how to take a shower in weightlessness -- the guests will enter a spa room in which bubbles of water will float around.

When guests are not admiring the view from their portholes they will take part in scientific experiments on space travel.

Galactic Suite began as a hobby for former aerospace engineer Claramunt, until a space enthusiast decided to make the science fiction fantasy a reality by fronting most of the $3 billion needed to build the hotel.

An American company intent on colonizing Mars, which sees Galaxy Suite as a first step, has since come on board, and private investors from Japan, the United States and the United Arab Emirates are in talks.

PLENTY RICH ENOUGH

If Claramunt is secretive about the identity of his generous backer, he is more forthcoming about the custom he can expect.

"We have calculated that there are 40,000 people in the world who could afford to stay at the hotel. Whether they will want to spend money on going into space, we just don't know."

Four million dollars might be a lot to spend on a holiday, but those in the nascent space tourism industry say hoteliers have been slow on the uptake because no one thought the cost of space travel would come down as quickly as it has.

Galactic Suite said the price included not only three nights in space. Guests also get eight weeks of intensive training at a James Bond-style space camp on a tropical island.

"There is fear associated with going into space," said Claramunt. "That's why the shuttle rocket will remain fixed to the space hotel for the duration of the guests' stay, so they know they can get home again."

In an era of concern over climate change, Galaxy Suite have no plans so far to offset the pollution implications of sending a rocket to carry just six guests at a time into space.

"But," says Claramunt, "I'm hopeful that the impact of seeing the earth from a distance will stimulate the guests' urge to value and protect our planet."
yahoo

From Google to gaggle


People quoted in featured stories on Google's US news site now have the right to reply, marking a fundamental shift in the search engine's role



Misquoted? Comments taken out of context? Don't get mad. Get heard. That seems to be the principle behind a new feature launched by Google last week on its US news site. The Californian search engine giant is allowing what it calls "participants" in news stories to post comments directly on to its main news aggregation page alongside news items.

Already scientists and academics who feel journalists have given only a partial picture of their work have taken to commenting on reports, while McDonald's was quick to respond to research into the impact of junk food advertising on kids.

Google's "experiment" seems to have brought the company a step closer to being a provider of content rather than merely a gatekeeper to other websites, as it actually hosts the comments itself - although copyright remains with the person who sent them in.

The media industry has an uneasy relationship with Google News. Many executives tolerate its rather cavalier attitude to copyright because it brings a wider audience to their content. News stories take readers straight to the originating outlet's website, boosting traffic and therefore advertising revenues. Adding comments directly to Google's own site, however, could circumvent the readers' blogs and comment sections, not to mention letters pages, of those very news organisations.

Multiple viewpoints

Google maintains that adding comments to stories builds on the ethos of its whole news service. Google News was created by one of its research scientists, Krishna Bharat, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11. He was looking for multiple viewpoints on the news and found it tiresome trawling around the web, so created a programme to do it for him. The service uses a variety of parameters that go beyond merely citing the most-read stories about a particular topic, and trawls more than 4,500 English-language news outlets across the globe.

"With that background," explains a Google spokeswoman, "it's not hard to see why someone thought 'let's do something to increase the viewpoints and help people discover more perspectives'."

Writing on Google's own blog, Dan Meredith and Andy Golding, software engineers within the Google News team, say: "We're hoping we can help enhance the news experience for readers, testing the hypothesis that - whether they're penguin researchers or presidential candidates - a personal view can sometimes add a whole new dimension to the story."

The worry for everyone else in the media, however, is how Google can ensure the comment function is only used by people who actually are "participants" in a particular story. Given the site's huge audience and the speed at which the web news industry operates, sometimes leaving little time for fact-checking, it is not hard to imagine how a well-placed fictional comment could skew the news agenda.

In the early stages of the trial, Google is using contact information available on the internet to get in touch with people and organisations involved in specific news stories to ask them to comment. This, for instance, is how Vic Strasburger, a professor of paediatrics at the University of New Mexico, came to comment on an Associated Press article last week in which he had been quoted. The article was about Stanford University research into fast food which showed children reacted strongly to branded wrappers when choosing food.

"I'll do a 15- to 20-minute interview, and two sentences will appear about what I've said," he told the Wall Street Journal afterwards. "So the Google feature is a chance to flesh out those two sentences." Following his comment, Walt Riker, from the McDonald's corporate communications department, posted his own lengthy response.

