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Led by the Associated Press (AP), the media have falsely reported that President Bush acknowledged the existence of CIA "secret prisons" in a speech on Wednesday. News flash! The President never used the term in the speech.

But type in the words "secret prisons" in the Google search engine for current news and see how many hits you get in connection with the Bush speech. Some say Bush "admitted" or "confirmed" the existence of "secret prisons." But notice that Bush's acknowledgement, admission, or confirmation is never presented in quotation marks. That's the tip-off that he didn't say what the media claim he said. Our media lied.

Leave it to Bob Schieffer, the former CBS Evening News anchorman, to admit the truth as he was being interviewed about the speech by new anchor Katie Couric on the Wednesday broadcast. "He never used the term 'prison,'" said Schieffer.

But if the President didn't use the word, then how can the media report that he did so? It's called "interpretive reporting." It's been taught in journalism classes for decades.

Left-wing blogs, even some supposedly devoted to being media watchdogs, are already citing the erroneous news accounts of the Bush speech as "proof" that "secret prisons" existed. They didn't bother to check the actual text.

All of this, however, is secondary to the fact that a secret CIA program to interrogate terrorists, including the architects of 9/11, did exist and should never have been the subject of stories in the media in the first place. But because of the exaggerated media coverage and attention given to the story, as well as a flawed Supreme Court decision about how to handle terrorists, the architects of 9/11 have now been transferred to the Guantanamo prison, once described by Amnesty International as the "gulag of our times" but which now serves Big Macs and offers first-class medical and dental care.

The distortions about what Bush said on Wednesday should be a lesson to news consumers to not accept what they see, read, or hear in the major media. Another lesson is not to trust the liberal blogs which accept anything negative about Bush they can find in that same media.

For the record, the President acknowledged that the CIA has maintained an interrogation "program" in which "a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war have been held and questioned outside the United States..." Bush said, "This group includes individuals believed to be the key architects of the September the 11th attacks, and attacks on the USS Cole, an operative involved in the bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and individuals involved in other attacks that have taken the lives of innocent civilians across the world. These are dangerous men with unparalleled knowledge about terrorist networks and their plans for new attacks. The security of our nation and the lives of our citizens depend on our ability to learn what these terrorists know." He referred to them having been "held in CIA custody."

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