End of a Dictator

Bumped to the top
12/30/06 00:55 EST: I have it on good authority that Saddam was executed at 4:22 AM... and every media source on the planet is wrong about the 6:00 AM execution.

Previously:

1:54 EST: Just got a reconfirmation from my source minutes ago. Saddam Hussein has about two hours to live, with a midnight execution still scheduled.

2:20: EST: Corroboration.

3:04 EST: Source: "they're gearing up, but logistics could put it in the wee hours after midnight. Absolutely no later than dawn, which is close to midnight our time. The Iraqis are not always as punctual as the U.S. military."

3:08 EST: Source: "It's still entirely possible he'll be dead within the hour. The curtain of secrecy draws tighter as the hour draws nearer. "

Note: this will be my final update until the deed is done-- CY.

According to an anonymous source, the former President of Iraq will be executed by hanging at 12:00 AM midnight Baghdad-time on Saturday/4:00 PM EST Friday afternoon at an undisclosed location.

If my source is correct, Saddam Hussein is facing his final sunrise.

Update:

Sooner, Rather than Later?

Update: Fox News confirms that Hussein's death sentence has been signed, and that Saddam will be executed by Saturday.

Update: What Saddam's impending death means to Jules Crittenden.

Update: Fox News confirms that Hussein's death sentence has been signed, and that Saddam will be executed by Saturday.

What Passes For Intellectual

From--where else?--the Huffington Post (h/t Hot Air):

WELL HUNG! Saddam Hung To Prove Bush is BETTER Hung... (Than His Dad)

Brilliant headline, don't you suppose? I bet Martin Lewis used all 36 years of his experince as a "journalist, columnist, writer, humorist, monologist, comedic performer, radio host, TV host, TV correspondent," etc, etc to come up with that one. Such deep, cutting-edge humor.

1) To George W. Bush. It only cost $354 billion (and counting) and the lives of 3,000 very expendable US military to enable the President to demonstrate to his dad that he has a bigger Dick. Or is one...

Isn't it ironic - don'tcha think? Saddam hung so that Dubya can prove that he's BETTER hung...

Such nuance. Such depth. Such class. Arianna trotted out her best for this one.

2) To George H.W. & Barbara Bush for raising a child with such wonderful values.

Why not attack the parents? After all, if attacking children is right in line with liberal values, parents are obviously fair game as well.

3) To Dick Cheney. If it wasn't for his remorse about his part in the "failure" in 1991 to kill off Saddam (one of the most cherished allies of the Reagan-Bush administrations) - he might not have had his "fever" to expend thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of American tax-payers' dollars getting Saddam this time around.

Quite right. After all, Saddam had only killed tens, if not hundreds of thousands of his own people, triggered a war that left approximately a million dead, attempted at least partial genocides against the Kurds and Marsh Arabs, invaded Kuwait and launched attacks on Israel and Saudi Arabia, but they were all brown people. Or Jews.

4) To Gerald Ford. For pardoning Richard Nixon without securing any confession or even acknowledgement of wrong-doing - and thus laying the path for Presidential unaccountability; for promoting the careers of Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld; and for having the courage to speak out against the Iraq war in June 2004 - and insisting that his criticism be held till AFTER his death. (Why risk hurting a GOP President's re-election prospects when the cost is just a few thousand American lives...) THAT'S why he deserves all the plaudits for his decency and courage.

How utterly gracious of Mr. Lewis to channel the latest missive from that greatest voice of Absolute Moral Authority. Were there any other comments you'd care to emulate of hers? We'll wait.

5) To Ronald Reagan. For unilaterally deciding in 1983 to end the 16-year international isolation of Iraq for its barbarity - and sending Donald Rumsfeld as his personal goodwill ambassador to befriend Saddam Hussein - during the exact same time when Hussein was committing the very crimes for which he was hung. Crimes that were publicized worldwide at the time by Amnesty International and others - and thus fully known about by Reagan, George W. Bush and their entire administration.

But just skip right on past any thought that this same barbarity might have been a decent reason to--you know--get rid of him. 'cause it's all about the dicks.

6) Spare a thought for Donald Rumsfeld. Tough week for him. He's just lost someone very close to him. And Gerald Ford as well in the same week...

See? I'm a humorist!

Stuk On Jon Carry In Irak

Several days ago a soldier in Iraq email a picture back home to the United States, showing John Kerry eating in a mess hall in Iraq. Absolutely riveting content, right?

Nonetheless, all sorts of people who should know better have gotten completely discombobulated about it, many to the point of calling it a fraud, or purporting that the photo showed some other sort of context.

If you want to get a good cross-section of what occurred (and apparently, is still occurring in some corners), start with the blog post that apparently got things going, accusations from those offended, a quite practical explanation from the guy who accidentally started the whole thing, and continued angst from lost souls that simply refuse to allow this excruciatingly minor story to die a natural death.

Jon Carry--uh, John Kerry-- was not shot nor stabbed nor completely shunned by our soldiers in Iraq, but thanks to his on-going contempt for our military he was not mobbed as most celebrities in a combat zone are. Instead, he got a "subdued reception."

He isn't popular with the troops for obvious reasons, but to our soldier's credit, they didn't act unprofessionally around him. Can we please just end this non-story there?

Back to the Future

In a photo taken several hours from now, Cindy Sheehan reacts to the death of Saddam Hussein... or news that her month-long supply of Jamba Juice supply may have been tainted.

Your call.

Worlds Apart

It isn't likely that you needed a litmus test to gauge the widely divergent viewpoints on the Iraq War, but on the off chance that you did, Senator Joe Lieberman provided it in spades in an op-ed published in today's Washington Post calling for more American troops to be sent to Iraq.

Reaction on both sides is as you might expect it, both from conservative bloggers, and from liberals.

Blogging from the right with a soldier-son in Iraq, Gaius at Blue Crab Boulevard:

My son and I were talking the other day about troop levels. Frankly, there should have been more on the ground sooner. That is looking back with 20/20 hindsight, of course. It is vital right now not to simply abandon the Middle East to Iran's ambitions. Yet that is what some want to do.

From Dan Collins at the libertarian-rightish Protein Wisdom:

In his opinion piece in the WaPo today, Independent Senator from Connecticut Joe Lieberman says the *gasp!* V-Word! He’s so over the line he's, he's . . . why, he's trans-neoconic! If you've no better source of entertainment today, you can watch the sinistrosphere go ballistic over the temerity of the man...

...If he runs for president, I think he's got my vote.

From Paul Silver at the moderate—what else?—Moderate Voice:

I agree with Senator Lieberman's commentary today in the Washington Post...

...Yes this war has been mismanaged, it is inconvenient, and it is expensive. And yes we may lose it still. But I can't support abandoning so many millions of people that WE put in harms way by surrendering them to ethnic cleansing. I feel shame when the most powerful society in history abandoned so many freedom loving southeast Asians after the Vietnam War, when we ignore those in Darfur, Rwanda, Bosnia and other killing fields.

I would be willing to pay higher taxes and volunteer once a week in a military base to allow trained soldiers to go over there, because I believe this is necessary and worth the sacrifice.

From Steve Clemons at the reliably left-wing Huffington Post:

Senator Lieberman just spent 10 days in the Middle East and still does not get it. He's penned an op-ed calling for more deployed American troops in Iraq.

It's a remarkable essay for just how anti-empirical it is and how he can so easily waft platitudes about America's engagement in the region after actually seeing the miserable results of more than three and half years of military occupation of Iraq by us...

...Many critics of this war -- including this blogger -- always worried that our engagement would trigger a regional conflagration and that removing Iran's "balancer" would have huge effects throughout the Middle East and fuel Iran's pretensions as a hegemonic force. Where is Lieberman's confession that he and others were warned of this and didn't see it coming?

And what really irritates is his depiction of the extremists, who he inappropriately ties to Iran. The extremists in many cases are angry Sunnis who want their place back in society, who despise Iran and now the Shiites as well as us.

Lieberman should have seen in Iraq that America is now supporting the guy Iran wants -- al-Maliki. Lieberman's entire depiction of the good and the bad in Iraq are ridiculous and remind one of Soviet era depictions of the enemy in Afghanistan...

...Senator Lieberman, let their be no doubt that the outcome you fear was totally predictable -- and was triggered by you and the other enablers of this war. Where is your humility and your own ownership of the consequences of what you have unleashed? Where is your realistic answer to what must be done to establish a NEW equilibrium of interests in the region?

Glenn Greenwald sees this as a declaration of war on Iran:

In his Washington Post Op-Ed today, the Great Warrior Joe Lieberman predictably endorsed sending more troops to Iraq, in the process dutifully spouting (as always) every Bush/neoconservative talking point. But Lieberman had a much larger fish to fry with this Op-Ed, as he all but declared war on Iran, identifying them as the equivalent of Al Qaeda, as the Real Enemy we are fighting...

...One might question why someone who is one of the most vocal advocates of the Iraq Disaster would seek to expand the war to include Iran, a country much larger and more formidable on every level than Iraq. After all, things aren't going that well in Iraq, and it might seem to a simplistic and Chamberlain-like appeasing coward that the absolutely most insane idea ever is to try to expand "our war" to include Iran. So what would motivate Lieberman to do this?

He then goes on to make the snide, roundabout case—and no, I'm not be facetious—that Liebermann is doing this because the Israelis told him too:

Initially, it must be emphasized that whatever his reason is, it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the sentiments expressed by Israel's newest cabinet minister, Avigdor Lieberman (whose duties include strategic affairs and Iran) when he visited the U.S. earlier this month and gave an interview to The New York Times:

"Our first task is to convince Western countries to adopt a tough approach to the Iranian problem," which he called "the biggest threat facing the Jewish people since the Second World War." [Minister] Lieberman insisted that negotiations with Iran were worthless: "The dialogue with Iran will be a 100-percent failure, just like it was with North Korea."

Joe Lieberman's desire for the U.S. to view itself as being at war with Iran also has nothing whatsoever to do with this:

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Friday compared Iran's nuclear ambitions and threats against Israel with the policies of Nazi Germany and criticized world leaders who maintain relations with Iran's president...

Israel has identified Iran as the greatest threat to the Jewish state. Israel's concerns have heightened since the election of Iran's hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who frequently calls for the destruction of Israel and has questioned whether the Nazi genocide of 6 million Jews took place.

"We hear echoes of those very voices that started to spread across the world in the 1930s," Olmert said in his speech at the Yad Vashem memorial.

And yes, he's serious as Glenn Ryan Wilson Ellers Ellison Ellensburg Greenwald can be.

And for a final left-wing viewpoint, Matthew Yglesias:

And what about al-Qaeda? Lieberman appears to be arguing later in the article that Iran and al-Qaeda are collaborating in Iraq since otherwise it's hard to make sense of the claim that "If Iraq descends into full-scale civil war, it will be a tremendous battlefield victory for al-Qaeda and Iran. Iraq is the central front in the global and regional war against Islamic extremism." Needless to say, he's backing the Bush/McCain escalation plan.

One problem here is that to the extent you see the dark hand of Iran behind all events in Iraq, the situation should logically be viewed as more rather than less hopeless. The reason, of course, is that Iran can escalate every bit as much as we can. Whoever's equipping, say, the Mahdi Army clearly isn't equipping them very well -- Hezbollah is much better-armed. Suppose we escalate and the Iranians counter-escalate by giving our foes wire-guided anti-tank missiles, katyusha rockets, Iglas and so forth -- then you're talking about a really bad scene. Obviously, though, that's logic and hawks aren't into logic.

And though I am a hawk—and therefore by definition "not into logic" according to Yglesias—I'll do my best to muddle through these divergent viewpoints and attempt to get to whatever apparent meat remains upon this proverbial bone.

From the center-right, the perspective seems to be that we did not go into Iraq with enough forces initially. We went in with enough military force to destroy Saddam Hussein’s military dictatorship, but not enough military and non-military forces to occupy the country and create stability in which a fledgling democracy could be established. I think few will argue with this perspective, as current events indicate that is precisely what appears to have occurred, as we currently have an Iraqi dictatorship that was quickly toppled in just weeks in 2003, only to fall into a worsening chaos afterward.

From this perspective, many conservatives—but certainly not all, by any means—hope that a influx of American troops can be used in some way to stop the near-constant escalation of sectarian violence in several key Iraqi provinces, and also dismantle various elements of the Sunni insurgency, terrorist groups, the Shia militias, and various criminal gangs. I, for one, agree with something Senator Liebermann said in his op-ed, that, "More U.S. forces might not be a guarantee of success in this fight, but they are certainly its prerequisite." If it is possible to win in Iraq—and no honest person can claim to have God's knowledge and unequivocally say this war can’t be won, or is already lost—then providing stability is indeed a prerequisite, and sending in more soldiers is the only option to help achieve that goal.

The "reality-based community" maintains that it has a crystal ball and that the war is already lost. This, of course is a ludicrous position, speaking of the future as if it is known, but a popular and perhaps prevailing one on the left nonetheless. The fact is, though they are loathe to admit it, that the American left wants to lose the War in Iraq. If the situation is turned around in Iraq, stability is restored and Iraq becomes some sort of non-belligerent representative and economically viable Middle Eastern democracy, then the far Left's rhetoric of the past six years will have been proven false. To maintain the viability of their ideology, the Bush Doctrine, and therefore the U.S. military forces and Iraqi government, must fail. It is a sad position that the Left has backed themselves into, but they are campaigning against victory in Iraq, putting their own psychological and philosophical needs above the lives of 26 million Iraqis.

This most certainly is the case, as that is the only way that Greenwald go to such extremes as to “blame the Jews” in almost Sheehanesque shrillness, while purposefully ignoring the fact that Iran has escalated the disagreements between our two nations to the level of conflict, and on multiple occasions.

In Bob Woodward’s State of Denial, he states (via NRO):

Pages 414-415: "Some evidence indicated that the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah was training insurgents to build and use the shaped IED's, at the urging of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. That kind of action was arguably an act of war by Iran against the United States. If we start putting out everything we know about these things, Zelikow felt, the administration might well start a fire it couldn't put out..."

Page 449: "The components and the training for (the IEDs) had more and more clearly been traced to Iran, one of the most troubling turns in the war."

Page 474ß: "The radical Revolutionary Guards Corps had asked Hizbollah, the terrorist organization, to conduct some of the training of Iraqis to use the EFPs, according to U.S. Intelligence. If all this were put out publicly, it might start a fire that no one could put out...Second, if it were true, it meant that Iranians were killing American soldiers — an act of war..."

From the same column, former FBI director Louis Freeh:

It's not the first time we have had information about Iran's murder of Americans. Louis Freeh tells us that the same thing happened following the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia. On page 18 of Freeh's My FBI he reports that Saudi Ambassador Bandar told Freeh "we have the goods," pointing "ineluctably towad Iran." The culprits were the same as in Iraq: Hezbollah, under direction from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence. And then there was a confession from outgoing Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani to Crown Prince Abdullah (at the time, effectively the Saudi king): page 19: "the Khobar attack had been planned and carried out with the knowledge of the Iranian supreme ruler, Ayatollah Khamenei."

As Freeh puts it, "this had been an act of war against the United States of America."

According to ABC News, Iranian-made explosives of recent manufacture have been captured at the Iran-Iraq border. Iranian fighters have recently been captured northeast of Baghdad after a skirmish with U.S. and Iraqi soldiers.

Greenwald is welcome to his own opinion, but he seems intent on creating his own reality as well, where Iran is not acting against us. Clemons takes the exact same approach, stating, Liebermann "inappropriately ties" Iran to some of the violence in Iraq. This takes a strong adherence to ideology over facts, and yet, this seems to be precisely their shared position. It is just one example of many they ignore or bend to bring "reality" to their "reality-based" community.

I offer only this.

I do not claim to have a crystal ball. I do not pretend to know where the war will lead. I do not pretend to know the outcome. What I do know, however, is that we further broke an already failing nation-state, and did much to create the situation in which the citizens of Iraq find themselves in. When someone creates a problem as we have done with the botched occupation we have witnessed so far, we have an obligation, a responsibility, to do everything within reason to help rectify that mistake.

If sending additional forces to Iraq in a so-called "surge" to attempt to break the militias, insurgents, terrorists and thugs is what the situation calls for, then we owe it—yes we owe it—to the overwhelming majority of the 26 million Iraqi people that simply want to live peaceful lives.

To do otherwise is to dishonor our nation, and the lives of those who fought and who are fighting in Iraq.

Jamil Hussein Rescued?

Saving lives--even fictional lives--it's just what we do:

BAGHDAD, Iraq Dec 28,2006 (AP) - Just hours after Conservative blogger, Bob Owens expressed concern over the disappearance and fate of Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein, the AP reported that a team of Iraqi police officers found Mr. Hussein inside a closet in a US military barracks, bound and blindfolded with severe lacerations over most of his body. Hussein was apparently beaten by American soldiers and will spend the next several weeks recuperating at his home in Baghdad.

[snip]

Hussein told the Associated Press that he was abducted by a group of US soldiers over a month ago after he personally witnessed them blowing up an Iraqi school bus packed with scores of Iraqi school children. The soldiers, Hussein said, tied him up, blindfolded him and then beat him with lead pipes until he could no longer walk. He was eventually found by Iraqi police officers who quickly rushed him to the AP's main office in Baghdad where he was treated for shock and eventually sent home to recuperate.

According to the AP, Hussein will take a year off from his job as Iraqi police captain to recover from his latest ordeal, but, he'll continue to work part time as a stringer for the AP.

Meanwhile, Hussein said he owes his life to Owens who alerted the AP to look for him.

I'm just glad I could help.

Woodward Scoops Again: Saddam's Embargoed Interview Leaked

In a pre-execution embargoed Bob Woodward interview leaked to Confederate Yankee, Former President of Iraq Saddam Hussein made several shocking confessions, including once having his secret police, the Mukhabarat plot the murder of Maury Povich in hopes of one day possessing Connie Chung.

Saddam also confessed to a strong craving for bran... lots and lots of bran.

More as this develops...

Louisiana Loserpalooza

John Edwards (the pretty one, not the psychic) declared from New Orleans today that he would be running in the Democratic primaries for President in 2008.

Funny how Edwards, a former North Carolina Senator, life-long North Carolinian with a job at UNC-Chapel Hill, chose to announce his candidacy in New Orleans, Louisiana, instead of on his "home turf," surrounded by friendly North Carolina Democratic politicians.

The fact of the matter is, Edwards doesn't have much home state support, and had he chosen to announce in NC, it would have likely been overshadowed by who chose not to attend, both stealing his thunder and saying something about his "down home" reputation he'd rather not the rest of the country find out.

Edwards spent part of his New Orleans photo-op with a shovel in hand. For those of us who know him the best, that seems quite appropriate.

Jamil Hussein Joins Cast of "Lost"

Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein, used regularly as a named source by the Associated Press including a flurry of eight reports about four burning mosques and 24 burning Sunnis (including six immolated) between November 24-26, has been noticeably missing from AP reporting for 31 days, and hasn't provided fresh information to the AP in 33 days.

To give you an idea of how odd this is, Jamil Hussein was used as a named source for the Associated Press (and only the Associated Press) on average every 5.2 days between April 24 and November 26 of this year. His longest previous period of silence was a 34-day gap between mid-September and Mid-October.

All of us are deeply concerned about the fate of Captain Hussein, and I think it would be a nice gesture if the AP, which has visited him so many times at his office at the police station, would give him a call, just to see if he's okay.

