Is This "Fair Use?"

We'd guess at least a third of the crap found here is from the AP. We like to call it free speech, or "fair use," if you want to be legalistic; the AP prefers "stealing," but either way we're glad to see the AP's president, Tom Curley, stand up for his outfit, & however far his concept of a free press goes. 

Mostly he's unhappy w/ the treatment reporters rec'd. at the bloody hands of AmeriKKKan baby killers (pretty much our phrasing, not Curley's) but he doesn't like the end run the Pentagon seems to be making around various media.

He said the Pentagon has kept secret some information that used to be available to the public, and its public affairs officers at the Pentagon gather intelligence on reporters' work rather than serve as sources. [...] "But does America need to resort to al-Qaida tactics?" Curley said. "Should the U.S. government be running Web sites that appear to be independent news organizations?" Should the military be planting stories in foreign newspapers? Should the United States be trying to influence public opinion through subterfuge, both here and abroad?" He also said the Bush administration had stripped hundreds of people, including reporters, of their human rights. He noted that when an Iraqi judicial panel reviewed the evidence gathered by the military against Hussein, the AP photographer, it ordered his release. He declined in an interview to say who said AP could be "ruined" for sticking to its principles, but "I knew that they were angry."

Don't get between propagandists & their message in the "information battlespace."

An AP video on the Pentagon's domestic & foreign psyops.