Anyone involved in a story who has not been contacted directly by Google can send an email to news-comments@google.com, with their comment, contact details and a link to the story commented on.

This last part, however, is slightly misleading because it is a news thread and not a particular story that gets tagged with a comment. Last week, for instance, a thread appeared on Google News consisting of a main headline story from Time magazine labelled Baby Einsteins: Not So Smart After All, a second news story from Fox entitled Educational Videos May Not Make Baby Brainy, and a comment from Dimitri Christakis, director of the Child Health Institute at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Clogged with spam

Christakis had conducted research into DVDs such as the Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby series, which are supposed to provide intellectual stimulation for young children. His research showed that for every hour a day spent watching these DVDs, infants learned six to eight fewer new words than babies who had not watched them. In his comment, Christakis says: "In general, the coverage has been accurate," although he adds, "some of the headlines have been a bit sensationalised".

His comments originally appeared under the Time story, but as the day wore on the top story on the thread became Baby DVDs Hinder Language Growth from the Times of India and Learning from DVDs May Impair Word Power from India's Economic Times, while his comment remained in place.

It is hard to see how this experiment is not going to drag Google further into the editorial process. A spokeswoman for the search engine stressed: "We are not getting involved in editing the comments ... we are providing the comment feature so people can post and we will verify their identity," but added that Google will not allow inappropriate comments.

Yahoo! News has already experimented with a similar service. It had forums based around specific news stories, but pulled them last year when the threads became clogged with spam and other unrelated content. "We are researching ways to improve the quality of the posts and how we can do that, whether through a machine or other editing processes," says a spokesman.

Mike Butcher, editor of BitesMedia.com, a media blog network, is in no doubt about the potential impact of Google's comment section. "This is an attempt by Google to hijack not only media but the entire online conversation. Since it does not own the rights to republish the news content, its next best option is to own the content produced by people commenting."

He believes Google is filling a vacuum left by media companies that refuse to allow readers to comment on stories online. "News providers are losing control of the story," he adds. "The best they can do is try and win back readers by allowing comments. Whether Google has any right to redirect the 'conversation' back to its own site is something I dare say the lawyers will be arguing about for some time to come." guardian

"Ask the American Indians what happens when you don't control immigration."

Gumtree comes to America



Gumtree: strong demand from existing users who have moved to the US

UK classifieds website Gumtree is expanding to the US from today, targeting expat communities in New York, Boston and Chicago.

Gumtree is aiming to pitch its service at the 2 million British, Australian and Polish expatriates in the US, targeting a niche community within the classified ads market.

"The classified market in the US is quite fragmented and there are lots of players," said a spokeswomen for Gumtree.

"There has been a strong demand for this from existing users who have moved to the US and we are very confident about this launch."

Gumtree, which claims to be the UK's largest local classifieds website, is free to read and free to advertise on, with the exception of job ads in London and Edinburgh, which cost £19.95.

The site records around 3 million unique users each month and 20,000 adverts are posted each day.

In the US, Gumtree will be promoted through existing users, local media and search marketing as it joins the largest classified advertising market in the world.

The launch coincides with recent US research by Veronis Suhler Stevenson that concluded internet advertising would surpass newspapers to become the largest advertising segment by 2011, worth $62bn (£30.8bn) for the year.

Gumtree was acquired by eBay in May 2005 as part of a strategy to build a base in the classified market.

The company also acquired a 25% stake in US classified site Craigslist, Dutch site Marktplaats, Loquo in Barcelona and Intoko in Turkey, and recently launched the Kijiji network of international classified sites.

guardian

Gingrich: Young Americans 'Massacred' by Illegal Immigrants
By EUNICE MOSCOSO - Cox News Service


WASHINGTON — Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Tuesday he is "sickened" that President Bush and Congress went on vacation "while young Americans in our cities are massacred" by illegal immigrants.

Gingrich, who is considering a run for the White House, was referring to the recent execution-style murders of three college students on a school playground in Newark, N.J.

One man whom police believe was involved in the murders — Jose Lachira Carranza — is an illegal immigrant from Peru who had been released on bail on charges of raping a child when the murders occurred.

Gingrich said that the "war here at home" against illegal immigrants is "even more deadly than the war in Iraq and Afghanistan."

"The federal government's incompetence, timidity and uncoordinated efforts to identify and deport criminal illegal aliens have had devastating consequences for innocent Americans," Gingrich said in a newsletter.

