Columbia Spectator, a daily paper produced by Columbia University students, investigates how the university came up with the statement that described Ethiopia’s tyrant as a “seasoned” leader.

We just told you about how the website for the World Leaders Forum, as of yesterday, contained an oddly laudatory bio page for Ethiopian Prime Minister (and alleged tyrant) Meles Zenawi. In a statement, the University said it obtained some of that information “from the [Ethiopian] government’s Mission.” But did it really?

We weren’t sure what the University meant by “the government’s Mission.” Did Ethiopian ambassadors—or some sort of official statement from the Ethiopian government—somehow inspire the WLF staff to describe Prime Minister Zenawi as a “seasoned” leader on the WLF’s website? That seems to be what the University was implying with its statement, but when pressed, a Columbia spokesperson refused to comment further.

So we did some googling, and we found that the World Leaders Forum website probably drew heavily not from Ethiopian diplomats, but from a random Internet comment (the first one on this page, from user “shewit1″) when they drafted the original bio page for Zenawi.

Shewit1 is a well-known TPLF cadres whose full time job is to write positive things on the web about his boss Meles Zenawi. He is active in EthiopianReview.com‘s own forum. Read the full text here