As it stands right now, he seems to have disappeared as if he never existed.

CPT, phone home...

RIP Gerald Ford

The former President has died at 93:

Former President Gerald Ford, who became president in 1974 after the resignation of Richard Nixon, died Tuesday at age 93.

Ford, the oldest surviving former U.S. president, died Tuesday, his wife, Betty Ford said. The former first lady's statement did not say where he died or give a cause of death.

"My family joins me in sharing the difficult news that Gerald Ford, our beloved husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather has passed away at 93 years of age," she said in a statement from Ford's office in Rancho Mirage. "His life was filled with love of God, his family and his country."

The nation's 38th president spent several days in the fall of 2006 at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage for medical tests. At the time of his release, on October 16, his chief of staff, Penny Circle, said he would "resume normal activities."

In August, he was discharged from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, after undergoing an angioplasty procedure to reduce or eliminate blockages in his coronary arteries. Doctors also implanted a pacemaker to improve his heart performance.

He is survived by his wife; three sons, Michael, Jack and Steven; and a daughter, Susan.

President Ford was the only President to ever hold the office never having been elected President or Vice President, being elevated in the wake of resignations in the Nixon administration following the Watergate scandal.

Music Bleg

My wife got a Sandisk M240 MP3 player for Christmas. Though a blogger I be, a technophile I am decidedly not. We're trying to decide between different music subscription services, and CNET offered reviews of MTV's Urge, Rhapsody To Go, Yahoo! Music Unlimited and Napster To Go.

Do you guys have any recommendations?

The Durham DA's Partial Withdrawal

I could really care less about the whole Duke Lacrosse rape trial, but today, Durham DA Mike Nifong finally dropped the rape changes. It's about damn time. They found plenty of DNA evidence, from five different men—we haven't seen that much sperm in North Carolina in one place since they stopped whaling—but none of it belonged to the lacrosse players.

And yet, he insists on prosecuting the kidnapping and sexual offense charges, which to my mind, hinged on the rape changes.

Why?

Answer provided by Durham native, Mary Katherine Ham:

It’s Durham. It’s full of a bunch of liberal white people who love to get yelled at by black people, and a bunch of liberal black people who are happy to oblige them. This story scratched that white guilt itch soooo good, they just couldn’t let it go, even though it was pretty clear from the beginning that the story was a little off.

The national media liked the white, privileged, lax boys rape hard-working, exotic dancer, single mom story, and they ran with it, too. As a result, many lives, seasons, careers, and a successful sports program have been seriously messed with by a D.A. who couldn’t back off on the narrative, either, lest he feel the wrath at the ballot box from those whom he denied their white guilt orgy.

I lived in Durham for two years.

That's about right.

Another Straw

Another Straw

In the detailed follow-up account to the initial "burning six" story AP insisted:

Two workers at Kazamiyah Hospital also confirmed that bodies from the clashes and immolation had been taken to the morgue at their facility.

They refused to be identified by name, saying they feared retribution.

This is a damn fine trick. According to Iraqi Brigadier General Abdul-Kareem, (via an email exchange with MNC-I PAO) their is no morgue at Kazamiyah Hospital. Any dead at Kazamiyah Hospital are transported by the police to the Medical Jurisprudence Center at Bab Almadham.

To sum up the "Burning Six" story so far:

Sources

• The primary source for the story doesn't apparently exist.
• The secondary source retracted his claim
• The tertiary source (Assn of Muslim Scholars) is suspected of being in league with the insurgency
• All other sources are anonymous, and in at least this instance, cite a factual impossibility.

• 6 men were pulled out of a rocketed mosque, doused in kerosene, and burned alive. No bodies have been recovered, and the mosque has curiously never been named.
• Those killed were seen by workers of Kazamiyah Hospital in the morgue. Kazamiyah Hospital does not have a morgue.
• 18 people were burned to death in an inferno at the al-Muhaimin mosque. Not a single casualty of any type has been found, and their is no evidence tha the mosque was set on fire.
• A total of four mosques-Ahbab al-Mustafa, Nidaa Allah, al-Muhaimin and al-Qaqaqa were attacked "with rocket-propelled grenades, heavy machine guns and automatic rifles," before being burned. There is zero evidence that any of the mosques were assaulted in such a manner, and only the Nidaa Allah suffered minor fire damage from a molotov cocktail. The fire was put out by local firefighters.

In short, four weeks after breaking this story, the Associated Press has no credible witnesses, nor any physical or photographic evidence, of a series of four terrorist attacks that they claimed killed as many as 24 people, six of them burned alive. To date, they refuse to issue a retraction.

Faith-based reporting is apparently the new Associated Press standard.

12/26 Update: I was offline over the past few days and so didn't check my email, but Michelle Malkin lets me know via email that according to her sources, Kazamiyah Hospital does not have a morgue, but it does have a large freezer that can be used to store bodies.

What is the Return Policy on Jamil Hussein?

Since near the beginning of Jamilgate, the Associated Press has maintained that:

...Hussein is well known to AP. We first met him, in uniform, in a police station, some two years ago. We have talked with him a number of times since then and he has been a reliable source of accurate information on a variety of events in Baghdad.

No one – not a single person – raised questions about Hussein’s accuracy or his very existence in all that time. Those questions were raised only after he was quoted by name describing a terrible attack in a neighborhood that U.S. and Iraqi forces have struggled to make safe.

The problem with the AP response, issued by none other than AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll herself, is that is it essentially states "You must trust us, because... you must trust us."

Now, exactly four weeks later, the AP has not provided a singe shred of evidence to show why we should trust them about the claimed existence of Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein.

As Michelle Malkin noted last night, teams of investigators working with her, CPATT (Civilian Police Assistance Training Teams), the Iraqi Ministry of Interior (MOI), Marc Danzinger, and Eason Jordan, have all been unable to find any evidence of a Captain Jamil Hussein having ever worked at the Yarmouk or Al Khadra police stations as AP claims.

There is however, another Iraqi Police Captain in Yarmouk, and he has now been through a second round of questioning at Ministry of Interior Headquarters. This same police captain worked at both Yarmouk and Al Khadra, and his first name is Jamil. His last name, however, is not Hussein, and he denies ever having spoken with the Associated Press.

And so we are left with the official statement of the Iraqi government that Police Captain Jamil Hussein has never existed, and no one, AP or otherwsie, has shown evidence to the contrary. He is a ghost, an apparition, a Never Was.

As the AP stands silent (probably on the command of their legal department), we are forced to consider at ths point the following most-logical possibilities:

1. Someone posing as "Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein" duped the Associated Press, from stringer to executive editor, for two years using a made-up identity, or;
2. The Associated Press made the decision prior to April of 2006 to create the pseudonym "Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein," as a cover identity for one or more sources, and had that cover compromised.

If the Associated Press has been duped by an false identity for two years, it should hardly come as a surprise that they would chose not to publicly admit to this embarrassing failure of basic journalistic fact-checking, a compromise that affects the integrity of all 61 stories in which Hussein was a source that are not corroborated by non-AP accounts.

If the Associated Press decided to use a pseudonym prior to the first "Jamil Hussein sourcing", attempting to defraud the public by using a made-up identity to mask the people behind one or more other sources, they are also guilty of compromising all 61 stories in which Hussein was a source that are not corroborated by non-AP accounts, and in addition, have compromised the reputations of all 17 reporters that have bylines to stories citing Hussein as a source, two of which have been promoted to new positions, curiously enough, since Hussein's identity came into question.

Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein was a named source for the Associated Press on 61 stories published between April 24 and November 26 of this year. AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll claims he was a well know AP source for two years. She and AP international editor John Daniszewski, newly-minted Baghdad News Editor Kim Gamel, and brand new Assistant Chief of Middle East News Patrick Quinn have had 29 days to prove Police Captain Jamil Hussein exists, and they have failed, utterly.

I propose that the AP and others in the news business—and make no mistake, it is a business—incorporate a version of the 30-day return policy so common to other businesses.

If a news organization cannot provide physical proof of a disputed story of stories, or the basic existence of sources within 30 days, they should then produce a full retraction of their story of stories using that source, and finance a third-party independent investigation into why their reporting methodology failed to come up with the evidence that should have been needed to take a story to press in the first place. Doing this would ensure that methodological failures can be addressed and lessons learned to keep these kind of failures from repeating in the future.

You've had 29 days to prove your case, AP, and you've failed, utterly.

You've got 24 hours, then I think we're entitled to at least one retraction, and perhaps as many as 61.

Dumb Congressman, Dumber Blogger

If it is true that a negative and a negative make a positive, does that mean that a stupid comment made by a politician, and responded to ignorantly by a blogger, equate to good blog fodder?

Let's see.

BlueNC, a liberal blog apparently from the Concord, NC area outside of Charlotte, attacked Republican Congressman Robin Hayes yesterday for something the local newspaper reported he said in a speech to a local Rotary Club:

"Stability in Iraq ultimately depends on spreading the message of Jesus Christ, the message of peace on earth, good will towards men. Everything depends on everyone learning about the birth of the Savior."

If that is an accurate reflection of what Hayes said (Blue NC provides no link, as the local paper, the Concord Standard and Mount Pleasant Times, has a web site, but does not have an online edition), then Hayes made an unwise comment.

I know the Concord area, and Hayes was certainly playing to his constituency in the heavily Christian audience, with no thought that his comments would get wider distribution around the world thanks to modern technology.

Were his comments careless? Certainly. Accurate? Only in that Christians don't have much of a track record of suicide bombings, nor do they typically use their electric drills for much other than home repair.

Typically.

Hayes, like many of our leaders in the House and Senate, seems far from savvy of how this series of tubes called the Internets, works. He doesn't get it.

Like too many public figures, he does not yet understand that anything you say, anywhere you say it no matter how small, can and will be used against you now in the court of public opinion. Does this make him evil or a "crusader?" No, just stupid.

Equally stupid, however, is this comment by the formatting and theologically-challenged blogger, LiberalNC (my bold):

So if we just turn our soldiers into missionaries everything will be okay, Mr. Hayes? First we sent our men over there to take out the WMD’s, then it was to “spread democracy”, now you want them there to “spread the message of Jesus Christ”? It so happens that people in Iraq already have a savior but unfortunately for Mr. Hayes it’s Muhammed, not Jesus. If we can’t keep Muslims from killing each other over there, I don’t think that trying to make them all Christian is going to be any easier.

This will undoubtedly come as a shock to "LiberalNC" and perhaps many liberals in general, but "Mo" isn't anyone's savior. Never has been, never will be.

The very concept of a Savior, someone both God and man who sacrificed his earthly life to take up the burdens of our sins, is uniquely Christian.

There is nothing even similar to the concept of a savior in Islam. Mohammed did a lot of interesting things, like zipping around Heaven and Hell on guided tours, but he was never a savior, nor did he ever claim to be.

Maybe that is why I find it so amusing when liberals try to comment on the War on Terror.

They don't understand even the basic underlying cultural and philosophical differences between western societies based upon Judeo-Christian thought and those societies based upon Islamic philosophies, and ignorantly assume that Islam is some sort of flip-side to Christianity, that Mohammed is a direct analog to Jesus.

Hayes made a mistake pandering to a local audience, but certainly understands he comments were just hot air, with no hope of being implemented or even seriously discussed. LiberalNC, however, was quite serious, making a comparison based upon a vast ignorance of the gulf between two of the world's major religions.

The later is assuredly more ignorant than the former.

Men In Glassy Houses...

...Shouldn't throw stones:

[Ahmadinejad] toured cities in western Iran, telling the crowds that Iran will not be intimidated by Western demands to dismantle its nuclear program, and scolding Bush.

"Oh, the respectful gentleman, get out of the glassy palace and know that you are the most hated person in the eyes of the world's nations and you can't harm the Iranian nation," Ahmadinejad said, according to the official Iranian Republic News Agency.

Glassy. Iranian nation. Ahmadinejad.

Barring a major change in Iranian politics and rhetoric, I think we'll see all three of those in a sentence again in the near future.

Hi, I'm A Blogger

And he's soooo AP.

h/t Insty.

Uranium-Laden Big Rigs Flips

I think this is generally why they prefer to ship nuclear fuels by rail:

A fully loaded tractor-trailer carrying about 6,600 pounds of powdered uranium has overturned on part of Interstate 40 in Johnston County, authorities say.

All eastbound lanes of I-40 are closed at exit 325 (N.C. Highway 242 to Benson). Traffic is being rerouted through Benson.

The accident occurred shortly before 9 p.m. when the vehicle overturned on the Interstate 95 northbound ramp to I-40 east.

Johnston County's emergency communications director says the threat level is low because the uranium is packed securely. The only threat is if the radioactive material breaks through the reinforced container it is in.

Let's hope that doesn't happen.

BTW... what color is "Carolina Green?"

Soylent Bean

Did you hear about "American concentration camps for brown people?"

It come from this extended wet fart in an post from Firedoglake's Pachacutec (my bold):

Latina Lista has been doing fantastic work on the story of the truly evil ICE roundup of immigrant children and families, which has in many cases left American citizen children effectively orphaned. Now, we learn of American concentration camps for brown people, holding hundreds of children, just in time for Christmas, here on mainland American soil. As allied forces liberated Europe after defeating Germany, the undesirables of the Nazi regime were set free. Who will liberate these people?

It has to be you.

Nazis? Illegal Aliens? You know what that means... FIRE UP THE OVENS!!!

And be sure to leave some for Santa... con leche.

Does that illustrate just how stupid you sound, Pachy? Good.

The Nazis efficiently murdered between 9-11 million people because of no other reason than they were "undesirables"of the wrong religious, cultural, or social minority, or they were gay, crippled, or mentally handicapped, or prisoners of war.

To compare such a barbaric event to the incarceration of people into undoubtably stressful and uncomfortable but safe and heated facilities for ignoring this nations laws, is beyond the pale. Get a sense of perspective, and perhaps, an education.

Werewolves of London

Via the Blotter:

British intelligence and law enforcement officials have passed on a grim assessment to their U.S. counterparts, "It will be a miracle if there isn't a terror attack over the holidays in London," a senior American law enforcement official tells ABCNews.com.

British police have been quietly carrying out a series of key arrests as they continue to track at least six active "plots" tied to what they call "al Qaeda of England."

Officials said they could not cite any specific date or target but said al Qaeda had planned previous operations during the Christmas holidays that had been disrupted.

"It is not a matter of if there will be an attack, but how bad the attack will be," an intelligence official told ABCNews.com.

Authorities say they are seeking at least 18 suspected suicide bombers.

Well, isn't that just peachy.

Terrorism isn't rocket science, folks, and al Qaeda has a track record of loving the classics. If al Qaeda is plotting to hit London over the holidays with suicide bombers, figure on trains, planes, and TATP.

TATP, shorthand from triacetone triperoxide, is a powerful and unstable "homebrew" explosive used in the successful subway and bus bombings in London on July 7, 2005, and four failed bombings exactly two weeks later where the TATP used, thought to come from the same batch of explosives, failed to detonate.

I question the timing, and I mean that quite seriously. If these rumored terrorists are indeed plotting a Christmastime attack, it would seem that at least part of the goal would be to drive a deeper wedge between British Muslim "other" and the overwhelming majority of a too-politically correct and predominately Anglo-Christian nation.

Jamil Who?

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present you Jamil Ghdaab Gulaim:

According to two CPATT officials--one in the U.S, one in Iraq--there is no one named "Jamil Hussein" working now or ever at either at the Yarmouk or al Khadra police stations. That is what they have said along and nothing has changed.

The Baghdad-based CPATT officer says there is no "Sgt. Jamil Hussein" at Yarmouk, which contradicts what Marc Danziger's contacts found. I have another military source on the ground who works with the Iraqi Army (separate and apart from the CPATT sources) and is checking into whether anyone named "Jamil Hussein" has ever worked at Yarmouk.

There is only one police officer whose first name is "Jamil" currently working at the Khadra station, according to my CPATT sources.

His name is Jamil Ghdaab Gulaim (alternate spelling per CPATT is "Ghulaim.") Previously, Jamil Ghdaab Gulaim worked at a precinct in Yarmouk, according to the CPATT sources. Curt at Flopping Aces has received the same info.

Now, go back and look at the full name and location information the Associated Press cited in its statement on the matter:

[T]hat captain has long been know to the AP reporters and has had a record of reliability and truthfulness. He has been based at the police station at Yarmouk, and more recently at al-Khadra, another Baghdad district, and has been interviewed by the AP several times at his office and by telephone. His full name is Jamil Gholaiem Hussein.

Let's review: AP's source, supposedly named "Jamil Gholaiem Hussein," used to work at Yarmouk but now works at al Khadra. CPATT says the one person named "Jamil" now at al Khadra -- Jamil Ghdaab Gulaim -- also used to work at Yarmouk. His rank is the same as that of AP's alleged source. His last name is almost identical to the middle name of AP's alleged source. (FYI: In Arabic, the middle name is one's father's name; the last name is one's grandfather's.)

Pseudonyms? Why should I care about pseudonyms?

Curiouser and curiouser...

Content to be Rabble

Joseph Rago doesn't seem to like bloggers much. His WSJ op-ed The Blog Mob states that blogs are "Written by fools to be read by imbeciles."

That may be, but I must wonder: How many people check the Wall Street Journal web site several times each day specifically to see what Mr. Rago is going to say?

For all of the things he may or may not have right in his op-ed, I think I detect a touch of jealousy.

In Spite of Ourselves

So the cheesesteak-eating surrender monkey declares that "Militarily we have lost" in Vietnam Iraq. A bold declaration, considering we've never lost more than a skirmish. For anyone familiar with Murtha, these pronouncements are the typical, defeatist, and dishonest rhetoric we've come to expect from him. He has no desire to win any conflict against terrorism, and has staked his political future on a U.S defeat. Ideologically, he surrendered long ago.

That said, Col. Abscam does illustrate a point; we do tend to be quite myopic, and focus on military success as the be-all, end-all measurement of success or failure in Iraq. In particular, our media and leaders seem focused lately almost exclusively on the rise and fall sectarian violence in Baghdad. While Baghdad, as Iraq's largest city and capital is undoubtedly the single most recognizable city in Iraq, does it necessarily follow that images of conflict in Baghdad accurately reflect the state of the nation?

The simple fact is that there are other factors affecting the success or failure of the Iraqi State, and many of these events are happening outside of the Iraqi capital.

One of those "other factors" is the state of the overall Iraqi economy, which as the media will not readily tell you, is booming:

In my December 10th entry, I observed that the Iraqi economy is doing quite well. I wrote, "This economic news also shows is that Iraqi nation may be slowly evolving into three federal sections since most of the economic progress is happening outside the Baghdad." Newsweek is now reporting what others such as Strategypage.com have been showing for the past couple of years, the Iraqi's economy is booming. And just as I wrote, much of this is occurring is outside Baghdad. Newsweek reports, "With security improving in one key spot—the southern oilfields—that figure could go up." But this is not all. Newsweek added, "Even so, there's a vibrancy at the grass roots that is invisible in most international coverage of Iraq. Partly it's the trickle-down effect. However it's spent, whether on security or something else, money circulates. Nor are ordinary Iraqis themselves short on cash. That's boosted economic activity, particularly in retail. Imported goods have grown increasingly affordable, thanks to the elimination of tariffs and trade barriers. Salaries have gone up more than 100 percent since the fall of Saddam, and income-tax cuts (from 45 percent to just 15 percent) have put more cash in Iraqi pockets." What Newsweek is describing supply side economy and guess what, it works in the United States, and it works in Iraq!