"As an American, I am sickened that the political leadership of America could continue to go on vacation and do nothing," he said. "Why are the August vacations for the president and the Congress more precious than the lives of young Americans who are being killed because of government incompetence and inaction?"

Gingrich said another suspect in the Newark murders is an illegal immigrant from Nicaragua with a long record of arrests who was ordered deported in 1993 but never left.

However, The (Newark) Star Ledger reported Tuesday that the man — Rodolfo Godinez — obtained permanent legal residency in 2001.

The Newark Police Department did not return requests for comment.

Gingrich said that Bush ought to be furious at the failure of bureaucracies to protect the American people.

In addition, he said the president should call Congress back into a special session for three days to pass a bill in honor of the slain students.

The measure should order the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to outsource the development of an identification system to check the legal status of felons and have it up and running by Jan. 1, 2008, he said. He added that the government should withdraw federal aid from any city, county or state that refuses to participate in checking the legal status of arrested felons.

"No illegal alien criminal will be released back into the American population to prey upon Americans," he said. "After they finish time for their crime, they will be retained until deported."

At the White House, spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore said that "the president is deeply saddened by this tragedy and his heart goes out to the victims' families."

"Officials at the Department of Justice work tirelessly every day, around the clock to combat crime in communities across our country," she said.

John Trasvina, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said it is "beneath contempt" for Gingrich to use the tragic, violent murders in New Jersey to attack immigrants, particularly at a time when many immigrants are fighting for the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"It's unfortunate that he finds that the road to the White House is going to be the low road," Trasvina said.

Police allege that six people, including four juveniles, were involved in the Aug. 4 murders of Terrance Aeriel, 18; Dashon Harvey, 20; and Iofemi Hightower, 20, according to news reports. A fourth victim, 19-year-old Natasha Aeriel, survived after being shot in the head.

Three of the six are in custody, including Carranza, who turned himself into police.

Police have said they believe that robbery was the motive for the killings.

coxwashington

Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Wednesday that the issue of illegal immigration angered people unlike no other, including the unpopular war in Iraq, and sparked unprecedented death threats against him.

"It is unbelievable how this has inflamed the passions of the American people," the Arizona senator said in remarks at The Aspen Institute, a public policy forum. In an interview, he declined to elaborate on the threats he had received.

Still, McCain said, he continued to support a temporary worker program for the 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States. Derided by critics as amnesty, the program was one of the most controversial elements of the failed immigration bill supported by President Bush and a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the House and Senate.

McCain acknowledged that the immigration issue, along with his support for the war in Iraq, had cost him politically.


"Look, I've got to do what I know is right for this country. These issues I have to take head-on," he said.

McCain said the United States is making progress in Iraq, and he recommended that the U.S. take a hard line against Iran. He said an alternative is needed to the United Nations, where Iran's supporters have blocked sanctions, and that the U.S. should set up another coalition with democratic nations.

Russian President Vladimir Putin should be barred from the next meeting of the G-8, the coalition of western leaders who meet to discuss world issues, McCain said. Putin wants to reunite the former Soviet Union and has surrounded himself with former members of the Soviet spy agency, the KGB, to crack down on opponents, he said.

McCain said the G-8 was founded on fundamental economic and democratic principles and that Russia no longer meets the qualifications for G-8 membership.

"We have to make it clear to Putin that this kind of behavior makes him, in many ways, a pariah. The next year when they're meeting, stay home, Vlad," he said. huffingtonpost

Terror law puts Britons at risk of surveillance by US agents




A new law swept through Congress by the US government before the summer recess is to give American security agencies unprecedented powers to spy on British citizens without a warrant.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was approved by Congress earlier this month to help the National Security Agency in the fight against terrorism. But it has now emerged that the bill gives the security services powers to intercept all telephone calls, internet traffic and emails made by British citizens across US-based networks.

As much of the world's telecoms networks and internet infrastructure runs through the US, the new act will give the security services huge scope for monitoring and intercepting Britons' private communications, as well as those of other foreign citizens. The new act has led to fears it will see a huge increase in the number of British citizens being extradited to the US.

'Just because it happens to pass through the US they claim they can do whatever they want,' said Tony Bunyan, director of Statewatch, the civil rights group that campaigns against state surveillance. 'Where is the EU saying, "What's going on here, we've got to protect the rights of our citizens?"'

