For God’s sake, when will this end? Jim Michaels of *USA Today* reports that the U.S. has cap­tured at least six *Al Qaeda* media cen­ters in Iraq and arrested 20 sus­pected pro­pa­gan­dists for the orga­ni­za­tion. Michaels quotes mil­i­tary sources as say­ing they’ve cut down on the amount of AQI pro­pa­ganda com­ing out of Iraq, but Rita Katz of the [SITE Institute](http://www.siteinstitute.org/), which mon­i­tors ter­ror­ist web sites, said the five– to six-week dip seen in the pro­duc­tion has ended. Dis­tri­b­u­tion of AQI mate­r­ial is back on track.
Let’s take a moment to chide Michaels. Even if the mil­i­tary con­stantly refers to “al Qaeda,” it’s not the same orga­ni­za­tion that did the 9/11 attacks, and to repeat that line of, well, pro­pa­ganda cre­ates a mis­lead­ing impres­sion for USA Today’s read­ers. Repeat after me: It’s Al Qaeda *in Iraq*, not big, bad al Qaeda in Pak­istan. They’re two dif­fer­ent, but affil­i­ated, orga­ni­za­tions. It may be polit­i­cally expe­di­ent for the White House and the Pen­ta­gon to cre­ate the impres­sion that there’s no dif­fer­ence between al Qaeda and al Qaeda in Iraq, but Michaels has been cov­er­ing the war long enough to know bet­ter. (Let’s also note the irony of this crop­ping up in a story about jihadist pro­pa­ganda.) The Times and the Post have made the dis­tinc­tion after some pub­lic cri­tiques from their own ombuds­men and this blog, among oth­ers. It’s high time USA Today stopped par­rot­ing the line.