The Futurist was even more bold, building upon work done by the Brookings Institute's Iraq Index and a summary of their report, making the case that Coalition forces and the Iraqi government will defeat the insurgency in 2008 in two posts:

Everybody Sing: "Sha-Sha-Sha, Shia..."

Via email, from a post titled, "The ten least popular Christmas toys of the year."

See what you people give me to work with?

Editing The Greg Mitchell Way

In my last post, I mentioned an AP news release about Jamilgate that seemed to have disappeared. It's back and well, well, well.... What have we here?

Kind of curious that the AP has taken their response of Nov 28th off their website. The address that I, along with many other bloggers, linked to is this one.

What kind of information was given in that response?

He has been based at the police station at Yarmouk, and more recently at al-Khadra, another Baghdad district, and has been interviewed by the AP several times at his office and by telephone. His full name is Jamil Gholaiem Hussein.

Also they said in that response that they confirmed the burning via hospital and morgue workers:

AP reporters who have been working in Iraq throughout the conflict learned of the mosque incident through witnesses and neighborhood residents and corroborated it with a named police spokesmen and also through hospital and morgue work

But guess what? The new cache version has this paragraph:

AP reporters who have been working in Iraq throughout the conflict learned of the mosque incident through witnesses and later corroborated it with police.

The same paragraph minus the bit about the hospital and morgue workers.

A little creative attempt to rewrite history by the AP, eh? Quite dishonest, trying to alter an already released story. Yet strangely familiar...

Put it on Kathleen Carroll's tab... and cue the flaming skull.

Update: Allahpundit makes a good argument that since the two versions vary slightly in the USA Today and AP.org versions of the Daniszewski statement, that the comment about the morgue and hospital workers many not have been omitted from the AP release today, because it might not have ever been there. I Googled every variation I could think of aobut the morgue and hospital workers statement, and all hits tracked back to the USA Today story, so I'm inclined to think he's right.

But AP isn't out of the woods by any stretch, as Allah also noted that they USA Today version of Daniszewski's statement came after the AP version. They still dropped the hospital and morgue workers, just not in the same release.

So far, the AP has dropped the hospital and morgue workers and reduced the number of burning mosques from 4 to one, and the number of dead from 24 to six, if my count is accurate. That is a lot of revisionism warranting a retraction, in my opinion.

Absurdly Unethical: The Potential Ethics Case Against AP

To quote the Bard, "What's in a name?"

The on-going Associated Press scandal known as Jamilgate began with this report from AP reporter Qais Al-Bashir. The initial report hinges exclusively on the word of Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein, a source that the Associated Press has cited a total of 61 times since April of this year, and a man the AP has claimed they have known for two years (Note that link was active as I wrote the original draft of this story, but has since disappeared).

In fact, when Hussein's credibilty was challenged, AP went further in supporting this identity, and even provided the full name of Jamil Gholaiem Hussein to bolster their case.

But what happens if it is determined that Jamil Gholaiem Hussein is not the name of AP's long-running source? What if it is a pseudonym?

I posed a generic ethical question based upon Jamilgate to quite a few people this morning. It read:

Good morning.

Can I ask you three quick questions about source ethics in journalism?

If it is determined that a reporter has been using named source in an on-going series of stories, and that name turns out to be a pseudonym, under what circumstances would this be considered unethical behavior, and how serious a breach of ethics would this be?

Would it be compounded if the reporter insisted upon the veracity of the pseudonym?

What responsibility does the reporter bear in verifying the identity of his source?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

I decided on a generic approach as something of a "control;" is isn't scientific by any stretch of the imagination, but by posing this as a hypothetical, I was hoping to avoid any biases that people may harbor towards this specific story. It is, I think, far better to investigate these questions based upon the underlying principles that should drive honest reporting.

The answers to my hypothetical questions have begun to trickle in, and paint quite a dark portrait of the AP's behavior in Jamilgate if, Jamil Gholaiem Hussein turns out to be a pseudonym for someone else.

Dorian Gray?

So far, I have received four responses to these questions, from Jon Ham of the John Locke Foundation and a former managing editor of the Durham Herald-Sun, Larisa Alexandrovna of the liberal-leaning Raw Story, Jay Rosen of New York University's PressThink, and Committee of Concerned Journalists Founding Chairman, Bill Kovach (Peter Y. Sussman who is on the Ethics Committee of the Society of Professional Journalists. has also responded, as noted in the update at the end).

A lengthy excerpt of Jon Ham's response:

There are, indeed, times when a reporter needn’t know who a source really is. Let’s say a note comes in over the transom saying X will or has happened. A reporter then must, on his own, determine if X has or is about to happen. He must confirm it. That’s reporting, and since the reporter now has first-hand knowledge, the identity of the source is immaterial.

But if a reporter gets information from a source and reports it without verifying it, i.e., trusting the source implicitly, then he MUST know who that source is, what that source is, what his biases are, who he works for, what he’s got to gain, etc. That’s the only way to weigh his veracity.

If a reporter THINKS he knows all this and then it turns out the person was lying to the reporter and was really someone else, then the reporter has a moral obligation to report that to his superiors immediately since all his previous stories are now called into question. The reporter may be a victim in this scenario, but he has by definition failed as a reporter. For whatever reason, he believed the source and didn’t do enough to check him out.

So far, the above is not so much unethical as incompetent. But, if a person KNEW when he reported it that the person was not what the reporter told the world he was, that’s as unethical as it gets.

Also, if a reporter identifies a source by a pseudonym he has an obligation to tell the reader that he is not using the source’s real name and explaining why not. You can’t just make up a name and use it in a story. That’s not reporting, that’s fiction writing.

From Larisa Alexandrovna:

I am not sure what the context here is, so I will do my best . In general, a reporter should use anonymous sources when revealing the source identity would put the source into danger or retaliation politically or via employer. Usually, when using anon sources, a journalist should try to give basic background information regarding the source, for example:

• A current official in the Department of Defense Intelligence office.

The above provides a great deal. It illustrates that the source is current and has direct access to topic being discussed. It shows that the source works for the US government, in the military, more specifically in covert activities. It also describes the source as an "official" which suggests the source has a higher rank.

Sometimes it may put the source at risk giving even this much information. So the journalist must put some distance between the source and identifying features:

• An official in DOD (so you have put the source in a much larger organization out of specifics) OR
• A current official close to the DIA (so you are still saying the source has access and is of rank, just not suggesting that they actually work there)

But you get the basic idea. So, given this background, the use of pseudonyms is not necessary to protect a source and not something I do. That said, It has been done when there are more than one source and all of the sources are at risk. Think Deep Throat, which while in part is a former FBI man, is actually a composite. If there is a real person who is a source, citing them anonymously and putting some distance between who they are and how they know what they know should be enough.

The reporter MUST verify the source and if it is an anonymous source, so too MUST the editor. That said, I don't know the context, so it is hard to say. If the source is intel, they may have a history that is "misleading." Again, without context, I simply do not know how to address this, but in general and as a matter of process the MUST stands.

From Jay Rosen:

The purpose of naming sources is transparency-- so that we can "consider the source," as the saying goes. Part of what we might want to consider is the source's background, history, where the person is coming from. A pseudonym obviously interferes with that, and so it defeats the purpose of naming sources in the first place. That would be true whether or not some expert says it's a violation of journalism ethics.

Normally, if a reporter is introducing a pseudonym for purpose of concealing identity so as to protect a source from harm, this would be disclosed. "Names were changed to protect...."

From Bill Kovach, CCJ Founding Chairman:

Without knowing all the facts let me try to answer your questions as asked: 1. If the reporter did not state clearly in the articles that a pseudonym was being used and the reason it was being used, yes it was a breach of ethics. Simply put it was not true and was deceiving the consumer of the information--both fundamental breaches of the ultimate responsibility the journalist has to the audience of the work. 2. I don't quite understand this question. If you mean the reporter insisted it was o.k. to use the pseydonym even though it was done without the knowledge of the audience to begin with it was a clear failure to understnd that the first undisclosed use was an ethical failure. In this sense it would be a continuing breach. 3. All reporters at all times have an absolute responsibility not only to make sure they know who their sources are but that they have verified that sources access to the knowlege imparted and to the fullest extent possible has verified that the information is valid.

The second question I asked—"Would it be compounded if the reporter insisted upon the veracity of the pseudonym?"—was a bit vauge, so I attempted to flesh it out with a bit more detail for Mr. Kovach:

I'm sorry for not making question #2 more clear. In this specific instance, the reporter was challenged as to the veracity of the source, with authorities claiming the named source provided was a fake. The reporter responded that the man is real, and went along further by providing a middle name to the pseudonym. If they willingly added to furthering this fake persona, this becomes a deeper ethical breach, does it not?

Chairman Kovach responded:

a case such as you describe---providing a middle initial to a fake name---is an absurdely unethical case.

To summarize, these four experts and practitioners seem to agree that it would be better for the source to be anonymous, and that it is hardly ever permissible to use a pseudonym to protect a source. The consensus also seems to be that in the rare instances a pseudonym is used, the reporter has an obligation to explain to the reader that a pseudonym was being used, and why.

If however, the reporter uses a pseudonym and refuses to disclose that fact, they we have a serious breach of journalistic ethics, one Ham refers to as "fiction writing," and what Kovach considers a "deceiving the consumer of the information."

As Kovach noted in answer to my follow-up about the reporter supporting the pseudonym by adding a middle name, he said is "absurdely[sic] unethical."

In other words, if it is determined that the Associated Press knowingly used the name Jamil Hussein as an un-announced pseudonym, then they knowingly breached journalistic ethics in all 61 stories citing him as a source.

Further, if they are responsible for creating or purposefully attributing a known false middle name for this pseudonym—such as the name "Gholaiem" cited by none other than AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll herself—then they are guilty of a major ethical breach of journalistic ethics by furthering such a fraud.

Let's hope for the AP's sake that Jamil Gholaiem Hussein is a real Baghdad police captain as the Associated Press continues to allege. If they are guilty of using pseudonym, then they have breached their journalistic ethics no fewer than 61 times.

This of course, brings up another question: what happens if the AP actually believed that Jamil Hussein was Jamil Hussein, and he turns out to be someone or something else?

Then, ladies and gentlemen, you get to watch as the credibility of every story ever reported using Jamil Hussein—all 61 stories—come crumbing down, and the reputation of the Associated Press along with it.

Funny thing, truth. Eventually it always gets out.

When it does, we'll be waiting.

Update: Another response, this time from Peter Y. Sussman who is on the Ethics Committee of the Society of Professional Journalists.

My question: If it is determined that a reporter has been using named source in an on-going series of stories, and that source name turns out to be a pseudonym, under what circumstances would this be considered unethical behavior, and how serious a breach of ethics would this be?

Sussman's response:

Barring some overwhelmingly important mitigating factor, it's unethical -- and, to my mind a serious infraction -- if the reporter knew the name was a pseudonym and intentionally did not say so in the story, and even if it is acknowledged in the story, it's a dangerous practice because it's a device often used to create a good story line where none truly exists. I assume that s/he did not acknowledge that the source was a pseudonym in the story itself because you said "turns out to be a pseudonym." If that's a knowing practice -- that is, the reporter wasn't duped by someone giving him or her a pseudonym -- it's intentional falsification (misleading, or lying to, the reader or viewer or listener). Such practices add to the lack of credibility in all journalism. There have been Pulitzer Prize scandals over such infractions, if memory serves.

Specific provisions of the SPJ Code of Ethics apply to such cases. You can read the code at http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp .

My second question: Would it be compounded if the reporter insisted upon the veracity of the pseudonym?

Sussman's response:

You mean that the reporter knew it was a pseudonym and refused to acknowledge it when confronted with credible evidence? Yes, no question it would be compounded. Candor with the reader is the first responsibility. Readers must be given the information needed to assess to their own satisfaction the story's trustworthiness. If the reporter was duped and is later confronted with credible evidence, he or she has a responsibility to weigh and discuss with the reader the possibility that an identification was in error -- and the reasons for the error. Clarifying and explaining news coverage is also covered by the Code of Ethics.

My final question: What responsibility does the reporter bear in verifying the identity of his source?

That is what the reporter is there to do, on behalf of the reader, to the best of his or her ability. Reporters can sometimes be duped, especially young and inexperienced reporters, but failure to check if there were any clues at all that a pseudonym was being used is reckless, bad journalism. Knowing or intentional or willful failure to do so (to make it a "better" story) is clearly unethical.

A lot will depend on the circumstances -- how much the reporter should have known if properly skeptical and how willful the falsification was -- whether the error was understandable or sloppy or outright unethical.

Fedayeen AP?

To answer Ace's question, a particularly interesting part of Marc Danziger's post is the apparent discovery of Uday Hussein associate and possible Baathist dead-ender Sgt. Jamil Hussein at the police station in Yarmouk.

If it turns out that this Hussein is the man claiming to be Captain Hussein, and his tied to Uday and the Baathists can be substantiated, then we've got something juicy brewing.

The association of Muslim Scholars is widely viewed as a terrorist-friendly Sunni group with ties to the insurgency and al Qaeda, and the AP uncritically and unquestioningly cited them in this story without an apparent second thought.

If it can be substantiated that the Sgt. Hussein uncovered by Danziger's work is AP's "Captail Jamil Hussein" source, and that it can be substantiated that he has ties to Uday, or more specifically has ties with the Fedayeen Saddam, then we will have reason to wonder how much of AP's reporting has been infiltrated in such a way as to promote a pro-Sunni insurgency agenda.

Update:

A short description of the Fedayeen Saddam from the Global Security link above (my bold):

Though at times improperly termed an "elite" unit, the Fedayeen was a politically reliable force that could be counted on to support Saddam against domestic opponents. It started out as a rag-tag force of some 10,000-15,000 "bullies and country bumpkins." They were supposed to help protect the president and Uday, and carry out much of the police's dirty work.

Does it get much dirtier than alleging false massacres?

Kathleen Carroll: Retract, and Step Down

I think it past time for senior executives of the Associated Press to step down for repeated failures of integrity and resposibility, and for violating so many of their organizations stated values and principles. The following is hardly a conclusive list of reasons that the AP should issue retractions and divest themselves of the failures of their senior leadership, but it is a start.

• AP should apologize for running the initial story of six Sunni men being pulled from a mosque and burned alive based upon the testimony of a single source. AP should acknowledge that single-source information has long been considered unreliable by serious news organizations and they should apologize for breaking that cardinal rule of journalism.
• AP should apologize for the multiple failures of reporting in the follow-up story, of which there were many, including:
  1. Using an embellished version of the same single-sourced account.
  2. AP should apologize for using the hearsay of an unverified secondary source as support for the primary account.
  3. AP should apologize for uncritically parroting the claims of multiple additional deaths made by the Association of Muslim Scholars, a group with suspected insurgent ties.
  4. AP should apologize for failing to check with official sources to verify the veracity of all the claims made above, plus;
  5. AP should apologize for utterly failing to check or even ask for any physical or photographic evidence to support claims which to this point, claimed four terrorist attacks on mosques and up to 24 deaths, including the 18 alleged killed at al-Muhaimin mosque, and the six men that our source claimed were pulled from a nameless mosque, doused in kerosene, and burned to death.
  6. AP should apologize for slandering the Iraqi Army, by uncritically repeating the charge that they stood by and did nothing as these terrorist attacks and murders were carried out, when we have no evidence to support that claim.

• AP should apologize as well for the multiple failures of basic editorial fact-checking and source verification that led them to continuing failures of the basic application of journalistic principles in follow-up stories to the original, including:
  1. stating that these attacks did not end until U.S. forces became involved, despite the fact that a simple call to the MNF-I Public Affairs Office would have verified that no U.S. forces deployed to Hurriyah that or any other day, because Hurriyah is nota U.S area of responsibility.
  2. claiming by name that the Ahbab al-Mustafa, Nidaa Allah, al-Muhaimin and al-Qaqaqa mosques were attacked "with rocket-propelled grenades, heavy machine guns and automatic rifles," before being burned, without taking the very basic steps of verifying through official or secondary sources that these mosques were in fact attacked.
  3. AP should apologize for slandering the Iraq Police for insisting they did nothing to stop the alleged attacks as well.
• AP should also apologize for attacking those who questioned all of these easily noticeable inconsistencies.
• AP should apologize to their literally billions of readers that they failed, to which they have an obligation to report facts, not propaganda, and not a convenient "truthy" narrative.
• AP should apologize to the U.S military for doubting their honor and integrity. When they put their names and reputations on the line, AP hid behind anonymous stringers and apparently false witnesses.
• AP should apologize to the Iraqi Police, the Iraqi Army, the Iraqi Ministries of Defense, Interior, and Health for slandering their employees.

I'm sure there are more specific apologies in order, including apologizes and promises to fix the AP's fatally-flawed stringer-based methods of reporting that have little to no editorial checks, and allows those with apparent insurgent ties to infiltrate and propagate false reports. AP executives should also issue apologies to the thousands of news organizations around the world that until now trusted the AP’s reporting, and internally, they should offer apologies to the overwhelming majority of honest journalists who work for the Associated Press around the world.

It will take months to rebuild the failed policies that led to the collapse of the AP's reporting efforts in Iraq, and double that time to implement those changes. Until these new methodologies are born out by time, the AP will have to suffer the loss of confidence that their flawed product created.

Of course, no error in judgement of this scale is complete without senior management acknowledging their failures.

If they truly care about the integrity of reporting in the Associated Press, Executive Editor Kathleen Carol should end her list of apologies and retractions with a resignation, as should AP international editor John Daniszewski.

Then—and only then—can we begin to look back through the 60 other stories to which Jamil Hussein was a source, and see whether any more of these accounts require retractions and apologies.

Congratulations Weblog Award Winners

The final votes have been cast and tallied, and the winners of the 2006 Weblog Awards have been announced.

Check out the final results, and if you have a moment, congratulate the winners, the finalists, and the nominees that made it happen.

On a personal note, I'd like to thank those of you who voted for Confederate Yankee, and for those of you who nominated me to be a finalist for the second year in a row.

Perhaps next, year, I'll see you in Vegas.

Bloomberg Behind Entrapment?

Glenn Reynolds linked to the following from NRA News:

There's someone out there telling folks to buy guns illegally, and I think it's time we put a stop to it. He's directing contract employees to walk into gun stores, lie on the paperwork about who's buying the gun, and walk out after making a straw purchase.

Even worse, he's bragging about what he's doing. He's holding press conferences to tell the world about what he's done, but so far law enforcement doesn't seem to be listening.

Well, I think it's time we help out the ATF agents that enforce our nation's gun laws. We need to call their Illegal Gun Hotline at 1-800-ATF-GUNS (that's 1-800-283-4867) and alert them to this illegal firearms activity. Tell them that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is hiring private investigators to initiate straw purchases in several states, and you want them to enforce the law.

Oh, I know Bloomberg says he wants to rid New York's streets of illegal guns. But he's not asking for help from local law enforcement agents. He's not asking for the help of the ATF. He's not even using his own police department.

Bloomberg is using his own private army of investigators to lie on the paperwork in order to sue the small business gun dealers, alleging that they're to blame for the lies they've been told. And once he sues, he offers the trapped gun dealers a devil's bargain: Give Bloomberg all of your business documents, and the lawsuit goes away.

Unless the law works differently in New York City than it does elsewhere, it appears that Mayor Michael Bloomberg may be involved in a criminal conspiracy to break federal firearms laws.

