About five weeks ago My Pet Jawa broke a story about al-Zarquawi's main site getting hacked. It was only down for a while, but Rusty got a screen capture that went into the post: the page was black, with an American Flag across the top and a crossed-out picture of Bin Laden.

A month later a related site was hacked, and this went unfixed for multiple days. Meantime, In the Bullpen was on the case, and he posted the event—with a screen capture of the graphic, a penguin holding a full-auto rifle and the legend, "if you host them, your [sic] next."

Now, the MSM (with MSNBC in the lead) are using screen captures from both postings without giving either gentleman credit for breaking the stories or saving the images for posterity. The attitude appears to be "I found it on the internet fair and square, and I neither need to authenticate it nor give the blogger credit." It's sloppy and amoral, but other than that it's a great approach.

And then there is the current online controversey about whether Americans should be hosting these types of sites in the first place. There have been attempts to shut them down, but at this point various Federal agencies are ordering companies to leave the sites up. So I'm not signing the petitions quite yet (or pressuring the hosting companies), in the hopes that our spooks and special ops guys are mere inches away from bagging Zarquawi.

A girl can hope.

And when we do capture him, I hope it's the Marines who have custody of him first. Because I think they would treat him in a very respectful way at any point wherein there were cameras nearby. That's all I really ask.

Posted by: Attila at 01:25 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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