The Dutch Liberal Democrat MEP Sophie in 't Veld has tabled a series of questions demanding answers from the EU parliament. In a statement to European politicians, In 't Veld warns the US law will 'directly apply to EU citizens and constitutes a major violation of privacy and civil liberties'.

The law has prompted a furore in the US, where it was opposed by Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. But other countries seem ignorant of its consequences. 'There's been a lot of upheaval in Congress about this new act over fears Bush will use it to eavesdrop on US citizens,' In 't Veld said. 'But it can and will be used for the communications of Europeans.'

She pointed out many companies and organisations are based in the US and that the new law will give the US powers to monitor their communications. 'For example, I would like to know what sort of communications go via the UN,' In 't Veld said.

Concern over US powers to monitor foreign citizens is growing. European privacy watchdogs have expressed fears that the US authorities are to be handed powers to check the personal details of travellers entering America and store them on databases alongside details such as their sexuality and religious beliefs for up to 15 years. The watchdogs, including the Information Commissioner of England and Wales, Richard Thomas, have been scathing in their criticism of the European Commission for granting the US its demand for the new powers.

In a coded statement the Information Commissioner's office yesterday acknowledged concerns that the privacy of some four million Britons who travel to the US each year is at risk because of the new powers.

'We will continue to work alongside our European data protection colleagues to try to ensure that airline passengers' details are protected by the appropriate data protection safeguards,' a spokeswoman told The Observer. Observer

FOX ATTACKS IRAN
FOX

BeliefWatch: Reincarnate


In one of history's more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. msnbc.msn

A hot air balloon's basket bursts into flames shortly after takeoff when it was about 25 feet off the ground in Surrey British Colombia Canada Friday evening Aug. 24, 2007. Witnesses said passengers screamed and jumped to the ground. The balloon reportedly took off from a grassy field with 12 passengers. The balloon crashed in a trailer park and campground , injuring as many as 11 people, police and local reports said. Two additional people were unaccounted for. (AP Photo/Don Randall) Mandatory Credit: Don Randall

Save us from hell of Darfur, say refugees


Women who have fled the violence of Sudan are facing discrimination in a culture which fails to distinguish between adultery and rape

Mariella Frostrup in Djabal refugee camp, Chad

The Observer

There are some stories you instantly want to forget, but they are often the ones that remain with you forever. In a hushed and claustrophobically hot room in eastern Chad, sitting on a hard mud floor scattered with rush mats, my own worst nightmares were brought to life by another woman's story.

You will have read about the conflict in Darfur, of the rapes and mutilations, of an estimated 200,000 people dead and 2.5 million forced to flee their homes in search of safety for themselves and their families. Despite endless United Nations initiatives, the attention of our Prime Minister and President Nicolas Sarkozy in France, and the campaigning of such celebrities as George Clooney and Mia Farrow, it remains for most of us a distant conflict in a world scarred by many such battles. Jaded from daily TV channel-hopping, we shrug off another genocide.

It seems both intangible and hopeless. Until you find yourself inches from a woman like Hawaye, her baby daughter Nadjva sucking on her malnourished breast as she tells us what drove her from Sudan to the Djabal refugee camp where we sit. 'They came at seven to our village, the janjaweed militia,' she says, the fact that she mentions the time seeming a poignant effort to give some structure to the evil that followed. Her husband was away when the rebels arrived and set about their business - the livestock rounded up, homes torched, men and boys mutilated and murdered, and finally the moment that she replays over and over, when one of the horsemen rode up and, with a machete, decapitated the baby that she held in her arms. She didn't have time to mourn. The murderers took her with them and kept her hostage for 15 days, repeatedly raping and violating her before they moved on.

But for many women, surviving is the worst-case scenario. Hawaye was reunited with her husband, but the fact that she had lived made her guilty of complicity in her 'loss of honour'. He divorced her. She briefly got lucky when another refugee with two children married her, a rare occurrence for rape victims, who are seen as unclean. You are no doubt hoping for a happy ending? When he found out about her ordeal, which she had kept secret in fear and shame, he also divorced her. Taking with him three of their four children. Now she lives hand-to-mouth, discriminated against in a misogynistic culture which refuses to differentiate between rape and adultery, even when the crime is being used as a weapon of war against its own women. Hawaye has no hope for the future and lives solely for her only remaining child, her daughter, haunted day and night by the atrocities she has suffered.