Strawman purchases—roughly defined as someone legally allowed to purchase a firearm illegally acting to purchase a firearm for someone not legally allowed to own a weapon—is a felony. At the sporting good store where I work, we have multiple notices posted for customers letting them know that such a sale can lead to up to ten years in jail and a substantial fine, and they are not the only people at risk.

Gun store owners and employees are extremely aware of the threat that illegal purchases pose to not just their industry, but their own immediate welfare. Knowingly selling a gun to someone we suspect may be a strawman is also a crime.

As a result, most gun store employees interrogate potential purchasers to a certain degree to attempt to determine if the potential gun purchaser is indeed attempting to purchase a firearm for himself. If we suspect that something might be fishy with the buyer, we have a right to stop the transaction from occurring, even when the federal government, through the FBI’s NICS Operations Center, verifies that the purchaser is indeed himself legally allowed to own a gun.

The problem is that Mayor Bloomberg's investigators likely know every nuance of the law, just as they know the tricks of the trade dealers use to expose potential strawman purchasers from legitimate purchasers. To initiate lawsuits against small gun store owners, it seems quite likely that Mayor Bloomberg and his investigators may have initiated a felonious conspiracy, committing fraud in order to set up my layman’s understanding of entrapment.

If any lawyers would like to comment on this, I'd be very interested to see if these gun shop owners targeted by Bloomberg have any criminal or civil recourse against the Mayor, his investigators, and the City of New York.

Monday Morning Jamilgate

Nothing yet from Danzinger over at Winds of Change to further his claim of possibly finding the AP's missing Iraqi Police Officer Jamil Hussein, but Patrick Frey spoke with him last night, and seems to think there might be something there:

I just got off the phone with Marc "Armed Liberal" Danziger. If everything comes together the way he hopes it will, he is going to blow the lid off of this Jam(a)il Hussein controversy. If he’s able to put together what he told me about on the phone, it's huge.

I wish I could say more.

Note that Patterico, lawyer that he is, doesn't say who is going to get burned.

Patterico also catches some fact-free lefty bloggers who were jumping to conclusions that are factually incorrect, to defend a story without any physical supporting evidence, based upon a typically uncritical post from a "news" industry site run by an admitted liar and revisionist with his own admitted history of using false sources.

As I have been pushing hard for a while now, Jamil Hussein is just one aspect of this story. The Associated Press has yet to account for unsubstantiated propaganda it repeated from this story for the Association of Muslim Scholars, a group with strong ties to the insurgency that claimed 18 people were killed in "an inferno at the al-Muhaimin mosque." There is zero supporting evidence for this claim made by a terrorist-associated group, and yet the AP reported it as fact.

How is this not dishonest journalism?

How is this not supporting terrorist propaganda?

The Associated Press has been curiously silent about its still unsubstantiated claims that four mosques--Ahbab al-Mustafa, Nidaa Allah, al-Muhaimin and al-Qaqaqa--were rocketed with RPGs, fired upon with heavy machine gus and assault rifles, and set on fire, with only the intervention of U.S forces stopping the carnage.

But we know that the al-Muhaimin mosque stands undamaged, and there is zero evidence that 18 people were killed inside. We know that tow other mosques are completely undamaged as well. Only Nidaa Allah suffered minor fire damage, quickly extinguished by Iraqi firefighters, who curiously did not find 18 people burned in an inferno there or anywhere else, nor an additional six burning bodies lying in the street. Nor were U.S forces ever in Hurriyah, an area exclusively patrolled by Iraqi forces.

By all means, I hope that Danziger can provide solid evidence that he located someone named Jamil Hussein. Perhaps Hussein, once identified, can point us to which AP reporters are most responsible for the Associated Press' apparent on-going journalistic malpractice, cover-up, and fraud in this, and potentially other instances.

The 60s radicals may have been partially right:

Don't trust anyone over -30-

Update: Though he made a noble effort, Marc Danziger concludes that despite his earlier comments, Captain Jamil Hussein does not exist. What he does turn up, however is that their is a suspect sergeant by that name with ties to the dead Uday Hussein (Saddam's sadist son) and Baathist dead-enders. While Danziger won't say it, I'd posit from those details that this Sgt. Hussein is obviously a Sunni, is perhaps tied to the insurgency, and certainly not who the AP claims he is.

Nice guy that I am, I'm currently working on helping Kathleen Carroll write the apology and retraction she should have released weeks ago. Here it is.

Update: SeeDubya maps the impossibilities.

Hussein Revealed?

Marc Danziger posts over at Winds of Change that he thinks there might be a Jamail Hussein at the Yarmouk Police Station in Baghdad. He doesn't provide any evidence, but then, he doesn't claim this is a certainty, either.

I posted the following in the comments:

I guess the question to this part of the equation is whether or not "Jamail Hussein" is "Jamil Hussein."

I find it unlikely.

AP pointed us to this specific police station and provided Jamil Gholaiem Hussein as the full name of their source. It defies all logic to think that both the American and Iraqi forces involved here would not have combed every possible variant of his name, and have not run through through the personnel records of every single officer at the Yarmouk police station... not to mention the probability that they interviewed every cop at Yarmouk to see if they knew of Hussein. I think it more likely that your Jamail Hussein is indeed a real Iraqi policeman, but somehow I doubt he is a Captain, and I think you'll find he will deny being AP's source.

But as I've said on my site, Hussein is only one aspect of the story reported on November 24.

The AP reported 4 mosques were rocketed with RPGs, machine-gunned with both heavy machine guns and assault rifles, burned, and blown up... and yet the AP has provided no evidence that these buildings were damaged, and officials from the Iraqi Army, Iraqi Police, and Iraqi Health Ministry (presumably in charge of the fire department) report only one mosque suffering minor fire damage, with the other three untouched.

The AP claimed six men were pulled alive from a rocketed mosque, doused in kerosene, and then burned alive. The AP also uncritically reported a claim by the Association of Muslim Scholars (long thought to be affiliated with the insurgency) that as many as a dozen people burned to death inside one of the burning mosques... one of the mosques that was found to be undamaged, much less destroyed.

Not a single body has been found, nor does anyone seem o be able to locate family members of those killed, or friends, or anyone who can so much as name the victims.

There seems to be zero physical evidence that the AP could produce in three trips to the area, and with three trips they've been unable to get anyone, official or unoffical, or go on the record supporting their claims with the exception of a Sunni elder that has since refuted his claim, and our friend, Captain Jamil Hussein.

The AP insists Hussein exists. At this point, they must. He is the only thing they can hang this story on, and if that falls apart, this story is utterly discredited. Of course, if this story falls apart, the AP's credibility takes a huge hit, not just for thist story, but becuase Captain Jamil Hussein was a named source on 60 other AP stories, throwing all those stories in doubt.

Bylines to those 61 stories were provided by 17 AP reporters... not exactly helping their credibility, either.

To further up the ante, Jamil Hussein is just one of more than a dozen "Iraqi policemen" cited by the AP in past (and current) reports for which the Iraqi Interior Ministry cannot confirm their employment or authenticity.

I don't think I'm overstating the case by saying that AP's entire portfolio of Iraq reporting credibility rests on the existence and authenticity of Jamil Hussein being an authentic Iraqi police captain.

For this very reason which the Associated Press undboutably understands, the AP would have produced an authentic police captain by now if they had one.

More than likely, Jamail Hussein is not Jamil Hussein, just as these blown up mosques still stand.

I think it is worth repeating that Jamilgate is a multi-faceted scandal. There are two basic questions driving this continuing event:

• Were four mosques and 18 people murdered (not including the six men by immolation) in Hurriyah as alleged by the Associated Press?
• Does the long-time AP source "Jamil Gholaiem Hussein." a Captain in the Iraqi Police, actually exist?

The first part deals with the specific allegations of a series of terrorist acts, and the evidence supporting those allegations. The second part deals with the credibility of a heavily-used and deeply trusted Associated Press source.

The common thread uniting the two parts? The unquestioning belief of the Associated Press in both the Hurriyah attacks they reported, and the man who was the primary source of this and 60 other stories, Jamil Hussein.

So far, the Associated Press hasn't been able to provide the first shred of physical or photographic evidence to support the existence of 18 killed in "an inferno at the al-Muhaimi mosque," nor six men pulled from a mosque and immolated, nor four mosques being rocketed, machine gunned, and burned, nor of a solitary Iraqi police captain who is the primary source of all those claims.

I somewhat doubt that he will when so many others have failed, but if Marc Danziger can prove the existence of Jamil Hussein, the world will be able to thank a blogger for doing what the largest news agency in the world could not.

With the Hussein question settled, we can then focus all of our efforts on trying to unravel why Hussein apparently lied about the attacks in Hurriyah, and begin to determine how many of the other five dozen stories he fed to the Associated Press were falsified, to what extent, and why.

Battle for Sadr City? No Hue.

Several days ago, Allahpundit caught a potentially important L.A. Times article which purports to outline "the way forward" in Iraq (my bold):

As President Bush weighs new policy options for Iraq, strong support has coalesced in the Pentagon behind a military plan to "double down" in the country with a substantial buildup in American troops, an increase in industrial aid and a major combat offensive against Muqtada Sadr, the radical Shiite leader impeding development of the Iraqi government.

Allah keyed in on the same phrase I did in the lede, and notes:

They want as many as 40,000 more troops and, to make sure no one’s going to call off the dogs once they’re unleashed, a shuffle within the Iraqi government, which is almost certainly what Bush’s meeting with Iraq’s Sunni vice president was about yesterday. Some experts are knocking the plan on grounds that you can’t kill your way to victory here. You can’t not kill your way to victory either, though — we tried that by turning al-Sadr onto politics and look where it got us. Gen. Chiarelli wants to split the difference by introducing an aggressive jobs program alongside the military maneuvers to give would-be jihadists an alternative to fighting.

Greg Tini hits similar point at the new TomDelay.com blog, and Charles Krauthammer concludes in a column at Townhall.com:

…the president has one last chance to come forward with a new strategy.

He must do two things. First, as I've been agitating, establish a new governing coalition in Baghdad that excludes Moqtada al-Sadr, a cancer that undermines the Maliki government's ability to work with us. It is encouraging that the president has already begun such a maneuver by meeting with rival Shiite and Sunni parliamentary leaders. If we help produce a cross-sectarian government that would be an ally rather than a paralyzed semi-adversary of coalition forces, we should then undertake part two: "double down" our military effort. This means a surge in American troops with a specific mission: to secure Baghdad and (together with the support of the Baghdad government -- a sine qua non) suppress Sadr's Mahdi Army.

It is our last chance for success. Bush can thank the ISG and its instant irrelevance for making it possible.

For the very few of you needing a refresher, Muqtada al-Sadr is the 33-year-old fourth son of a famous Iraqi Shiite Grand Ayatollah, and the grandson of another (Wiki yourself silly if you want his life story). He lacks the education to claim any sort of formal religious authority, and has built a following based on his family's name. In that regard, he's like a sober Ted Kennedy, and roughly as loyal.

While al-Sadr's family has traditionally drawn support in Najaf and Basra, Muqtada draws must of his support from the Baghdad slum of Sadr City (formally Saddam City), and this is likely where al-Sadr's forces, the Mahdi Army, will make their stand.

This is Sadr City.

click to enlarge

Sadr City is a dense slum of some 2 million mostly Shiite souls crammed into 8 square miles of dilapidated public housing, where electricity is sporadic, sewage runs in the streets, and death squads routinely dump the bodies of their victims.

A description of Sadr City from GlobalSecurity.Org:

Sadr City is subdivided into six sections. The district is one of the poorest in Baghdad. Unemployment is rampant. Homes are in disrepair. The population consists mostly of Shiite Moslems. It is also a haven for criminals released from Iraqi prisons by Saddam shortly before the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Sadr City, built by Saddam Hussein, was the scene of numerous confrontations between coalition forces and residents in 2003. Infrastructure problems still plague portions of the district. Electrical services are intermittent. Parts of some streets in some neighborhoods are flooded with sewage from long-neglected pipes. Trash pickup stopped during the war, and residents started dumping their trash on the medians in the potholed streets.

To get an idea of the "lay of the land" in Sadr City, look at the series of 17 photos provided by the Christian Peacemaker Teams from 2005.

This is a map view of Sadr City.

A larger view (source) of the map from which this was drawn shows Baghdad's Green Zone in the bottom left corner of the picture, on the east bank of the Tigris River. Sadr City is bordered to the northeast by a substantial canal, the Ishbiliyah neighborhood and the Army Canal to the southwest, and mostly undeveloped areas in the northwest and southeast.

* * *

Any attempt by U.S. and Iraqi Army forces to enter Sadr City and hunt down the Madhi Army militia is going to draw immediate comparisons to the 2004 Battle of Fallujah. Having just read an excellent detailed account of a Marine perspective of that battle in We Were One, I think I can honestly say, without any sense of humor or irony, that any battle in Sadr City will be exactly like Fallujah's Operation Phantam Fury, but completely different. That statement is not as Berra-ish as it may sound.

Sadr City is far more compact than Fallujah. Thanks to geography, it is theoretically easier to cordon off (and the last time they did, sectarian violence dropped sharply), and once segregated into quadrants, set up for combat or search operations.

Whether Sadr City becomes another urban moonscape, or is instead something far less intense, is very much up to al Sadr and the loose affiliates of the Madhi Army.

If they opt for a showdown, we could see extremely intense urban fighting. It would not be out of the realm of possibility to see significant U.S. casualties in this kind of close-quarters fighting, but the toll on the Madhi Army would likely be catastrophic. The Army and Marines have had two years to study the lessons learned from the assault on Fallujah, and adapt tactics, techniques, and rules of engagement. Estimates vary wildly on the number of terrorist casualties in Phantom Fury, but 1,200-1,600 killed and roughly half that number captured are the numbers from a force in the mid-thousands is most often cited.

The Madhi Army is estimated to be between 10,000-40,000 strong. Extrapolating out similar casualty rates for a similar urban combat, and the Madhi Army could suffer between 2,500-10,000 killed, with thousands wounded and captured.

If the bulk of the Madhi Army instead decides that martyrdom is best left for another time and decides to melt away, casualties could be considerably lower, and the operation could morph into a deadly Easter egg hunt. Coalition forces dodging booby-traps, IEDs, and the occasional sniper or small unit ambush could capture and destroy some or most of the Madhi army’s military capability.

In any even, this is likely the next large-scale battleground in Iraq, and a battle that increasing appears must be fought if Iraq hopes to suceed.

Picture This

As I scored the top two results in this Google search, shouldn't I be getting more traffic?

And tips?

Update: Would probably be about like this.

She's a Ho Ho Ho

Via Fox News:

The exotic dancer who accused three former Duke lacrosse players of raping her at a house party has given birth to a baby, FOX News has confirmed.

None of the 45 Duke lacrosse players had their DNA liked to genetic material recovered from the dancer, though DNA of five other men was recovered at that time.

It is not yet know if embattled Durham district attorney Mike Nifong will order all the men in North Carolina tested from a match.

Jamil Hussein Goes Ivy League

Don't worry. This isn't Yale allowing the corporeally-challenged Captain to join the student body like Taliban of semesters gone by, but a solid op-ed in the Daily Princtonian, titled You Can't Handle the Truth.

An excerpt:

That the story is wrong is beyond debate; even the AP now refers to one burned mosque, not four, so the question is not "if" but "how badly" the AP screwed up. Yet instead of an apology, the AP's response to criticism has been to shoot the messenger. The story first broke on the conservative blog www.floppingaces.net and grew quickly within a circle of other conservative blogs and opinion columns. The AP alleged that this was simply a "mad blog rabble" attacking an entirely reputable source. This ignores the fact that Hussein only became a story after the U.S. military and Iraqi government demanded but did not receive a retraction of the original faulty report.

So why have traditional media sources not reported this controversy? Because it is not in their interests to undermine the AP. This summer's "fauxtography" scandal at Reuters, in which photographers were found to have photoshopped evidence of Israeli atrocities during the Hezbollah war, did not hit at the underlying narrative. The storyline stayed the same with different details. If the AP has to issue a correction for all 61 stories in which Hussein was quoted, it will call into question fundamental perceptions about what is happening in Iraq. If Hussein isn't real, it suggests that there are other as yet undiscovered fakes.

If our media is reporting as fact attacks that never occurred substantiated by witnesses who don't exist, then we have a problem. Public opinion about distant events is necessarily based on what is reported in the press. Therefore, we need to be confident that what we read is real.

Requiring that our news be real? What kind of subversive things are they teaching these days?

To the Other Extreme

From Jim and Tammy Faye's kid (my bold):

While the current state of Christianity might seem normal and business-as-usual to some, most see through the judgment and hypocrisy that has permeated the church for so long. People witness this and say to themselves, "Why would I want to be a part of that?" They are turned off by Christians and eventually, to Christianity altogether. We can't even count the number of times someone has given us a weird stare or completely brushed us off when they discover we work for a church.

Weird stares? I can't imagine why.

I'm sure they mean well, but I don't think they "get it" any more than those on the Jerry Falwell end of the Christian spectrum they rail against.

Their response to those Christians they feel are too judgmental is to condemn them. Missing their own message, much? They then responds to what they considers too-judgmental Christianity with a very cavalier "it's all good" approach that I somehow doubt is any more correct or Christ-like. They simply fail in the opposite extreme.

While Jesus Christ never touched on the subject directly as it wasn't a direct theological social concern of the day, I'm pretty sure that Jesus, as a (mortally) unplanned pregnancy himself, would not appreciate Bakker and Brown's flippant dismissal of abortion as something we can "agree to disagree" on.

I'm no theologian, but I'm pretty sure Jesus would be in favor of loving children, not scraping them out of the womb as an inconvenience.

Back to Iraq

I just got an email from Michael Yon. He'll be flying out from Singapore and be in Baghdad via Kuwait on the 19th 25th-26th. I asked him to see if he could make it to Hurriyah while he's in town. He does happen to be pretty good with a camera.

AP's Kathleen Carroll should be breaking out in a cold sweat right about now...

Update: If there at the same time, Maybe Michael can have lunch with Michelle Malkin, who has accepted Eason Jordan's invitation to come over and hunt for the elusive Jamil Hussein, which is pretty much like looking for Nessie in the desert.

I'd advise Michelle to bring along plenty of Lysol wipes if she's going to be near Jordan, however. As Jules Crittendon attests, Jordan is as slimey as they come.

12/16 Update: As I just got email about this, I want to clarify a point:

Michael Yon's return to Baghdad is not related to the Malkin/Jordan snipe hunt for Jamil Hussein; Yon was already planning his way back "in-country" before Jamilgate emerged, and his only involvement is offering Malkin advice and gear. The timing is entirely coincidental.

Say Cheese

I'd like to introduce both a marvelous bit of technology to Associated Press Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll, AP international editor John Daniszewski, and the newly, and curiously promoted, AP Baghdad News Editor, Kim Gamel.

The marvelous bit of technology you see pictured below is what those of us on the cutting edge call a "disposable camera." In specific, the example pictured is a variant of the Kodak Fun Saver.

They have come up with a few more variants to suit your needs, and the prices are such that even a cash-starved global news agency can afford to send them out with even the most inexperienced of stringers. Your reporters don't have to return from Baghdad slums without any physical evidence ever again!

What will they think up next?

Now... how about a practical application of this new-fangled technology?

