Weasels

Wretchard at the Belmont Club has an excellent post up discussing the Pulitzer-prize winning photograph of Iraqi election workers executed on Baghdad's Haifa Street; and the recent detention of the CBS photographer/stringer suspected of working with terrorists. I urge you to read the entire post. At one point Wretchard compares statements from CBS and AP justifying the use of questionable Iraqi stringers with terrorist connections and concludes:

"It is common practice ... several brave Iraqi photographers ... covering the communities they live in ... give them access" are weasel phrases which cannot disguise the essentially immoral relationship where news agencies bestow protected person status on enemy combatants in exchange for bloody images which can then be sold for money. Personally, I would rather be the man who takes the photos, at some risk to myself, than the man who commissions them. It's cleaner.

Much cleaner. But then being clean--or honest-- isn't high on a weasel's list of priorities.