I listened to many other first-hand accounts of similar horrors in the company of eight eminent political leaders and campaigners, all women, who had come to the camps to bear witness to what is happening. Led by Ireland's former President Mary Robinson, and including four of Africa's most inspirational women, there wasn't a dry eye among them by the time Hawaye herself broke down. Nigeria's ex-finance minister and former World Bank vice-president Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala; Kenya's Dr Musimbi Kanyoro, secretary general of the World YWCA, a global movement of 25 million women committed to female empowerment; Bineta Diop, Senegalese founder of Femmes Africa Solidarite; Asha Hagi Elmi Amin, an exiled Somali, member of the transitional parliament in Mogadishu and the Pan African Parliament, and founder of Save Somali Women and Children; none of them strangers to the brutality of war, all silenced by the horror of what we heard.

I was a mere six hours' flight from London, my mobile phone worked perfectly, yet it felt like a different universe. Arriving at the camps of Goz Beida a few hours earlier, I admit my first feeling was one of confusion. Where were the starving and the desperate? There was even a centuries-past charm about this lush plain littered with well tended grass huts. Although the huge spread of hastily erected tarpaulin-roofed shacks detracted from the view, I'd seen much worse on television. Yet beneath the veneer of order achieved by the dedicated charity staff from the likes of Oxfam and Save the Children, the reality is terrible. Under the fragile layer of grass that the rainy season has produced lies red earth that will soon be cracked and dry. As the leaden skies and torrential rains recede, so the rebels, those real-life horsemen of the apocalypse, will resume their murderous rampages. More women like Hawaye and her companions will have their lives destroyed and their children murdered.

The population of the remote outpost of Goz Beida has swollen in the past four years from 7,000 to upwards of 60,000. Some 15,000 of these are refugees who escaped the mayhem of Darfur before the journey became too perilous, the majority recent arrivals from Chad, no more than 30 kilometres (about 20 miles) away, where rebels, some home-grown, are starting to ape the bloodletting of the militias over the border.

The tragedy here is further compounded by the random nature of this armed struggle, part tribal, part religious, part political, and fuelled by greed for oil revenue. The scale and complexity of the problem is often obscured by the all-inclusive tag 'janjaweed', which simply means 'sinister men on horseback'.

Even in the supposed safety of the camps, undernourished children in rags and women young and old with the shadows of horror on their exhausted faces struggle to coexist with the interchangeable groups of government troops and rival militias. Menacing gangs, impossible to tell apart in copycat army fatigues, wander freely, brandishing guns and machetes. Violence is a daily reality. Women who are forced to stray out of the camps to find firewood are often raped. The night before I arrived, a body was found just outside the charity compound where I stayed.

Despite destitution and lack of food, all that these desperate victims, most of them women and children, are unanimously begging for is security. Here in Europe we could send a force to protect them immediately. The people of Darfur and eastern Chad don't have the luxury of waiting months for diplomacy to take its course: their need is urgent. If we fail women like Hawaye, it is we who should be haunted forever by their nightmare.

How the conflict began

The conflict started in 2003 in Darfur, an arid province of Sudan, Africa's largest country. Rebels began attacking government targets. The government launched a military response. At the centre of the conflict is rivalry for resources, including water, between nomadic herders, backed by Khartoum, and those who farm the land - tribes from which most of the rebels come. Some 200,000 people have died, while 2.5 million more have fled their homes.

While the conflict has tended to be reported in terms of a struggle between the Arab Muslim Janjaweed militia, riding into villages on camels to rape and kill black tribesmen (also largely Muslim), the situation has been more complex. The government admits mobilising 'self-defence militias', but denies links to the Janjaweed despite evidence to the contrary. The UN agreed in July to deploy 17,000 peacekeepers.

· The Global Day for Darfur is Sunday 16 September. For more details go to: globefordarfur.org

Open Letter to the Associated Press: Government Propagandists 1; AP 0

Posted September 12, 2007



To: Matthew Lee, Anne Flaherty and AP Washington editors



CC: Americans and American media who rely on the AP

Bcc: Washington press corps reporters, if they exist, who have a shred of independence from the government left.

Mr. Lee and Ms. Flaherty, you should be ashamed. You know somewhere in your hearts that your stories about President Bush's upcoming speech have helped the government float a trial balloon it desperately needed to watch before the final text and talking points are approved on Thursday.