As we all know horrible acts of sectarian violence were claimed by AP reporters on November 24 in the Hurriyah neighborhood of Baghdad. According to a claim from long-time AP source Police Captain Jamil Hussein, a man that has since tripped and fallen off the planet, six Sunni men were pulled from a mosque, doused in kerosene, and burned alive.

In addition, AP claimed:

...members of the Mahdi Army militia burned four mosques and several homes while killing 12 other Sunni residents in the once-mixed Hurriyah neighborhood, Hussein said.

Gunmen loyal to radical anti-American Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr began taking over the neighborhood this summer and a majority of its Sunni residents already had fled.

The militiamen attacked and burned the Ahbab al-Mustafa, Nidaa Allah, al-Muhaimin and al-Qaqaqa mosques in the rampage that did not end until American forces arrived, Hussein said.

The gunmen attack with rocket-propelled grenades, heavy machine guns and automatic rifles. Residents said militiamen prevented them from entering burned structures to take away the bodies of victims.

All that carnage, and your stringers without a Fun Saver.

Just think... how much credibility could have been saved if the Associated Press stringers had access to such technology on any of their first three trips into the neighborhood to cover this story?

Instead, we have a "he said, she said," stalemate where the AP claims these four mosques were rocketed, machine gunned, burned, and blown up, and coalition forces instead insist that only one mosque suffered though any attack at all, and that was a minor fire put out by the local fire department.

If these mosques are indeed intact, the first person to snap four pictures of the Ahbab al-Mustafa, Nidaa Allah, al-Muhaimin and al-Qaqaqa mosques intact will have wrecked the reputation of the world's largest news organization for $3.75.

An empowering thing, technology.

Off-Topic Update: Since I have your eyeballs thanks to Glenn and Michelle and others, I'd like to remind visitors that the 2006 Weblog Awards will be accepting votes until tomorrow, December 15. Click the logo below to vote for your favorites in 45 categories.

Senator Suffers Possible Stroke

Via Fox News:

South Dakota Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson was admitted Wednesday to George Washington University hospital in Washington, D.C., for symptoms aides say indicate a stroke.

"As this stage, he is undergoing a comprehensive evaluation by the stroke team. Further details will be forthcoming when more is known," said a statement released from his office.

Johnson was admitted after wrapping up a conference call with reporters, in which he became disoriented and stuttered a response to a question. He appeared to recover, asking for any additional questions and then signed off.

I've seen a lot of political coverage of this already, and ironically enough, it is a politician that seems to be the only person keeping this in the proper perspective.

"This is a pretty mean town and lets just keep him in our prayers," said former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas. "This town is so eat up with power that everybody, you know, that's all they think about. You go to ask somebody for a cup of coffee, they question why you asked, there must be an ulterior motive to you asking.

"Senator Johnson is a really nice man from strong South Dakota stock so I am sure he'll be all right," DeLay added.

As "the Hammer" says, keep the Senator and his family in your prayers.

There will be plenty of time for our base sport of partisan sniping later.

Good, But Not Safe

Months ago, many liberals got bent out of shape over a Christian-themed video game called Left Behind: Eternal Forces. The game is based upon the very successful Left Behind fiction series, which is based upon the seven-year post-Rapture period described in Revelations.

Amazon.com provides a brief synopsis of book one, from Library Journal:

On a flight from Chicago to London, several passengers aboard Capt. Rayford Steele's plane suddenly and mysteriously disappear. When Steele radios to London to report the situation, he discovers that the incident on his plane is not an isolated phenomenon but a worldwide occurrence. As Steele begins his search for answers, he learns that the Christ has come to take the faithful with Him in preparation for the coming apocalyptic battle between good and evil and that those who have been left behind must face seven dark and chaotic years in which they must decide to join the forces of Christ or the forces of Anti-Christ.

While I've neither played the game nor read the series of books, it doesn't seem to be something worth getting upset about. The general plot seems to reflect a basic good vs. evil storyline, so why all the fuss?

Cue the latest round of liberal outrage from Ilene Lelchuck of SFGATE.com:

Clark Stevens, co-director of the Campaign to Defend the Constitution, said the game is not peaceful or diplomatic.

"It's an incredibly violent video game," said Stevens. "Sure, there is no blood. (The dead just fade off the screen.) But you are mowing down your enemy with a gun. It pushes a message of religious intolerance. You can either play for the 'good side' by trying to convert nonbelievers to your side or join the Antichrist."

The Rev. Tim Simpson, a Jacksonville, Fla., Presbyterian minister and president of the Christian Alliance for Progress, added: "So, under the Christmas tree this year for little Johnny is this allegedly Christian video game teaching Johnny to hate and kill?"

Both groups formed in 2005 to protest what their 130,000 or so members feel is the growing political influence and hypocrisy of the religious right.

In Left Behind, set in perfectly apocalyptic New York City, the Antichrist is personified by fictional Romanian Nicolae Carpathia, secretary-general of the United Nations and a People magazine "Sexiest Man Alive."

Players can choose to join the Antichrist's team, but of course they can never win on Carpathia's side. The enemy team includes fictional rock stars and folks with Muslim-sounding names, while the righteous include gospel singers, missionaries, healers and medics. Every character comes with a life story.

When asked about the Arab and Muslim-sounding names, Frichner said the game does not endorse prejudice. But "Muslims are not believers in Jesus Christ" -- and thus can't be on Christ's side in the game.

"That is so obvious," he said.

The game is based on a series of fiction books, which is in turn based upon the Pretribulationist variant of the futurist view of the biblical prophecy interpretation of the Book of Revelations. Put bluntly, it's fiction based upon fiction, based upon one of many interpretations of the most difficult to understand book in the Bible.

So why are liberals so upset? Aravosis complains that the game promotes mows down people based upon religious differences. Pandagon gripes that:

The object of the game is to convert heathens, Muslims or Jews; if they don’t come over to your side, you can kill them. – God Gameth, God Bloweth Away.

But the simple fact of the matter is that the gameplay is far, far more benign than many of the more popular video games on the market. In most games, you either kill your enemy, or they kill you. This game allows you the option of at least talking to your opponents, and trying to persuade them to convert to your point of view. Shouldn't that be commended? Not if you’re a liberal, apparently.

I strongly suspect that the real problem of the liberal left with this game are far more visceral than even they realize.

They've grown up somewhat convinced that true Christians are all "turn the other cheek" pacifists, and as such, liberals feel free to mock, revile, and persecute Christian beliefs, Christian symbols, and Christians themselves without penalty of threat of danger—things they would never do to far more outrage-prone Muslims. This game, featuring both non-pacifist Christians and the clear refutation of the secular, "devil may care" way of life, scares them.

This game is a reminder for some, and a wake-up call to others, that the God of Christianity, as C.S. Lewis once alluded, is good, but not safe. No wonder they are terrified.

Surreallaw

Must have been a butterfly indictment (my bold):

A day after authorities announced that a former New Hanover County deputy had been indicted in the shooting death of a Durham teen during a raid on a Wilmington home, members of the grand jury now say the indictment was a mistake.

The grand jury never intended to charge Cpl. Christopher Long with second-degree murder, but the foreman checked the wrong box on the indictment, authorities said Tuesday.

Peyton Strickland, 18, a Cape Fear Community College student from Durham, was shot to death Dec. 1 at his Wilmington home by deputies serving arrest and search warrants. Strickland and two friends were charged with assaulting a University of North Carolina at Wilmington student last month and stealing two PlayStation 3 consoles from him.

UNC-W police asked for support from the New Hanover County Sheriff's Office during the arrests of the suspects in the case because of the potential that they were armed and dangerous, authorities said. Strickland had an earlier arrest on a felony assault charge.

Was Theresa LePore the jury foreman by any chance?

Newsiness

When is news not news?

How about when the subject matter is a decades old story that just happens to be the subject of a new Hollywood blockbuster produced by a sister media company?

The article on CNN is called Blood diamonds: Miners risk lives for chance at riches.

Deep into the body of the article, we see this:

Sierra Leone is the setting for the new movie "Blood Diamond." Leonardo DiCaprio plays a crooked Zimbabwean ex-mercenary who searches for a rare pink diamond. (The film was produced by Warner Bros. Pictures, which like CNN.com is owned by Time Warner.)

It's a movie that should stir controversy about just how careful the precious gem industry has been in making sure diamonds are bought and sold legally.

SFGate.com, CBS News (check the sidebars), and many other newsie stories just happen to be coming out in conjunction with Le Dicaprio's new movie.

Using the news to promote fiction.

Shocking, I know.

Neck Deep

In a column published last night, Eric Boehlert does an excellent job of showing why David Brock's Media Matters should be regarded as the alimentary canal of punditry; on one end it's good at regurgitation, and on the other, the finalized product is consistently something better flushed.

In Michelle Malkin fiddles while Baghdad burns, Boehlert dishonestly addresses the continuing Associated Press scandal surrounding the "Burning Six" story that emerged from the Sunni enclave of Hurriyah in Baghdad on November 24.

By the next day, even more details had emerged in the AP's story along with a description of why the alleged attacks finally ended.

Synthesize the various versions of the story, and you will have a horrific story of how Shia gunmen attacked while the Iraqi police and military stood by, without interfering, as four mosques were destroyed and as many as 18 people were killed, including six Sunni men pulled from a mosque and burned alive after being doused with kerosene. Only the arrival of American military units brought an end to the carnage.

But here's the problem... there is little to no evidence that any of these events took place.

Contrary to the AP's reporting, the Ahbab al-Mustafa, Nidaa Allah, al-Muhaimin and al-Qaqaqa mosques were never blown up. There is no evidence uncovered that a single soul, much less 18, were burned in an "inferno" at the al-Muhaimin mosque. In fact, soldiers from the 6th Iraqi Army Division found al-Muhaimin completely undamaged.

There is no evidence whatsoever that six men were pulled from a mosque under attack, doused in kerosene, set on fire, and then only shot once they quit moving.

Only the Nidaa Allah suffered minor fire damage from a Molotov cocktail, and no injuries were reported. The Iraqi Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Defense were apparently unable to discover any other physical evidence of any attacks in Hurriyah as the Associated Press, and only the Associated Press, claimed. Further, U.S. soldiers never intervened in Hurriyah on November 24.

The entirety of the Associated Press’ reporting on these alleged events relies on the testimony of two named sources and a handful of anonymous sources. Of those two sources, Sunni Imad al-Hashimi recanted his story after being interviewed by the Defense Ministry, leaving just one named source upon which the Associated Press was hanging its credibility, Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein.

As we now know, the Iraqi Interior Ministry has now gone on the record, declaring that they have no record of anyone by the name of Jamil Hussein employed as an Iraqi policeman, at any rank. They also disputed the records of more than a dozen other AP sources that claimed to be part of the Iraqi police for which they had no records.

Further research indicated that Jamil Hussein was often on hand to report Shia on Sunni violence, and that Hussein had been used as a source for the Associated Press and no other news outlet, 61 times since April 24.

Boehlert, of course, is unsurprisingly disinterested as to why the Associated Press runs a story claiming the destruction of four mosques, the deaths of 18 people (six of them by immolation), or the allegations that Shiite military and police units allowed the attacks to take place. He quite purposefully leaves out the fact that all of the AP's sources were anonymous, other than the one that recanted, and the other that was exposed as long-running fraud.

Like the AP, Eric Boehlert seems far more interested in protecting a narrative and attacking the messengers, than seeking to discover how the AP's reporting could have been so horribly compromised.

He attacks "warbloggers," explicitly (and falsely) stating that those citizen journalists interested in getting to the bottom of this and other questionable instance of reporting blame the press "squarely" for the state of the war, a preposterous claim he does not even attempt to prove.

Few, if any, highly-regarded bloggers hold that opinion. Bad pre-war planning and post-invasion implementation of the same are widely acknowledged for much of the problems on the ground in Iraq, as are undisputed facts that al Qaeda, Syria, and Iran have contributed to the violence.

What Boehlert would like to gloss over (as it suits his narrative and that of the organization he writes for) are the very real structural problems with the stringer-based systems of reporting in Iraq.

In Iraq, the overwhelming majority of foreign journalists never leave the relative safety of Baghdad's Green Zone. Most newsgathering done in Iraq is compiled by Iraqi journalists, which in and of itself is to be expected. Iraqis know their country, their communities their language and their politics far more intimately than any Western reporter is ever likely to achieve. From that perspective, it would make little sense to rely primarily on Borat-like foreign reporters to cover what is going on inside the country.

But even though Iraqi reporters are the logical best choice to cover Iraqi events, the Associated Press and other wire services must be cognizant of the fact that just like the fellow Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds in their fractious society, reporters and their sources will also have regional, sectarian and tribal biases.

Because of this, all news organizations, especially the largest news organizations such as the Associated Press and Reuters, have an obligation to their readers to provide a robust set of editorial checks and balances to verify that the reporters they use and the sources they quote are supported by factual evidence.

As we now know, at least the final stories of the almost certainly fictitious Captain Jamil Hussein have no supporting physical evidence. Even repeated trips to the Hurriyah neighborhood have been unable to extricate the Associated Press from this mess of their own making. There are no destroyed mosques. There are no bodies.

Nothing.

Characteristically dishonest in his claims, Boehlert claims that bloggers are engaging in "wide-ranging conspiracy theories and silencing skeptical voices."

The truth of the matter is precisely the opposite; we're asking for more skeptical voices, more layers of fact-checking and editorial professionalism that seemingly have disappeared once wire service reporters join what Michael Fumento and other combat journalists from all sides of the political spectrum have derided as the "Baghdad Brigade."

If the Associated Press had a working system of checks and balances to do background checks on their reporters, they might not be in the embarrassing position of having one of their Iraqi stringers in prison after he was captured in a weapons cache with a terrorist commander, coated in explosives.

If the Associated Press had a working system of checks and balances to verify their sources, they might not have been listening to a false Iraqi policeman for two years, and more than a dozen other "policemen" that the Iraqi Interior Ministry says does not work for them (NOTE: The AP still uses these same named suspect policemen as sources to this very day).

If the Associated Press had a working system of editorial fact-checking, the lack of physical evidence alone should have precluded the burning mosques/burning men claims from ever having run. Hunkered down for in the Green Zone, the isolated fortress mindset infecting the media has led to reporting where allegations, not facts, are enough reason to run a story written by men and women who have never seen the subject matter on which they report.

Pure and simple, it is "faith-based" reporting.

It is because of this kind of absentee journalism that wave after wave of combat veterans return home from Iraq and Afghanistan claiming that the media is consistently misrepresenting what is going on in Iraq. Not necessarily better or worse, but just plain wrong. It's hardly surprising. You wouldn't expect a reporter in Boise to effectively cover a bank robbery in Raleigh, so why would you expect a reporter in a Baghdad hotel to accurately reporter events in Ramadi?

The problems of reporting in Iraq are based on flawed news-gathering processes and methodologies, questionable vetting of reporters and sources, and continued poor editorial oversight. The Associated Press responds to these problems exposed by Jamilgate by promoting those involved.

Boehlert shows he is far more interested in choking down typical Media Matters talking points and excreting arrogance mixed with contempt than engaging in any honest attempt to identify and fix obvious flaws in a broken system of reporting that lead to false reporting such as that evidence in Jamilgate. Apparently, "truthiness" is close enough for his purposes.

His mentor must be proud.

Update: Michelle piles on. Apparently Boelhert got even more wrong than I realized:

He is such an idiot that he doesn't even read the link that he includes to bolster his ridiculous charge.

I am the one who called a fellow conservative blogger to task for irresponsibly reporting that anonymous Republican sources had accused a Democrat staffer in Harry Reid's office of being the source. If he had bothered to follow his own links, this clown would know that. Or maybe he did and it doesn't matter. He's got a narrative to protect.

Boehlert charges that "[W]arbloggers aren't interested in an honest, factual debate about a single instance of journalistic accountability."

Like he would know anything about honest, factual debates and journalistic accountability?

Ouch. That's gonna leave a mark.

Fading Like Britney's Tan Lines

Fourth?

Where's the love? ;-)

Olmert Admits Words Worst-Kept Secret

Apple is now planning to sue, claiming a copyright infringment on "I-Bomb."

Perception or Deception?

According to AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll, Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein is a well-known source that they have had a relationship with for two years.

According to Curt at Flopping Aces, Hussein was cited in Associated Press reports by name 61 times between April 24th and November 26th of this year. No other news organization other than the Associated Press seems to have evern been in contact with Jamil Hussein. It is not known if Hussein may have been cited as an anonymous source, if at all, in addition to the 61 times he was cited as an official source by AP.

During the first months (April and May) he was used as a source, Hussein was cited 24 times in stories by no fewer than 7 different AP reporters (Thomas Wagner, Lee Keath, Robert H. Reid, Sinan Salaheddin, Qassim Abdul-Zahra, Tarek El-Tablawy, and Patrick Quinn).

In June and July, Hussein was cited as a source 19 times by at least 9 AP reporters (Sinan Salaheddin, Ryan Lenz, Steven R. Hurst, Bassem Mroue, Qais al-Bashir, Sameer N. Yacoub, Qassim Abdul-Zahra, Bushra Juhi, and Kim Gamel), eight of which had not written using Hussein in the months before (only Sinan Salaheddin carried over from the previous months).

In August and September Hussein was uncharacteristically quiet, being used as a source just nine times in total, and five of those stories coming on a single day (September 20). Sinan Salaheddin, Robert H. Reid, Bushra Juhi, and Qais al-Bashir used Hussein again, Rawya Rageh used him for the first time, and David Rising used him as a source for four stories on the first and only day he cited Hussein.

In October Hussein was only cited twice, in a Sinan Salaheddin story and in another by Sameer N. Yacoub.

Police Captain Jamil Hussein was then silent for 28 days until November 24, when he was cited five times describing the now familiar series of claims that Shia militamen immolated six Sunni men. Those claims have been disputed by the Iraqi Police, Interior Ministry, Iraqi Army, and even the responding unit of the Baghdad Fire Department which put out the one minor mosque fire that actually existed of the four that the Associated Press claimed were attacked.

According to the document compiled by Flopping Aces and cited above, AP provided no bylines for four of these reports, but the fifth was sourced to Qais al-Bashir. Hussein was cited twice more, on November 25 (including once in a story by Steven R. Hurst).

Hussein was cited for a final time on November 26 by the man who first used his name on April 24, Thomas Wagner.

In just eight months, Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein was cited as a source in stories by 17 named AP reporters, and also appeared in several stories where no byline was given. To the best we can determine, he has never been cited by another news organization, at any time.

Since his authenticity was thrown in doubt, the fabled Iraqi Police Captain has completely disappeared from AP reporting, except for the AP's denials that he is the fraud that the Iraqi interior ministry says he is. The captain, if he is real, would have likely come forward by now to clear his name. He has not.

At the current level of controversy, it might be prudent for these 17 Associated Press reporters, AP international editor John Daniszewski, and AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll to each go on the record and establish the details, dates and locations of their relationship with alleged Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein that they have so vigorously defended.

Daniszewski and Carroll should also explain why, when there is so much suspicion that the Associated Press has been duped by a series of false witnesses tied to a flawed stringer-based news gathering methodology, that the AP promoted two of the reporters involved in this controversy.

Kim Gamel, who issued stories using Hussein as a source on June 1, June 5 and twice on June 6, has now been promoted to the newly-created position of Baghdad News Editor.

Patrick Quinn, who wrote a story using Hussein as a source on May 30, has been promoted to the newly-created position of Assistant Chief of Middle East News.

