If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee. ~ Abraham Lincoln

My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (Martin) The Iraq Surrender Group must be obeyed!! — “The opinions of 9 old men and an old woman are no more likely to be the right prescription than mine. Less so. A camel is a horse designed by committee, and that’s what this report is.”

Blue Star Chronicles (Beth) Ahmadinejah tells West, Follow God or Vanish — “Ahmadinejah warns us once again that his intention is to have us convert to islam or die. As per his own words, there are no other choices. Still we don’t listen to what our enemies tell us over and over and over again.”

Confederate Yankee Just the Facts, Ma’am — “Kathleen Carroll, the Executive Editor and Senior Vice President of the Associated Press, just can’t seem to do the required legwork necessary to resolve the questions surrounding six immolations and four mosque burnings alleged in news reports by anonymous reporters working for her organization. She does, however, try her best to deflect criticism in her latest response to the emerging scandal this afternoon.”

Don’t forget to vote in the 2006 Weblog Awards.

AP is telling the world that photo-stringer Bilal Hussein is being held by the U.S. military in Iraq.

The U.S. military in Iraq has imprisoned an Associated Press photographer for five months, accusing him of being a security threat but never filing charges or permitting a public hearing.

Military officials said Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi citizen, was being held for “imperative reasons of security” under United Nations resolutions. AP executives said the news cooperative’s review of Hussein’s work did not find anything to indicate inappropriate contact with insurgents, and any evidence against him should be brought to the Iraqi criminal justice system.

Hussein, 35, is a native of Fallujah who began work for the AP in September 2004. He photographed events in Fallujah and Ramadi until he was detained on April 12 of this year.

It’s certainly good to know that a, “review of Hussein’s work did not find anything to indicate inappropriate contact with insurgents.”

Or it would be if that could be believed.

Later in the article I read this:

Hussein has been a frequent target of conservative critics on the Internet, who raised questions about his images months before the military detained him. One blogger and author, Michelle Malkin, wrote about Hussein’s detention on the day of his arrest, saying she’d been tipped by a military source.

Michelle’s post that day said regarding that tip,

This afternoon, in response to a tip from an anonymous military source in Iraq, I contacted both the AP reporter embedded with the Marines in Ramadi, Todd Pitman, as well as AP’s media relations office headquartered in New York concerning Hussein’s whereabouts.

Also in that post she recounts and links to some of the questions and controversies surrounding Hussein’s photos.

More background from the blogosphere here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Do take the time to re-read them all. The context is important.

I’ll repeat what Michelle said, do read them all.

My question is, why are they saying something now? Here is the reason given in the article:

The AP has worked quietly until now, believing that would be the best approach. But with the U.S. military giving no indication it would change its stance, the news cooperative has decided to make public Hussein’s imprisonment, hoping the spotlight will bring attention to his case and that of thousands of others now held in Iraq, Curley said.

Frankly, I’m not sure that’s entirely true.

UPDATE: Michelle posts on today’s story here saying,

Over the past five months, I have pestered the Associated Press for answers about one of its photographers, Iraq-based Bilal Hussein. As noted here in April, Hussein’s photos have raised persistent questions in the blogosphere about his relationship with terrorists in Iraq and whether his photos were/are staged in collusion with the enemy. Military sources informed me then that Hussein had been captured by American forces in a building in Ramadi, Iraq, with a cache of weapons.

The question of his relationship with terrorists and the staging of photographs still need to be answered. The answers provided by his employer are, so far, inadequate.

Thanks to Michelle for the link.

Blogs are far from the death knell for the traditional media as is sometimes claimed. Still, even those traditional sources are beginning to explore the relationship between the two.

The Associated Press announced two agreements Tuesday — one that will tie its news stories to the rapidly growing world of blogs and another that will help guide readers to newspaper Web sites.

Under the first, Technorati Inc., the leading search engine for blog postings, will provide links to blogs that cite AP stories.

[...]

Technorati will search blogs for postings that include links to AP stories. Links to those postings will be available along with the original AP stories on 440 member Web sites served by AP Hosted News, a service that uses AP servers to display AP content on member sites. There also will be a box featuring the “Top Five Most Blogged About” AP stories.

Clicking on the links takes the reader to a Technorati page listing the relevant blogs. Revenue from ads on the page will be shared by Technorati and the AP, but the revenue is not expected to cover more than the cost of the project, said Kristie Bouryal, AP’s deputy director of online for U.S. newspapers.

Interesting.