'Hostility towards America has reached shocking levels," the United States government told itself in early October, in a high-level report recommending triage for Washington's hemorrhaging public image abroad. "What is required is not merely tactical adaptation but strategic, and radical, transformation."

The State Department alone spent more than US$1-billion on global public relations last year, and the "Changing Minds, Winning Peace" report recommended both a spending increase and the appointment of a Cabinet-level "image czar" to help sell U.S. policies to a surly, skeptical world.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, a handful of Homeland Security airport guards continue to teach the State Department a valuable lesson about maximizing the per-dollar impact on the international image of the United States. Unfortunately for the mind-changing peace-winners, though, the enthusiastic border-minders are making a bad (and expensive) situation worse, without contributing anything noticeable to the prevention of Bin Ladenite terrorism.

In mid-November, Sue Smethurst, a 30-year-old Australian journalist, made the long flight to LAX to conduct an exclusive interview with local resident Olivia Newton-John for a Down Under magazine called New Idea. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials blocked Smethurst from entering the country, because she lacked a "journalist visa," an obscure document that until seven months ago was almost never demanded of reporters from the 27 U.S.-friendly countries covered under the visa waiver program, which gives free three-month passes to visitors travelling for "business or pleasure." Journalism, inexplicably, qualifies for neither.

For the next 15 hours, Smethurst was interrogated, handcuffed and probed, before being sent back on a plane to Australia. "I was body-searched," she told the Australian Associated Press. "I've had every part of me groped beyond belief."

Immigration and Customs officials later called it a "simple pat-down for weapons."

On an effort-to-impact scale, in terms of U.S. image, the Smethurst rebuke was truly impressive: Nearly every news outlet in Australia reported her withering take on the States ("I would have walked across broken glass to get home"); the foreign affairs spokesman of Australia's Labour Party demanded an explanation from the U.S. embassy, and the tale made headlines on several continents. Several newspapers ran her photograph, in which she looks roughly as threatening as an upper-class socialite out shopping for handbags.

Smethurst wasn't alone in learning about LAX's new journalist-visa enforcement the hard way. A month before, reporter Rachael Bletchley of the British newspaper The People "was held for 26 hours, was handcuffed for a time, was given very little to eat or drink, had no possibility of sleep and had to ask permission to use the lavatory, which was denied on at least one occasion," according to a protest letter to Tom Ridge, the Homeland Security Secretary, sent by the World Association of Newspapers.

In May, at least eight French and British reporters attempting to cover L.A.'s enormous E3 computer-game conference were blocked, probed and sent back home, drawing protests from Reporters Sans Frontieres.

In each of these cases, the journalists had no right to see a lawyer, no right to call their local consulate and no right to appeal (these rules come courtesy of anti-terrorism measures passed in 1996 and 2001). And the growing international outcry seems only to embolden the Immigration and Customs agents who are keeping the United States safe from celebrity hacks and technology journalists.

"A customs officer ... chose to make me sweat and to threaten me with deportation, even though I have a valid journalist's visa that does not expire for another two years," wrote Andrew Gumbel, a correspondent of The Independent, in late July. " 'A visa is not a guarantee of entry,' he told me. 'We've been deporting quite a few British journalists recently.' "

But aren't the rebuffed reporters in fact breaking U.S. law? Shouldn't they realize we're trying to fight a war on terrorism here? That's what Homeland Security officials say. "After 9/11," Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration spokesman Francisco Arcaute told me, "You can understand that we have to be very careful who enters the U.S."

I actually understand that very well. Which is why the L.A. crackdown on foreign journalists strikes me as particularly insane. Journalists from allied countries are singled out for exemption from the visa waiver program; if you were an evil-doing terrorist from France, Britain, Australia or the 24 other eligible countries, all you'd have to do is deny that you are a journalist, state that you are travelling for non-journalistic "business or pleasure," and the red carpet would be rolled out for you.

According to the newly enforced rules, if there were an earthquake in L.A. tomorrow, British reporters would need to pay US$100 to the local U.S. embassy or consulate, show up for a face-to-face interview carrying a "comprehensive letter from the journalist's employer on the employer's letterhead identifying the journalist and describing in detail the nature and function of the journalist's position," and then wait any number of days and weeks before getting the go-ahead. British terrorists, meanwhile, could just buy a ticket and hop on a plane.

So the United States gets unwanted negative publicity from the harassed reporters, throws roadblocks in the way of people who want to do nothing more than publicize U.S. residents, companies and conferences, all the while preventing no terrorism to speak of. And other countries, which are already annoyed by Washington's many tightenings of immigration rules in the last two years, may well begin to impose tit-for-tat restrictions on Americans travelling abroad.

What makes this dumb situation truly retarded is officials from both the State Department and Homeland Security will tell you privately that it's precisely as ridiculous and counter-productive as it looks. But since the two bureaucracies despise each other, and since one makes the policy (State) while the other enforces it (Homeland Security), letting a few LAX border guards go postal on some hapless journalists actually serves both agencies in the broader arm-wrestling match.

In the coming weeks, State will likely spend thousands of dollars to fly a senior department official out to L.A. to meet with the anxious local foreign press and diplomatic corps, and shake his head sadly that there's nothing much he can do. Homeland Security officials will likely counter that if Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, doesn't like it, he should stop complaining and change the rules.

Meanwhile, real terrorists will keep plotting real acts of violence, while maintaining their spotless record of never entering the United States by claiming to be journalists. And the United States will continue to win the booby prize of being just about the only Western country to join Cuba, Serbia, China, Indonesia, Laos and other hellholes to be criticized repeatedly by respectable international press-freedom organizations for using "journalist visas" as a political weapon.