In most any line of work, discovering that two actors were promoted after it was revealed they were in some way involved in a scandal, would create a scandal of its own. Many people might assume that their superiors might be trying to buy their silence. That suspicion would only grow if those people were promoted to positions that didn't previously exist.

At the very best, the Associated Press is guilty of creating the perception that their reporters' silence in the Jamil Hussein affair may have been bought. While there is no evidence that such a thing did occur, I shudder to think what it may mean to the future of the Associated Press if it is more than just a perception.

Update: fixed a glitch above, where I meant "stringer-based" reporting, not "string-based," which is reputedly how AP handles telecommunications. Sorry for the confusion.

Torture? Who Cares?

As much as the fringe left seem to be able to manufacture spittle-flecked outrage over the interrogation of suspected al Qaeda terrorists, they seem curiously quiet over the treatment of a captured homicide bomber that said the following of his incarceration:

"It is a closed-off world designed to isolate inmates from social and environmental stimuli, with the ultimate purpose of causing mental illness and chronic physical conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and arthritis."

Where is the ACLU? Amnesty International? Dick Durbin?

You would think that sockpuppet (Who answers "How would a Patriot Act?" by moving to Brazil) and his ideological fellow travelers would be all over this story, wouldn't you? And yet they are curiously silent.

It must have something to do with the fact that the man who said this is Eric Robert Rudolph.

Proof?

I just a received an email that claims to show photographic proof of the Jamil Hussein/Burning Six story of the Associated Press. Make of it what you will.

Sir,

I must take issue with your attempt to discredit Mr. Jamil Hussein, nonexistent though he may be, regarding his story about six Sunni worshippers who were burned alive outside a bombed mosque. I submit for your review the attached photograph, which clearly shows a Shiite insurgent wielding a gas pump from which spouts fuel that feeds the flames engulfing his Sunni victim. The other five victims, already aflame, are visible in foreground and background amid the rubble of the mosque. My objection to your criticism of Mr. Hussein, however, arises not from your skepticism over his claim that the men in question were actually Sunnis, or were actually burned, or were actually alive once, or were dead later, or that the attackers who did or did not do the burning were or were not Shiites, or that they did or did not burn the Sunnis who were or were not burned; indeed, I recognize all of these to be points over which reasonable people can in good faith disagree.

(click to enlarge)

Rather, I find it alarming that you fail to fail to reveal the truth that underlies this incident, if it happened: clearly, Mr. Hussein was coerced by U.S. and Israeli agents into suppressing his knowledge that the supposed Shiite incendiary insurgent in the photograph is actually a Mossad operative. In light of this fact, Mr. Hussein's pretended existence is obviously a cover designed to disguise his non-identity and avoid reprisals from the Vast Right Wing Conspirators who blew up the World Trade Center in the mistaken belief that it was actually the United Nations building.

By revealing that Mr. Hussein is not truly Jamil Hussein, but is another non-existent person of a different name, you have "outed" him, making him vulnerable to attack by the same American Jewish interests that used Valerie Plame to attack Karl Rove in order to punish Bush for his too-tepid support for the establishment of a Hebrew-only language policy in the Jew-occupied territories stretching from Brooklyn to Ethiopia. As you know, the Hasidim of Flatbush* oppose the use of Hebrew, instead preferring to use Yiddish in order to hasten the arrival of the Messiah. As this extremist party sees the outbreak of Total War between Jews and Muslims as a precursor to the divine visitation, they surely will not take kindly to Mr. Hussein's deceptions on behalf of liberal Israeli accommodationists. The accommodationists - including the aggressor in the photograph - pose as apostate Jews (though many are actually Christian Phalangist moles), and are known to be inflaming sectarian violence in Iraq. They hope that if things get nasty enough, the U.N. will step in and resolve the conflict before Iran gains dominance. They calculate that an ascendant, nuclear capable Iran would need to surrender unconditionally to Israel in order to restrain itself from launching a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Jerusalem and Tel Aviv that would, in fact, hasten the arrival of the Messiah.

In sum, you, sir, have made it impossible for the person who Mr. Hussein is not to do his work with impunity. By revealing that Mr. Hussein does not exist, you have placed him in mortal danger at the hands of deathmongering moderate Jewish Israelis and Americans whose counterespionage protocols call for the death or subjugation of all non-existent persons.

I hope you're happy.

Cordially,
Jamal Hussein (no relation)
Sandy, Utah, USA

P.S., Should you find yourself needing legal representation over this matter, I kindly refer you to my esteemed associate Ramzi al-Clarkstein Baker'sman McCarterGates. He's not Jewish, but he's still a decent lawyer.

*Note: "FlatBUSH" - mere coincidence?

I'm not certain if Mr. Hussein's claims are accurate, but his explanation sounds every bit as credible as what the Associated Press has offered up as evidence so far.

Weblog Awards Continue

Despite some minor server-related glitches, the Weblog Awards are online and waiting you to vote in 45 categories. I'm quite flattered to be in second third right now, especially considering the blogs I'm up against.

Make sure you vote for your favorites every day; voting ends on December 15.

Just the Facts, Ma'am

Kathleen Carroll, the Executive Editor and Senior Vice President of the Associated Press, just can't seem to do the required legwork necessary to resolve the questions surrounding six immolations and four mosque burnings alleged in news reports by anonymous reporters working for her organization. She does, however, try her best to deflect criticism in her latest response to the emerging scandal this afternoon.

She begins:

In recent days, a handful of people have stridently criticized The Associated Press' coverage of a terrible attack on Iraqi citizens last month in Baghdad. Some of those critics question whether the incident happened at all and declare that they don't believe our reporting.

Indeed, a small number of them have whipped themselves into an indignant lather over the AP's reporting.

What concerns Carroll is that her "handful" includes Jules Crittenden of the Boston Herald, Mark Tapscott of the Washington Examiner, Tom Zeller of the New York Times, and Robert Batemen in the New York Post, and this handful is steadily getting larger by the day thanks to a diligent army of citizen-journalists.

Their assertions that the AP has been duped or worse are unfounded and just plain wrong.

No organization has done more to try to shed light on what happened Nov. 24 in the Hurriyah neighborhood of Baghdad than The Associated Press.

Well, thanks for clearing that up. I can sleep comfortably now that you've confirmed what is in your self-interest to reinforce.

We have sent journalists to the neighborhood three different times to talk with people there about what happened. And those residents have repeatedly told us, in some detail, that Shiite militiamen dragged six Sunni worshippers from a mosque, drenched them with kerosene and burned them alive.

And yet in all of those trips to this intimate Sunni enclave, there are a few things the largest news organization in the world hasn't been able to discover... for instance, how the militiamen "burned and blew up" four mosques in the initial report, only to see that number dwindle to one mosque partially burned, without a retraction being issued. For that matter, which mosque were these six men dragged out of? Basic reporting, Editor Carroll. Eighth-grade school-paper who-what-when-where-why.

While we're on the subject of basic journalism, it would seem simple to find names for the six victims in such a tight-knit community. So why, after AP journalists went to this neighborhood three different times to investigate a story under a cloud of suspicion, has the Associated Press been unwilling or unable to provide that basic information?

No one else has said they have actually gone to the neighborhood. Particularly not the individuals who have criticized our journalism with such barbed certitude.

This isn't exactly the truth, Editor Carroll, and if you read your own reporting, you are well aware of that fact. An Iraqi fire company was called into the neighborhood to extinguish the one (not four) minor mosque fire. There does not seem to be any reports from the fire company concerning something as noticeable as six humans combusting in the street.

In addition, we know from your own reporting that legitimate Iraqi police and interior ministry officers dispatched to Hurriyah were unable to verify any of the claims made by AP reporters. They were able to interview the one named source, Imad al-Hasimi, at which time al-Hasimi told a different story than the one reported by the Associated Press. From what little you've given us, it seems he has retracted his story entirely.

I'm sorry that those of us thousands of miles away from the situation are having to criticize AP reporting with such "barbed certitude," but when your senior reporters five miles away don't seek answers to obvious and pressing questions, those of us further away must.

The AP has been transparent and fair since the first day of our reporting on this issue. We have not ignored the questions about our work raised by the U.S. military and later, by the Iraqi Interior Ministry. Indeed, we published those questions while also sending AP journalists back out to the scene to dig further into what happened and why others might be questioning the initial accounts.

The AP mission was to get at the facts, wherever those facts took us.

Transparent? The AP will not tell us who their reporters are (citing safety concerns, of course). We have no names for alleged witnesses for precisely the same reason. We don't know the name of the mosque from which these men were abducted. We don't seem to have the names of the dead, and contrary to initial AP reports, we don't seem to have any named employees of the Kazamiyah Hospital who will claim to have seen these bodies. Of the two named sources in the initial story, one now disavows the story originally attributed to him, and the other, primary witness seems all but certain of being a long-run, deeply embedded fraud.

And what about the things that Carroll would rather not address?

Such an example is the fact that the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars, which would rarely miss a chance to cite an example of Shia brutality, has been curiously silent about these alleged immolations. Al Jazeera, the preeminent Arab news outlet, also did not report on this atrocity, despite how easily they could sell this story to their primary media market. For that matter, neither Reuters, nor UPI, nor any other news organization has been able to confirm the Associated Press story. AP, it seems, has an exclusive that no one else can or will substantiate, even two weeks later. If AP has the facts, they are very stingy sharing them.

What we found were more witnesses who described the attack in particular detail as well as describing the fear that runs through the neighborhood. We ran a lengthy story on those additional findings, as well as the questions, on Nov. 28.

Some of AP's critics question the existence of police Capt. Jamil Hussein, who was one (but not the only) source to tell us about the burning.

These critics cite a U.S. military officer and an Iraqi official who first said Hussein is not an authorized spokesman and later said he is not on their list of Interior Ministry employees. It's worth noting that such lists are relatively recent creations of the fledgling Iraqi government.

By contrast, Hussein is well known to AP. We first met him, in uniform, in a police station, some two years ago. We have talked with him a number of times since then and he has been a reliable source of accurate information on a variety of events in Baghdad.

No one – not a single person – raised questions about Hussein’s accuracy or his very existence in all that time. Those questions were raised only after he was quoted by name describing a terrible attack in a neighborhood that U.S. and Iraqi forces have struggled to make safe.

And now, we get to what concerns Editor Carroll most of all.

Jamil Hussein isn't just a one-off source, but an on-going, continual source for the Associated Press over the past two years, being used as a named source no fewer than 61 times in the past year. If Captain Hussein is a legitimate Iraqi police officer as Carroll insists, then inviting him to meet with his own superiors and representatives of U.S Central Command in front of Associated Press cameras would not only be uneventful for Captain Hussein, who could clear charges that he is an insurgent operative, but it would vindicate the Associated Press completely. The Associated Press can end this controversy by merely producing Captain Jamil Hussein.

And yet, we know that if the Associated Press could produce Captain Hussein to vindicate it's reporters, it would have done so by now. The fact that the Executive Editor of the Associated Press has been reduced to spending the bulk of her response attacking the messengers tells you just how dire the situation of the Associated Press in Iraq truly is.

Jamil Hussein is one false source that immediately calls into question all 61 AP stories in which he was a source. Jamil Hussein is just one of at least 14 sources that the Associated Press has claimed as Iraqi policemen, that have provided "proof" in perhaps dozens to hundreds of stories, that the Iraqi police simply have no record of.

The Associated Press is standing behind their story, perhaps because at this point, acknowledging how deeply they've been compromised is far too difficult to contemplate.

We don't need anymore bluster, accusations, or denials, Kathleen Carroll.

Simple facts will suffice.

Derrick Shareef, Trash Can Grenadier

What. A. Moron.

The Smoking Gun has the affidavit. Ace got it right when he described Shareef's plan as "more aspirational than operational."

Even if the no-so-bright Shareef had managed to obtain a quartet of fragmentation grenades as he intended, he seems to forget that the average mall trash can (at least many I've seen) are made of pretty stern stuff. I'm sure they vary, but many I've seen are made of concrete or steel outer can bodies, with strong, lightweight plastic or aluminum can liners that hold the actual trash.

As your typical frag only weighs about a pound and the kind of cans described would tend to both constrain fragments and force the explosive blast towards the path of least resistance (straight up, away from people), it seems only one guy would be in severe mortal danger in such an attack.

The AP Goes Truthy. Will the Left Stay Silent?

Looking back from the future, we may one day determine that a macabre but seemingly straightforward story of Iraqi sectarian violence was the beginning of the end of credibility for the world's largest news organization.

Six burned alive in Iraq
The Associated Press

BAGHDAD, IRAQ -Revenge-seeking militiamen seized six Sunnis as they left Friday prayers and burned them alive with kerosene in a savage new twist to the brutality shaking the Iraqi capital a day after suspected Sunni insurgents killed 215 people in Baghdad's main Shiite district.

Iraqi soldiers at a nearby army post failed to intervene in Friday's assault by suspected members of the Shiite Mahdi Army militia or subsequent attacks that killed at least 19 other Sunnis, including women and children, in the same neighborhood, the volatile Hurriyah district in northwest Baghdad, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein.

Most of the thousands of dead bodies that have been found dumped across Baghdad and other cities in central Iraq in recent months have been of victims who were tortured and then shot to death, according to police. The suspected militia killers often have used electric drills on their captives' bodies before killing them. The bodies are frequently decapitated.

But burning victims alive introduced a new method of brutality that was likely to be reciprocated by the other sect as the Shiites and Sunnis continue killing one another in unprecedented numbers. The gruesome attack, which came despite a curfew in Baghdad, capped a day in which at least 87 people were killed or found dead in sectarian violence across Iraq.

In Hurriyah, the rampaging militiamen also burned and blew up four mosques and torched several homes in the district, Hussein said.

Residents of the troubled district claim the Mahdi Army has begun kidnapping and holding Sunni hostages to use in ritual slaughter at the funerals of Shiite victims of Baghdad's raging sectarian war.

Such claims cannot be verified but speak to the deep fear that grips Baghdad, where retaliation has become a part of daily life.

President Jalal Talabani emerged from lengthy meetings with other Iraqi leaders late Friday and said the defense minister, Abdul-Qader al-Obaidi, indicated that the Hurriyah neighborhood had been quiet throughout the day.

But Imad al-Hasimi, a Sunni elder in Hurriyah, confirmed Hussein's account of the immolations. He told Al-Arabiya television he saw people who were drenched in kerosene and then set afire, burning to death before his eyes.

Two workers at Kazamiyah Hospital also confirmed that bodies from the clashes and immolation had been taken to the morgue at their facility.

They refused to be identified by name, saying they feared retribution.

And the Association of Muslim Scholars, the most influential Sunni organization in Iraq, said even more victims were burned to death in attacks on the four mosques. It claimed a total of 18 people had died in an inferno at the al-Muhaimin mosque.

This story first began emerging late on November 24, with the version of the story printed above being published on November 25.

Thanks to some investigative started by Curt of Flopping Aces into the many apparent discrepancies in the story, we now know for a fact that significant portions of this story are categorically false, and that other details are highly suspect.

We know that four mosques were not burned nor blown up as the AP story alleges. We know that only one mosque was burned, and the extent of that damage was relatively minor. We know that Imad al-Hasimi, the Sunni leader cited in the original story, has recanted his earlier statements. We also know there is no record of burned bodies being taken the Kazamiyah Hospital, or anywhere else, for that matter. They've simply never been produced.

We also know that the star witness for the Associated Press in this story, Iraqi Police Capt. Jamil Hussein, has never existed.

The Iraqi Police and Interior ministry have confirmed that no person by the name of Jamil Hussein is an Iraqi policeman or even an interior ministry employee, much less an officer cleared to speak with the media as a named source. Further investigation has determined that this incorporeal captain has been a named source for the Associated Press (and apparently no other news organization) in no fewer than 61 stories over the past year.

The false captain is just one of more than a dozen sources the Associated Press claims are official Iraqi police or interior ministry spokesmen that the Iraqi government cannot verify exist, meaning that potentially hundreds of Associated Press stories may be suspect.

As I wrote three days ago:

This presents us with the unsettling possibility that the Associated Press has no idea how much of the news it has reported out of Iraq since the 2003 invasion is in fact real, and how much they reported was propaganda. they failure of accountability here is potentially of epic proportions.

When producer Mary Mapes and anchor Dan Rather ran faked Texas Air National Guard records on 60 Minutes, it was undoubtedly the largest news media scandal of 2004, and yet, it was an isolated scandal, identified within hours, affecting one network and one show in particular.

This developing Associated Press implosion may go back as far as two years, affecting as many as 60 stories from just this one allegedly fake policeman alone. And Jamil Hussein is just one of more than a dozen potentially fake Iraqi policemen used in news reports the AP disseminates around the world. This does not begin to attempt to account for non-official sources which the AP will have an even harder time substantiating. Quite literally, almost all AP reporting from Iraq not verified from reporters of other news organizations is now suspect, and with good reason.

Instead of affecting one show on one network watched by 14 million viewers as Rathergate did, "Jamilgate" means the Associated Press may have been delivering news of questionable accuracy to one billion people a day for two years or more. In this evolving instance of faux journalism, "60 Minutes" is now potentially 60 billion false impressions, or more.

A principled, professional news organization owes its consumers the truth. To date, the Associated Press, as voiced by comments from officers international editor John Daniszewski and executive editor Kathleen Carroll, has refused to address the rampant inconsistencies in the "burning men" story, produce physical evidence proving their allegations, or produce star source Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein. Arrogantly, they attack the messenger (both U.S military and Iraqi government sources and bloggers), and insist we must believe them, even though they give us no compelling reason to do so, and many reasons to doubt them.

They have not proved their claims with facts, nor produced the police captain they have cited as a source on multiple stories over two years.

You would think that the possibility of such widespread fraud would bring forth all bloggers hoping to call into question what appears to be a terminally flawed methodology of news gathering. Instead, the cry for the Associated Press to produce Jamil Hussein, to examine their stringer-based reporting methods, and launch an impartial investigation into how things could have gone so horribly wrong, has been almost exclusively an endeavor from the center-right blogosphere and conservative-leaning media outlets.

Surely, I thought, not just conservatives desire facts and accuracy in the reporting from the world's largest media organization. These stories, if inaccurate, impact all of us, regardless of political persuasion.

Hoping that the silence in this matter from top liberal bloggers was the silence of simply not knowing—which was the excuse they claimed as an unhinged (and now fugitive) liberal professor by the name of Deb Frisch stalked Jeff Goldstein's family—I wrote a pair of them with which I've corresponded in the past.

Two days ago, I sent the following email to a prominent liberal blogger:

XXXXXX, I'm sure by now you've heard about what some are dubbing "Jamilgate," the almost certainly false AP report of six Sunnis being doused in kerosene and burned alive in a Baghdad slum. You are also probably aware that one of the two named sources in the story is Iraqi Police Capt. Jamil Hussein, and that after a thorough internal investigation, the Iraqi interior ministry now states categorically that no such person exists as an Iraqi police captain. That alone would be only a minor story if the AP would issue a retraction, but it turns out that the Associated Press has used Jamil Hussein as a source 61 times, and that they are unwilling to accept that Hussein is a fraud... even though they seem unable to find him now. Clearly, we're now dealing with a coverup. Why should you care (other than the traffic-driving reporting of what could be the biggest scandal in modern journalism history)? I suspect that there is an inclination among bloggers on the left to view this as a partisan issue, as it seems to pit conservative bloggers and the military against the world's largest news organization. XXXXXX, I'm hoping that you will see that there are indeed some much larger issues at play here. Quite simply, this is right versus wrong, truth versus fiction, ethical behavior versus unethical behavior. The Associated Press is using stringer-based reporting with no checks or balances for accuracy, and even when caught with its hand in the proverbial cookie jar, it has no interest at all in correcting their flawed methodology, or issuing retractions for the 61 stories where they cited a fraud as a source. They are issuing forth broken news, and don't care if its broken. Shouldn't we all be screaming bloody murder? I've read your work on occasion, know the reputation you have on your side of the ball. I'm hoping that you can help take this out of the realm of right/left, and get other left of center bloggers, writers, and activists involved in a basic demand for the AP to issue retractions, admit they were conned, and fix a flawed methodolgy that allowed for this long-running fraud to occur. Right, left or center, as pundits, we're only as good as the news we get to work from, and if the AP and other news organizations feel they can get away with "faith-based" reporting of world events using fictional sources, and feel they will not have to pay a penalty for that betray of trust, we all suffer as a result. I'd really appreciate the help, so thanks for considering this.

