AP's Mideast daily roundup had a busy Tuesday: the US Navy put two Hellfire missiles into a cargo ship in the Gulf of Oman, and Houthi missiles killed six people on another cargo ship in the Bab el-Mandeb. Two acts of violence at sea, one wire article, refreshed through the day. Which makes it a perfect controlled experiment — same newsroom, same story, same 24 hours — for the question: who gets a "says"? * When the roundup led with the American missiles, the headline read: "US military says it has fired on a ship in Gulf of Oman to enforce its blockade of Iranian ports." Says. The strike CENTCOM announced itself, on the record, with a statement and visible enthusiasm — arguably the least disputed fact in the entire Middle East that day — and it still arrives wrapped in protective attribution, plus a purpose clause ("to enforce") borrowed straight from the press office. * Then the death toll in the Bab el-Mandeb firmed up, and the same article was re-headlined: "Houthi rebels attack vessel in Bab el-Mandeb, killing 6." The version pushed to wire clients was blunter still: "Iranian-backed Houthis kill 6 in attack on vessel." No says. No said. Subject, verb, body count — grammar with its jacket off. * So where did that body count come from? AP's own first sentence answers: "Yemeni authorities said six people were killed" — the government currently at war with the Houthis. The article's own subhead is even more honest: "4 crew members and 2 allied fighters killed, Yemen says." The attribution exists everywhere in AP's copy. The headline takes it off in exactly one situation: when the actor is an official enemy. * Notice the accessories, too. The Houthis come headline-dressed as "Iranian-backed" — sponsor's logo stitched on. Yemen's internationally recognised government, whose claim the whole headline rests on, gets no "Saudi-backed," no "US-aligned," no jacket at all. One side in this war walks into AP headlines with a warning label. The other is just "authorities." * And before anyone files this under unavoidable-wire-convention: Al Jazeera — not historically the Pentagon's most annoying fan — kept the hedge AP dropped: "Six killed in Houthi attack on Bab al-Mandeb ship, Yemen's government says." AJ also carried the detail with actual teeth: it called this a "double-tap strike," because the second missile hit the people running a rescue. The outlet you'd expect to editorialize wore the attribution; the wire service didn't. * Were the deaths real? Almost certainly — Pakistan later confirmed three of its citizens were among them, in an AP update headlined, note it well, "Pakistan says 3 citizens killed." So the tally stands: "says" survives when Pakistan is talking, when Yemen's coastguard is talking, even when CENTCOM is announcing its own missile launch. It goes missing in one grammatical situation only, and that situation has a flag. * Earlier today we gave AP points for attribution discipline on the blockade story — the wire that "kept its receipts." We're clawing a few of those points back. Because receipts you only keep for one side of the ledger aren't accounting, they're alibi. Attribution is doubt, formalized. And doubt, on this evidence, is a service AP extends to its own military and bills to everyone else.