The initial AP report on the speech ran among other places on the Dallas Morning News Web site yesterday without a byline under the headline "Bush to announce Iraq troop reduction."

The lede was amazing in both its simplicity and its ability to mislead. It read:

"President Bush will tell the nation this week he plans to reduce the American troop presence in Iraq by about 30,000 by next summer, but will condition those and further cuts on continued progress, The Associated Press has learned."

That story and the follow-up with your bylines did nothing more than allow government speech writers and communications staff to test the waters further to see whether mainstream reporters for the national media would buy their frame -- that the president wants to "reduce" troop levels in Iraq -- when the evidence and the facts in the story show that nothing of the sort is under consideration.

Let's be honest. The AP knew when it took this information yesterday "on background" with no attribution and no direct quotes and reported it around 4 p.m., just in time for evening newscasts all over the country that it was being used. The reporters knew it, and the editors knew it.

The AP didn't break this story after tireless research and independent verification. The AP didn't uncover any new information on its own. The AP was fed -- with a wink and metaphoric handshake that this somehow was some sort of leak -- the way this administration has fed national reporters all of its propaganda since it began building its case for this disastrous war.

My journalism students at Columbia and NYU know the difference between a leak and a feed. They know the technical difference, and they know the ethical implications. (A leak is when someone gives you something they shouldn't release and risks consequences if they are discovered. A feed is when propagandists hand you something to print with the tacit approval of their bosses.)

The White House gave you the information with a specific purpose. It wanted to see if national media would buy the frame "Bush to announce troop cuts." And the national media did, as the Kansas City Star and others showed today by running the follow-up that bears the Lee and Flaherty byline.

The government that is running this war wanted to make sure that the story that comes from the president's speech on Thursday isn't framed or given the more precise and accurate headline "Bush to continue surge for at least another year." And the AP happily obliged.

In return for a feed, the AP gave the government a lede and frame its propagandists desperately need to sell a war Americans overwhelmingly want to end. The AP confirmed to the propagandists that their frame is plausible -- at least to the Associated Press.

And by virtue of the role the AP plays in American media, the frame and the word "reduce" were distributed to virtually every newspaper and most television stations in the country yesterday.

The truth is that this administration pitched a "surge" to Americans last spring with the same hubris and "thumb in the eye" lies it pitched the original war. Our government told us it wanted to increase troop levels in Iraq temporarily during the summer of 2007. It's propagandists fought desperately to keep anyone from using the word "escalation," claiming that was an unpatriotic frame that invoked images of Vietnam.

What you have learned -- let's be honest here; what this speech will say -- is that instead of a temporary, three-month escalation, our government plans to continue the surge for at least another year.

White House propagandists gave you information that shows the government plans to make the 30,000 troops called-up for the surge effectively permanent, and that it will not even consider reducing the number of troops to pre-surge levels until next summer.

And you reported they are planning a troop "reduction."

Instead of reporting what the government is doing now, you chose to report what its spin doctors are saying it may (or may not) do a year from now. What other word is there for your work than propaganda?

My students and most Americans can tell you missed the lede. The question is why.

For some reason you chose to parrot the line the government you are supposed to watch and when necessary call on the carpet fed to you. Instead of telling people what that government is doing now, you chose the propagandists' phony frame and effectively reported on a future you have no way of reading.

A beginning journalist knows better, and so should you.

The question now is will you and your editors find a reason to attack me or anyone else who calls you on this embarrassing dereliction of your duty as some anti-war or anti-Bush zealot -- or will you simply ask yourself if this critique of your reporting is fair? This column has been about your journalism, not your or my politics.

The reason this is dire -- and you know this -- is the AP has a special agenda-setting effect. With fewer and fewer independent reporters in Washington D.C., more and more local and regional outlets depend on the AP for news from our nation's capital.

Now, that isn't all that important, relatively, when the story is: Who is responsible for a standoff between the president and Congress over a farm bill; or when it is a "he said/ he said" attack ad during a political campaign.

But this story is about America's place in the world today and in the history books for generations. It's also about the thousand or more young Americans likely to die in this war built on lies if the surge continues -- as the government plans, as you know.

Your decision to show the government that at least the AP will buy its frame has historic and moral implications, which wartime propaganda often does. Whether you want to abdicate your responsibility as a free and independent press to sort through what you are spoon fed, does, too.
hufingtonpost