Thus far, she has not yet responded. She may be otherwise indisposed, and so I've "X"'d out her name just in case she simply hasn't had a chance to get back in touch with me. Surely, she wants the media to be honest in it's reporting, not just merely sounding out what she wants to hear.

Several hours ago, I also contacted the founder of a fairly popular liberal group blog that I've corresponded with off and on for a while. I wrote:

XXXX,

Just a quick question: how come nobody on your side of the aisle seems interested in the false sources story raised by the "burning six" story? Is it seen as a right wing + military thing against the media?

The evidence is compelling that the lead named source in this story, Captain Jamil Hussein, who has been a source for the Associated Press in 61 stories, has simply never existed. He's completely faked, and is either a fictionalized construct shared among many AP reporters, or more likely, is an insurgent that conned the AP into thinking he was a legitimate source. In any event, we know he doesn't legitimately exist (the Iraqi police have officially confirmed this), and that 61 AP stories are now suspect. We also know that more than a dozen other sources that the AP has used are also suspect (the Iriaqi interior ministry has confirmed none of these men are on their payroll), including three men cited as policemen in AP stories today.

We are legitimately looking at the largest systemic compromise of a news organization in world history, with hundreds or thousands of stories potentially compromised, and nobody on the left seems to care.

We know why most of the media is silent - they get their news from AP, and don't want to bite the hand that feeds them unless forced - but I'm frankly amazed that the only center-left commentary I've seen on this is a newshounds post attacking those who exposed of Hussein as a fake.

This is perhaps the blogosphere's greatest chance to expose a dishonest and slip-shot reporting methodology and force the media to be more accountable and honest in their reporting. Why do you think your contemporaries won't engage? Isn't this something we should all be hammering on a bipartisan basis?

Granted, he's only had a few hours to respond, but he's usually pretty quick about such things. Maybe he, too, is otherwise indisposed.

So far, the only moderately popular liberal blog I've been able to see even address this story in any way at all has been this one mentioned in the email above, and they only mentioned it in the bizarre context of using it to attack Brit Hume. They didn't seem too concerned—actually not concerned at all—that the AP might be feeding us all suspect news.

Curt diligently reports again this morning that the Associated Press continues to publish stories citing Iraqi police officers that the Iraqi government has already identified as suspected fakes, without even acknowledging that the Iraqi government says they have no record of these men working for them.

Surely the "reality-based" community cares when the world's preeminent news organization is suspected of publishing insurgent propaganda as news.

I'm sure now that they know about the Associated Press and its scandalous behavior, that these liberal, truth-seeking bloggers will act by calling for an impartial investigation into the AP’s reporting methods to ensure that the Associated Press is delivering accurate, factual information to the rest of the world. After all, honesty in the media matters, and if we want to know the true state of the nation, we'll have to rely on more than a talking points memo and suspect news reports. We need news organizations we can trust to deliver facts, not suspected propaganda from a bunch of crooks and liars peddling lies while posing as policemen. No, we need facts to make sure we aren't raising a hullabaloo based on false information.

When confronted with such strong evidence that they're being fed lies, such ethical people will fight to be given the facts, not spin.

If they don't, then they'll be frauds too... won't they?

Steyn Rips AP Over Bias

On the first segment of O'Reilly. As always, Allah's got the video.

A taste:

"...I believe that the majority of American newpapers, which are full of Associated Press content, on the central issue of our time, they're either dupes, at best, or semi-treasonous and colluding with the enemy and demoralizing America on the home front, including having agents of the enemy on their payroll. This is a disgraceful organization."

He goes on to mention Bilal Hussein (by deed, not name) the Pulitzer-winning AP photographer arrested with an al Qaeda commander, in a weapons cache, coated in explosive residue.

The Associated Press, of course, is quite angry that Hussein is being detained. They seem far less concerned that he may be tied to terrorism and the murder of Iraqi civilians, or that he could be feeding the AP propaganda instead of legitimate news.

Dupes, or semi-treasonous? You make the call.

Weblog Awards Voting Now Open

10 days, 45 categories, 450 of your favorite blogs. Go forth and vote.

(Especially here. I'm getting smoked.)

Researcher Quits Over the Dumbest Book Ever Written About the Bush Administration

Protesting Frank J. Fleming's controversial new book on the President—with the provocative title, "The Chronicles of Dubya Volume 1: The Defeat of Saddam" —Dr. Frank Stein resigned this week from the Fleming Center. Stein had co-authored a previous book on the Middle East with Fleming, had been affiliated with the Center for 3 years, and in many ways was Fleming's "brain" on Dubya for years.

Stein writes in a letter explaining his resignation that Fleming's new book is "replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments. Aside from the one-sided nature of the book, meant to provoke, there are recollections cited from meetings where I was the third person in the room, and my notes of those meetings show little similarity to points claimed in the book. In due course, I shall detail these points and reflect on their origins." *

When contacted to respond, Fleming's office stated he was attempting to arrange a meeting between former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former President Jimmy Carter, and that he was presently unavailable for comment.

Edited for Recreancy

Update: An opinion on the Baker Commissions findings from Sgt. T.F. Boggs, in Mosul, Iraq:

After watching the Iraq Survey Group press conference today I am a firm believer that all politicians are idiots. Okay well not all of them but they all have a problem understanding reality. If any politician is reading this now feel free to email me and we’ll go out for coffee and I’ll further explain. But I digress.

The Iraq Survey Group’s findings or rather, recommendations are a joke and could have only come from a group of old people who have been stuck in Washington for too long. The brainpower of the ISG has come up with a new direction for our country and that includes negotiating with countries whose people chant “Death to America” and whose leaders deny the Holocaust and call for Israel to be wiped from the face of the earth. Baker and Hamilton want us to get terrorists supporting countries involved in fighting terrorism!

...What the group desperately needed was at least one their members to have been in the military and had recent experience in Iraq. The problem with having an entire panel with no one under the age of 67 is that none of them could possibly know what the situation is actually like on the ground in Iraq. Now I concede that it is possible to have a good understanding of things as they stand in Iraq but unless you interact with the people of Iraq and spend a year or years of your life on ground you cannot possibly have a complete picture of the situation.

We cannot appease our enemies and we cannot continue to cut and run when the going gets tough. As it stands in the world right now our enemies view America as a country full of queasy people who are inclined to cut and run when things take a turn for the worse. Just as the Tet Offensive was the victory that led to our failure in Vietnam our victories in Iraq now are leading to our failure in the Middle East. How many more times must we fight to fail? I feel like all of my efforts (30 months of deployment time) and the efforts of all my brothers in arms are all for naught. I thought old people were supposed to be more patient than a 24 year old but apparently I have more patience for our victory to unfold in Iraq than 99.9 percent of Americans.

Sgt. Boggs understands that there are only two ways to deal with terrorists: you either kill them, or you appease them.

Jules Crittenden worries that short-sighted Americans, bored with this war (that is rightfully our responsibility to win), will pass down a much more dangerous world to future generations if we refuse to complete our mission now:

My son, 10 years old, has grown up in a world of war more intense than I grew up in. He was five and watching TV when he saw the Twin Towers on fire. His uncle was a soldier, helping to keep us safe, we told him. Then his dad went away to war. He met people who had been in war, even people who had been horribly wounded in war.

And he has said things to me like, "When I grow up, if I don't get killed in battle, I want to be a Major League pitcher."

I'm proud of a boy who talks like that, and heartbroken that he has to. I know the day may come when my boy has to go, and I'll learn things about war that hundreds of thousands of American parents have learned in the past few years.

Will my son then also have to learn all these gut-wrenching things?

What about the betrayal? Will he have to learn about that as I fear we might be about to?

Far too many people have deluded themselves into thinking that if we withdraw our military from Iraq, that Iraqis will somehow have peace. Far too many people have deluded themselves into thinking that if we withdraw from Iraq, that we will have peace.

We were not in Iraq on September 11, 2001. We were not in Japan on December 7, 1941, and in both instances, fanatics loyal to would-be tyrants attacked us.

65 years later, BB-39 U.S.S. Arizona still bleeds, but we finished the job. The United States destroyed the enemy and the ideology that sent her to the bottom. We fought a far more capable enemy that was armed with far greater resources and weaponry, and we sustained far more casualties in individual battles than we might loose in ten years in Iraq... Yet we prevailed.

If we refuse to finish the job of destroying Islamist terrorism where it lives in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Gaza, Sudan, and elsewhere, it will not slink away in the night. Terror will smolder like a peat fire in corners of the world both far and near, until once again one day, we look up to see burning building and burning people falling from the sky.

Then it will be our children—yours, mine and Jules'—sent off to fight what will then be a more widespread and entrenched enemy. This future war will requiring more men, more resources, and more terrible weaponry, and yet, this future war never needs to be... if we have the fortitude to finish this war that they started, now, in our time.

Iraq is but one battleground in a wider war that one day must include every nation that harbors, equips, or sustains Islamic terrorism.

"Cowboy" Bush was right on September 20, 2001.

You either honor the ideas, ideals and sacrifices required to maintain free and democratic civilization, or you allow barbarism, fanaticism, and oppression to reign.

The choice is yours.

Harsh Nature

CNET.com senior editor James Kim, who went missing in Oregon while trying to get help for his stranded family, is dead:

"At 12:03 hours, the body of James Kim was located at the bottom of Big Windy Creek," Oregon State Police Lt. Gregg Hastings said at a press conference.

My heart goes out for the Kim family. James Kim left behind a wife and two small children, all of which were rescued in good condition on Saturday.

Iraq Study Group Report

The Iraq Study Group Report is posted here (PDF).

I've only had time to skim through the executive summary up through the assessment thus far, but don't see anything inconsistent with the findings of the report that were leaked previously. Baker & Co. are not offering any radically new ideas. I think an argument can be made that much of what is said in this report is merely the dusting off of the same failed realist diplomacy that helped create a Middle East where extremism was allowed to rise unchallenged.

In many ways, the Baker Commission ignores the lessons of the last five years (or 35, depending on your viewpoint) and advocates plastering over modern problems with outdated applications of policies that have systematically failed over three decades.

Baker and his contemporaries obviously exhuasted their best ideas Presidents ago.

Fact-Challenged Superficial Jew-Hating Fabulist

"Precious!"

But other than that, I'm sure he's a pretty nice guy.

McGovern: An Iraqi Genocide Would Not Be Our Problem

In an interview with Rick and Donna Martinez on North Carolina's Morning News with Jack Boston on News-Talk 680 WPTF, former senator and noted surrenderist George McGovern was interviewed about his new book, Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now.

During the course of the interview, and after McGovern described his desire to see the United States pull completely out of Iraq within six months, Rick Martinez brought up the genocides of Shia and Kurds with weapons of mass destruction after the 1991 Gulf War, and then asked McGovern what we should do if the complete pullout led to a similar wave of genocidal killings.

I'm paraphrasing here, but McGovern's response was something along the lines of "it's not our problem," unless we get some sort of an international mandate to go back in to correct it.

As we are all well aware, the Rwandan Genocide saw between 800,000-1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus slaughtered over about 100 days in 1994. We are still waiting for McGovern's "international" action in Darfur, a slow-motion genocide that has been on-going since 2003, and which has cost 400,000 lives thus far, with no end in sight. McGovern knows any international action to an Iraqi genocide would be slow or more likely, non-existent.

What McGovern is saying is that he does not care if hundreds of thousands of Iraqis—most likely Sunnis—are slaughtered in Iraq as the result of the immediate U.S. pullout he calls for.

So much for multi-culturalism.

Thank You

Confederate Yankee is officially a finalist for the 2006 Weblog Awards, in the category "Best of the Top 251 - 500 Blogs." CY was also a finalist in this category last year, and we face some vey tough competition again this year.

Nominees in this category include:

Betsy’s Page
Confederate Yankee
Flopping Aces
Jarhead’s Firing Range
Point Five
Regime Change Iran
Sister Toldjah
Texas Rainmaker
The Daily Brief
Star Sailor

Blog readers can begin voting for 450 finalists in 45 categories tomorrow at the 2006 Weblog Awards. Be sure to vote for your favorites, and may the best blogs win!

Moderately Uninformed

Writing at the Moderate Voice, Shaun Mullen gets quite a few things—almost everything—wrong, in just four short paragraphs:

Robert Gates got it wrong right out of the, er . . . gate on Tuesday in the opening session of his nomination hearing to replace Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense.

Gates declared that Iraq is "one of the central battlefronts" in the war on terrorism, but failed to note why. His omission compounded the biggest of President Bush's Big Lies: The U.S. didn't go to war in Iraq because it was awash with terrorists. It is awash with terrorists because Rumsfeld's horribly botched occupation opened the door to Al Qaeda and others.

Gates did get a couple of big things right: The U.S. is losing the war and the resulting mess may trigger a regional war.

His candor is a refreshing change, but I fear that Robert Gates is too little too late.

First, Gates never claimed that we were losing in Iraq. As a matter of fact he expressly said we weren't losing (nor winning, implying a stalemate). I invite Mr. Mullen to go back and re-read what actually happened, instead of printing what he apparently wanted to hear.

I'd also point out that prior to the 2003 invasion, several terror groups called Iraq home, that Saddam paid bounties to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, and that Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas, and Abdul Rahman Yasin, the 1993 WTC bomb builder, all lived in Iraq with Saddam's knowledge and perhaps his blessing. In addition, Iraq's intelligence services were complicit in planning, financing, training, and executing terror attacks internally and regionally. Iraq had quite a stable of terrorists and terrorist-enablers prior to the invasion, and I frankly resent Mr. Mullen's patently dishonest mischaracterization that Iraq wasn't waist-deep in terrorism.

As the Man said, the stated objective of the invasion was "to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people."

Mullen might not like those facts, but he isn't allowed to make up his own history in response.

I will agree that the post-war occupation (the war itself lasted weeks and was a decisive U.S. victory) has been botched horribly, but it wasn't all Rummy and Bush; State and other government agencies have proven to be every bit as much incompetent as the civilian leadership at the Pentagon, even if they aren't as visible.

Mullen also seems to imply that everything going wrong in Iraq happens only as a result of U.S. actions and/or inactions, a patently dishonest rhetorical position that flies directly in the face of reality.

His position—rancid "blame America first" pabulum echoed by far too many "serious" people who should know better—ignores the fact that other regional actors such as Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, etc all have the capability to influence the situation within Iraq for good, or ill.

Sadly, most Arab nations such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and others that could have a positive influence have adopted a mostly "hands off" policy, which had the Iraqi foreign minister today blaming them for not doing more. The two nations that have been making a concerted effort to affect conditions in Iraq have both been negative, with Syria supporting the Baathist insurgency and Iran supporting Shiite militias. It also ignores the free will of Iraqis, some of which (particularly some of the Sunni tribes in al Anbar) is self-defeating.

Mullen’s next-to-parting shot is ignorant along those same lines, another failure of shortsightedness.

He states a U.S failure could trigger a larger regional war. I've got a news flash for him and you as well; the war between western and Islamist philosophies—the larger regional war, or if left unfinished soon, a probable world war—has been building in its latest incarnation for nearly 30 years. It is merely the latest iteration in a war over a thousand years old, and renewed conflict is a certainty. It will occur, regardless of the proximate trigger.

If we are very very lucky we will fight this as a regional war instead of a world war, and sooner rather than later. We should fight it before bare democracies in Iraq and Lebanon fall to the influence of Shia Islamists, and preferably before Iran completes and uses nuclear weapons on Israel, wiping out the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in the process, prompting a dying Israel to launch a nuclear counterstrike that will kill tens of millions of Iranians.

Robert Gates has a terminal weakness common to many realists, the inability to realize that the "other" does not think like us, or even necessarily opposite of the way we think. The term for this sort of failure is called mirroring, an it was such disastrous thinking that convinced the Japanese 65 years ago that a strike on the U.S Naval base at Pearl Harbor would knock us out of the war.

The Japanese did not understand the psychology of America then, just as Gates, Baker, and other realists make the mistake of misunderstanding how the apocalyptic Hojjatieh sect thinks now. The Hojjatieh sect ruling Iran is a branch of Shia Islam so extreme that Ayatollah Khomeini outlawed it in 1983. These are not rational Cold War Russians, but zealots hoping to expedite the return of their Messiah, and they are sure that they have the Allah-given mandate to bring the Madhi back to earth through nuclear fire.

We will fight this war. The only question is how high the butcher's bill will be, which is in part determined by howe much longer we procrastinate.

Mullen fundamentally misunderstands what the nomination of Robert Gates represents. He isn't "too little, too late." The realist school of foreign policy to which Gates subscribes created the problem with which we are now confronted.

Robert Gates may be a fine man and great public servant, but unless this leopard has changed his spots considerably, he is precisely the wrong man for the job.

60 Billion Minutes

Mark Tapscott of the Washington Examiner weighs in on how the Associated Press can extricate themselves from the Jamil Hussein/burning men story in Iraq. Sound familiar?

What AP appears not to grasp is that the most serious questions about its credibility are already in the minds of millions of people, thanks in part to the bloggers, but also to the few mainstream media organizations that have covered the growing controversy.

What is most puzzling about the AP reaction is its failure to do the one thing that would instantly put the critics in their place - produce Capt. Jamil Hussein. If he is in fact an Iraqi police captain, it is impossible to understand why he cannot be produced and his credentials verified.

"Captain Jamil Hussein" is but one of 14 Iraqi-sounding names of sources quoted by AP that U.S. military officials say cannot be verified as credible sources.

Produce Jamil Hussein. Brilliant!

By this point, the Associated Press has almost assuredly tried to contact Jamil Hussein to come on camera, in uniform, in his police office to prove that he does in fact exist, thereby shutting down this gathering storm.

Just as assuredly, the present silence from the Associated Press on the matter indicates that they have likely failed to produce their source for over 60 news stories.

To give you an idea of the scale of this apparent fraud, consider the case of veteran freelance photojournalist Adnan Hajj from earlier this year.

Hajj was exposed for tampering with a photo from the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah conflict, where he added dense smoke to a picture to make an Israeli bombing seem more intense than it actually was. Shortly thereafter, another manipulated photo was uncovered, and other photos came under intense scrutiny. Reuters, who had worked with Hajj for over a decade, responded by disassociating itself from him (effectively firing him) and removing all 920 photos he had for sale.

Hajj was just one reporter, caught manipulating images that most would agree over-dramatized and mis-characterized events, but images that would not have been significant news on their own if they had been real.

The story that brought into question the existence of Jamil Hussein is a much larger scandal in the making.

The allegation that six men were pulled from a Sunni mosque (one of four Sunni mosques the original story claimed were burned and blown up) by Shiite militants and then burned alive is a horrific story on multiple levels, one that media cited as a key example of how brutal sectarian violence in Iraq had come. And yet, there was an in a problem; a lack of evidence that any of the violence claimed actually took place.

Not a single one of the four mosques claimed blown up in the AP story actually were. Only one mosque could be verified to have any fire damage, and the minor damage confirmed by the Iraqi government to one mosque was consistent with unverified Shiite militia accounts that a molotov cocktail had been thrown into the building and quickly extinguished. There is zero evidence that a mosque door was blown open by an RPG as the Associated Press claimed. There is no physical evidence that six men were pulled into the street by militiamen, doused in kerosene, set on fire, and then shot in the head.

There is no physical evidence of burning men, nor bullet-scarred streets where anonymous eyewitnesses claimed the men were shot in the head once they had quit moving. There are no bodies, and no graves. There are only two named sources, one of which has recanted his story. The other named source for the AP story? Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein.

Unlike Adnan Hajj who only manipulated comparatively minor photo elements and who might have gone unnoticed were it not for sharp-eyed bloggers, this AP story was immediately carried and reprinted around the world as fact. We now know that the events described may have been entirely fictionalized as part of an insurgent propaganda campaign, one foisted upon a complacent news organization with very few checks and balances for accuracy on their stringer-based reporting methods.

We also know that Jamil Hussein has consistently been a source for at least 60 news stories over two years, and that Jamil Hussein is just one of many apparently fake sources that has driven Associated Press reporting in Iraq.

This presents us with the unsettling possibility that the Associated Press has no idea how much of the news it has reported out of Iraq since the 2003 invasion is in fact real, and how much they reported was propaganda. The failure of accountability here is potentially of epic proportions.

When producer Mary Mapes and anchor Dan Rather ran faked Texas Air National Guard records on 60 Minutes, it was undoubtedly the largest news media scandal of 2004, and yet, it was an isolated scandal, identified within hours, affecting one network and one show in particular.

This developing Associated Press implosion may go back as far as two years, affecting as many as 60 stories from just this one allegedly fake policeman alone. And Jamil Hussein is just one of more than a dozen potentially fake Iraqi policemen used in news reports the AP disseminates around the world. This does not begin to attempt to account for non-offical sources which the AP will have an even harder time substantiating. Quite literally, almost all AP reporting from Iraq not verified from reporters of other news organizations is now suspect, and with good reason.

Instead of affecting one show on one network watched by 14 million viewers as Rathergate did, "Jamilgate" means the Associated Press may have been delivering news of questionable accuracy to one billion people a day for two years or more. In this evolving instance of faux journalism, "60 Minutes" is now potentially 60 billion false impressions, or more.

A principled, professional news organization owes its consumers the truth. To date, the Associated Press, as voiced by comments from officers international editor John Daniszewski and executive editor Kathleen Carroll, has refused to address the rampant inconsistencies in the "burning men" story, produce physical evidence proving their allegations, or produce star source Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein. Arrogantly, they attack the messenger (both U.S military and Iraqi government sources and bloggers), and insist we must believe them, even though they give us no compelling reason to do so, and many reasons to doubt them.

They have not proved their claims with facts, nor produced the police captain they have cited as a source on multiple stories over two years.

Their continuing failure to substantiate their story with evidence runs directly counter to these stated principles:

For more than a century and a half, men and women of The Associated Press have had the privilege of bringing truth to the world. They have gone to great lengths, overcome great obstacles – and, too often, made great and horrific sacrifices – to ensure that the news was reported quickly, accurately and honestly. Our efforts have been rewarded with trust: More people in more places get their news from the AP than from any other source.

In the 21st century, that news is transmitted in more ways than ever before – in print, on the air and on the Web, with words, images, graphics, sounds and video. But always and in all media, we insist on the highest standards of integrity and ethical behavior when we gather and deliver the news.

That means we abhor inaccuracies, carelessness, bias or distortions. It means we will not knowingly introduce false information into material intended for publication or broadcast; nor will we alter photo or image content. Quotations must be accurate, and precise.

It means we always strive to identify all the sources of our information, shielding them with anonymity only when they insist upon it and when they provide vital information – not opinion or speculation; when there is no other way to obtain that information; and when we know the source is knowledgeable and reliable.

The Associated Press is guilty of using a terminally flawed newsgathering methodology that makes their news organization an easy target for those desiring to insert of propaganda as news. What's worse is that their leadership clearly doesn't care.

The leaders of the Associated Press seem to have little interest in living up to their own stated values and principles, and in doing so, have betrayed that essential trust that they must have to survive.

Noted photojournalism expert, author, and professor David Permutter of the William Allen White School of Journalism & Mass Communications at the University of Kansas noted during the height of the journalistic controversies of the Israeli-Hezbollah war in Lebanon:

The Israeli-Hezbollah war has left many dead bodies, ruined towns, and wobbling politicians in its wake, but the media historian of the future may also count as one more victim the profession of photojournalism. In twenty years of researching and teaching about the art and trade and doing photo-documentary work, I have never witnessed or heard of such a wave of attacks on the people who take news pictures and on the basic premise that nonfiction news photo- and videography is possible.

I'm not sure, however, if the craft I love is being murdered, committing suicide, or both.

The wounds, in this case, are assuredly self-inflicted.

Update: As if to underscore that point (via Instapundit):

In nearly every conversation, the soldiers, Marines and contractors expressed they were upset with the coverage of the war in Iraq in general, and the public perception of the daily situation on the ground. The felt the media was there to sensationalize the news, and several stated some reporters were only interested in “blood and guts.” They freely admitted the obstacles in front of them in Iraq. Most recognized that while we are winning the war on the battlefield, albeit with difficulties in some areas, we are losing the information war. They felt the media had abandoned them.

During each conversation, I was left in the awkward situation of having to explain that while, yes, I am wearing a press badge, I'm not 'one of them.' I used descriptions like 'independent journalist' or 'blogger' in an attempt to separate myself from the pack.

Associated/Depressed

The Associated Press scandal-without-a-catchy-name* continues today, as Tom Zeller Jr, of the NY Times bends over backwards to provide cover for the AP’s abortive attempts to brush aside the continuing criticism of their reporting of an incident where mosques and people reputedly burned during a Shiite rampage in a Sunni enclave in Baghdad.

Taking the opposite tack, Boston Herald City Editor Jules Crittenden rips into the AP on his blog, his column, and on Fox News.

For those of you who might have forgotten how this got started, it went a little something like this:

Six burned alive in Iraq
The Associated Press

BAGHDAD, IRAQ -Revenge-seeking militiamen seized six Sunnis as they left Friday prayers and burned them alive with kerosene in a savage new twist to the brutality shaking the Iraqi capital a day after suspected Sunni insurgents killed 215 people in Baghdad's main Shiite district.

Iraqi soldiers at a nearby army post failed to intervene in Friday's assault by suspected members of the Shiite Mahdi Army militia or subsequent attacks that killed at least 19 other Sunnis, including women and children, in the same neighborhood, the volatile Hurriyah district in northwest Baghdad, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein.

Most of the thousands of dead bodies that have been found dumped across Baghdad and other cities in central Iraq in recent months have been of victims who were tortured and then shot to death, according to police. The suspected militia killers often have used electric drills on their captives' bodies before killing them. The bodies are frequently decapitated.

But burning victims alive introduced a new method of brutality that was likely to be reciprocated by the other sect as the Shiites and Sunnis continue killing one another in unprecedented numbers. The gruesome attack, which came despite a curfew in Baghdad, capped a day in which at least 87 people were killed or found dead in sectarian violence across Iraq.

In Hurriyah, the rampaging militiamen also burned and blew up four mosques and torched several homes in the district, Hussein said.

Residents of the troubled district claim the Mahdi Army has begun kidnapping and holding Sunni hostages to use in ritual slaughter at the funerals of Shiite victims of Baghdad's raging sectarian war.

Such claims cannot be verified but speak to the deep fear that grips Baghdad, where retaliation has become a part of daily life.

President Jalal Talabani emerged from lengthy meetings with other Iraqi leaders late Friday and said the defense minister, Abdul-Qader al-Obaidi, indicated that the Hurriyah neighborhood had been quiet throughout the day.

But Imad al-Hasimi, a Sunni elder in Hurriyah, confirmed Hussein's account of the immolations. He told Al-Arabiya television he saw people who were drenched in kerosene and then set afire, burning to death before his eyes.

Two workers at Kazamiyah Hospital also confirmed that bodies from the clashes and immolation had been taken to the morgue at their facility.

They refused to be identified by name, saying they feared retribution.

And the Association of Muslim Scholars, the most influential Sunni organization in Iraq, said even more victims were burned to death in attacks on the four mosques. It claimed a total of 18 people had died in an inferno at the al-Muhaimin mosque.

That is how the story was reported by the Associated Press, and yet, much of what was stated in this article is unsubstantiated. In fact, this may be a story that never was.

We know several things about this original article are categorically false. We know that though the Associated Press article claims four mosques were burnt and blown up, that simply didn’t happen. One mosque had its doorway set on fire which was extinguished, and graffiti was painted on the building. Limited fire damage and spray paint on one mosque is a far, far cry for four mosques being blown up.

We also know that "police Capt. Jamil Hussein," who was the key witness leaning credibility to the AP’s allegations, simply does not exist. The Iraqi interior ministry has confirmed that they have no employees by the name of Jamil Hussein, as a police captain or otherwise… and yet, the fictional Captain Hussein has been a source in no fewer than 61 AP stories.

al-Hasimi (alternately al-Hashimi), the Sunni elder who is credited with witnessing the attack in the original story, now says that he did not.

Even the most key element of the story, that six men had been burned alive, seems to be false.

Nevertheless, the AP circled the wagons and continues to insist the story is real, despite the overwhelming evidence that mosques were not burned and blown up. 18 people did not die "in an inferno" at the al-Muhaimin mosque, for the al-Muhaimin mosque was never destoryed, just as six men were never pulled into the street, doused in kerosene, and set on fire.

This entire series of events is an apparent fiction from which the Associated Press will not back down, and a lie to which the new York Times seems unwilling to seriously question.

There are no charred bodies numbering between 6-18, nor four blown-up mosques, nor a police captain named Jamil Hussein who has been cited in 61 media reports. In one of the most graphic images of sectarian violence manufactured in the Iraq war yet, this incident seems quite entirely fabricated out of thin air. No other news organization will back the Associated Press’s account of burning mosques and men. Even Rueters cannot find the artificial police captains or anonymous sources to back such a claim.

If the Associated Press produces evidence that Jamil Hussein exists, or else admits that they were duped as part of a long running insurgent propaganda campaign, we can at least say the Associated Press got the wrong facts via an honest attempt to report the news. They can then go back and see if they can verify if the other 60 stories they wrote consulting the imaginary captain were real, or also part of a work of extended insurgent fiction.

Instead of looking for the truth, however, Kathleen Carroll seems to be rallying the troops around a "fake, but accurate" defense.

That response hasn't worked out too well for Mary Mapes and Dan Rather, and I suspect that it won't work much better for Kathleen Carroll, and the curiously incorporeal captain, Jamil Hussein.

* Not that it matters, but my vote goes for "Imaginary Friendgate."

Boo Freaking Hoo

I hope that you are sitting down as you read this, because the surprise of what I am about to tell you will make you weak in the knees:

The NY Times has published an article with the apparent goal of trying to generate sympathy for a terrorist.

Shocking, I know.

And before you ask, yes, the Times is quite willing to help his defense team work on a new angle.

Now lawyers for Mr. Padilla, 36, suggest that he is unfit to stand trial. They argue that he has been so damaged by his interrogations and prolonged isolation that he suffers post-traumatic stress disorder and is unable to assist in his own defense. His interrogations, they say, included hooding, stress positions, assaults, threats of imminent execution and the administration of “truth serums.”

Just one problem with that angle:

A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Todd Vician, said Sunday that the military disputes Mr. Padilla’s accusations of mistreatment. And, in court papers, prosecutors deny “in the strongest terms” the accusations of torture and say that “Padilla’s conditions of confinement were humane and designed to ensure his safety and security.”

“His basic needs were met in a conscientious manner, including Halal (Muslim acceptable) food, clothing, sleep and daily medical assessment and treatment when necessary,” the government stated. “While in the brig, Padilla never reported any abusive treatment to the staff or medical personnel.”

Jose Padilla, the violent gang-banging ex-con Muslim convert from Chicago who attempted to murder and maim his fellow Americans in a dirty bomb attack, is once again painted as the victim by the New York Times.

Color me unimpressed.

Update: For the record, for my "netroots" visitors...

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that the Executive Branch does have the legal right to hold Padilla. I'm sorry that your "reality-based" worldview won't accept it, but the courts have already decided that the President does have the authority to militarily detain:

...a citizen of this country who is closely associated with al Qaeda, an entity with which the United States is at war; who took up arms on behalf of that enemy and against our country in a foreign combat zone of that war; and who thereafter traveled to the United States for the avowed purpose of further prosecuting that war on American soil, against American citizens and targets.

That narrowly defines that the Executive does have the legal, quite Constitutional right to make specific detentions.

That narrow definition should also belay the squawkings of the hyper-emotive, Chicken Little leftists that still insist, against all factual evidence to the contrary, that Bush can through anyone in jail at any time, for any reason, without hope of a trial.

It won't, of course.

Little things like facts and court decisions just get in the way of their essential "truthiness" that President Bush is a big old evil fascist, and that what really matters, facts be damned.

Iowa Voice Bleg

What exactly are your job options in Iowa... don't they boil down to football and things you can do with corn?

Anyway, Brian at Iowa Voice just accidentally graduated and is blegging for dollars to help him through until he lands a job. If you enjoy his blog and have a dime or two to spare, consider helping him out.

Open Season

Lots of things are flying around today, and trying to contextualize, compartmentalize, and sort through them in a logical manner is proving to be difficult.

I've just read MSM bias: "Everybody knows ... from the Alabama Liberation Front (via Instapundit, which touches on the ficticious story of six men "burned alive" in Baghdad and the AP's refusal to back down from the story, and the dangers of "groupthink" and so-called conventional wisdom. I then read Dr. Sanity's Systematic Subversion and the Ultimate Triumph of Freedom, which I think was supposed to optomistic about the ultimate triumph of freedom over tyranny, but it's stopping points along the way, highlighting how terrorists support Democratic politics becuase they indeed share some of the same goals (if not for the same reasons), the impression of anomie upon the American people by a mindlessly self-destructive media and the majority of our political leadership, and questions about whether Islam was compatible with freedom, and what the answer to that question meant for the future, left me rather emotionally exhausted.

Toss in my own continuing, pre-existing disgust with a media machine more focused on profit and spreading (and dictating) conventional wisdom than doing it's job, the apparent resurrection of foreign policy realism (the same incompetent, political-party spanning philosophy that did much to create the conditions favorable for the rise of terrorism), the overly war-like actions of Iran and Syria that every nation on the planet seems to see, but chooses to ignore, and you might understand why I'm getting a headache trying to make sense of it all.

But is there any sense to be made?

Kathleen Carroll, Executive Editor of the Associated Press, is going to bat and supporting a story that actually has less credible evidence that the Dan Rather/Mary Mapes fiasco, with anonymous reporters, anonymous witnesses, no physical evidence and one named witness, who it turns out, is not who he claims to be. Carroll even goes to the absurd extreme of saying that since they've used the fictional Captain for numerous stories, that he must be real.

We've been feeding you stories from someone who doesn't exist for months, and now is too late to complain about it seems to be her defense, and curiously, (or perhaps not), no other news organization wants to tackle this, and for a very telling reason: the methodologically flawed stringer-run, faith-based, virtual reporting exposing the glaring weaknesses of Associated Press news-gathering efforts here are the norm among news organizations in Iraq. They news gathering techniques used in Iraq are fatally corrupt, easy for enemy propagandists to exploit, and worst of all, it is all but certain that media organizations such as the Associates Press are well aware of these flaws, but have chosen not modify them becuase these reporting methods were yeilding the "common sense" reporting that they desired. Top media management supports inaccurate stories, devoid of facts, because these stories fit their preconceived ideas of what they expect should be happening, even if the events themselves are false.

It's psychic newscasting, where they forecast what the events should be, and tailor a story to match it. It's a lot of things... but it isn't honest, it isn't credible, and it isn't news, and those who "stand for nothing and fall for anything" aren't confined to an incurious and lazy media.

As Pat Santy's post notes, those Islamic terrorists who seek our deaths, refer to one of poltical parties in brotherly terms. Leaders of top terrorists groups openly rooted that same poltical party in the 2006 midterms, just as Osama bin Laden's push for an American withdrawal from the War on Terror in 2004 was so similar to that party's own views, that their candidate attributes his loss to Osama's tape, a tape which exposed their too similar views.

Vasko Kohlmayer outlines the similarity between the chosen party of terrorists and the Islamofascists themselves quite specifically in World Defense Review:

Given all that the democrats have done, the affection in which they are held by our foes is neither unjustified nor surprising. They have more than earned it by systematically subverting this country's war effort while simultaneously proffering assistance to those who have pledged to destroy us.

Democrats' devious deeds are too numerous to be fully recounted, but here at least are some of the highlights:

• They have tried to prevent us from listening on terrorists' phone calls
• They have sought to stop us from properly interrogating captured terrorists
• They have tried to stop us from monitoring terrorists' financial transactions
• They have revealed the existence of secret national security programs
• They have opposed vital components of the Patriot Act
• They have sought to confer unmerited legal rights on terrorists
• They have opposed profiling to identify the terrorists in our midst
• They have impugned and demeaned our military
• They have insinuated that the president is a war criminal
• They have forced the resignation of a committed defense secretary
• They have repeatedly tried to de-legitimize our war effort
• They want to quit the battlefield in the midst of war.

While some may quibble over Kolhmayer's choice of wording, these factual acuracy of the postions he represents are all quite true, and heavily documented by the media, the pronoucements of liberal blogs, and the words of Democratic politicians, who to this very day support policies that seek to weaken America while strenghtening the hand of our enemies, supporting terrorism, even if accidentally.

To add to the Democrats on-going cohesion with our terrorist enemies, we have among us leaders on both sides of the political that ignore the increasingly obvious fact, that for their to be any hope of a stable Middle East, Iran and Syria must be forced out of their state sponshopship of terrorism.

These two terror-supporting states, who right now attempting to force the Lebanese government to step down peacefull now because they failed in their attempt to murder enough of Fouad Siniora's Cabinet ministers to enforce their coup d'etat at the barrel of a gun. Iran and Syria used Hezbollah earlier this year to instigate a nearly month-long war, that some defense analysts think was ordered by Iran to test Israeli military capabilities.

Iran has also been supplying both training and munitions to Sadrists to target American soldiers and destabilize Iraq, as Syria has supplied Sunni insurgents and allowed foreign fighters to inflitrate into al-Anbar province for these same reasons.
And yet, we have politicians and media elites purposefully ignoring the obviously correct course of action of killing those who target our soldiers for death. Instead, they propose establishing dialogue, as if talking with our moral enemies while they attempt to kill us is somehow an intelligent course of action.

Dr. Sanity seems convinced that in the end, that freedom with prevail. I hope for that outcome as well, but fear that our current moral cowardice in confronting those who boldly and mortally stand against us, will mean that millions more will die in that march for freedom than otherwise would have to perish with direct and decisive actions to end their threat today.