AP Re-Enters Hurriyah; Is Unable to Find Lost Credibility

I received an email from Linda Wagner of the Associated Press late this afternoon, alerting me that AP has posted a pair of new news reports by Sally Buzbee about Hurriyah, and that Wagner herself has issued forth a new statement. All three are available at the following link:

http://www.ap.org/response/response_112806a.html

As Linda was nice enough to contact me directly, we'll start with her statement first:

01/31/07

AP STATEMENT

From Linda Wagner
Director of Media Relations & Public Affairs
The Associated Press

All news organizations covering the war in Iraq have faced a severe security situation since the conflict began. The risks have risen dramatically in recent months as sectarian conflicts have escalated.

Some have criticized AP’s use of anonymous sources and its refusal to identify by name all AP staff members who have contributed to reporting about violent incidents in the Hurriyah district of Baghdad.

AP has already lost four staff members killed in Iraq. Upon the death earlier this month of the most recent AP staff member killed there, AP President and CEO Tom Curley said, "The situation for our journalists in Iraq is unprecedented in AP's 161-year history of covering wars and conflicts. The courage of our Iraqi colleagues and their dedication to the story stand as an example to the world of journalism's enduring value."

Without protecting the identities of many of its sources and staff members from the extraordinary dangers in Iraq, it is impossible to provide news coverage of many events in the violent conflict about which the public has the right to know.

AP’s use of anonymous sources and unnamed staff members adheres to its ethics and journalism guidelines, which are among the most thorough and strict in the news media profession.

You can see AP’s ethics and journalism guidelines from the home page of www.ap.org -- click on this link at the top right : The AP Statement Of News Values and Principles. (direct URL: http://www.ap.org/newsvalues)

You can learn more about AP’s concern for the public’s right to know about the war in Iraq and many other public issues by visiting another link from its www.ap.org home page: AP and the People's Right to Know. (direct URL: http://www.ap.org/FOI/index.html)

Iraq is indeed a dangerous place, both for it's residents, and for those attempting to cover the war for news organizations. In 2006 alone, 32 journalists died.

It has been a long-standing journalistic tradition to have anonymity to when naming the journalist or the source might place their lives in danger. All of this is understood.

But Wagner's release flatly dodges the elephant in the room, the Iraqi police source hiding behind the pseudonym Jamil Hussein. It is quite clear that using an undeclared* pseudonym is a serious breach of journalistic ethics.

As perhaps a few of you may be aware, Associates Press Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll has officially maintained, for over two months now, that the AP's primary source for it's Hurriyah reporting has been a man she insists is Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein. We know, however, that Jamil Hussein is not his real name, according Iraqi Interior Ministry personnel records, as provided to this blogger and others via CPATT and Multinational Corps-Iraq/Joint Operations Command Public Affairs.

Wagner has been contacted multiple times to explain this discrepancy, and others. To date, she has refused to address the issue of the pseudonym. For that matter, she’s refused to answer almost all questions about Hurriyah, or problems with AP’s stringer-based reporting methodology, so this does fit a pattern.

And now to the news, brought to you by Sally Buzbee, AP's chief of Middle East News.

The leading story, "Mosques still show damage from attacks in Hurriyah" has been covered extensively by Bryan Preston, Michelle Malkin and Curt at Flopping Aces. I have very little to add, except this: it is very interesting that of the four mosques "burned and blew up," this new AP account does not speak of any apparent fire damage at either the al-Muhaimin mosque or al-Qaqaqa mosque.

The relative intactness of the al-Muhaimin mosque is quite important, as AP's reporting claimed that 18 people, including women and children burned to death in an "inferno" during the November 24 attacks.

This picture captures worshipers in al-Muhaimin the very next day.

Soot and corpse free. The claim is apparenty a complete falsehood.

al-Qaqaqa? I'll let AP tell it:

The fourth mosque named in the AP's original report, the al-Qaqaqa mosque, also known as the al-Meshaheda mosque, has a broken window and is closed, guarded by Iraqi army troops outside and adorned with a picture of al-Sadr's father. It also has Mahdi Army graffiti scrawled on its side, partially whitewashed over but still readable.

A broken window and graffiti. By that standard, several apartment buildings I've lived in have been "burned and blew up."

Buzbee's second article, which focuses more fully on the transition of Hurriyah from a mixed neighborhood to one populated almost entirely by Shiites and run by Madhi Army militiamen, is a very well-written article, perhaps the most informative article on life in these neighborhoods after it has been overrun that I've seen thus far.

That said, when the subject of the November 24 attacks came up, the reporting just. gets. weird.

The fighting included a Nov. 24 attack by Mahdi Army militiamen on a number of Sunni mosques. At one, the AP reported -- based on statements of residents, a local Sunni sheik and a police officer -- six men were doused with fuel and burned alive by Shiite militiamen.

Getting vague on the number of mosques... interesting. That broken window must be bothering them.

As for the witnesses, they've suddenly reversed their order of importance. Originally, Jamil Hussein was the primary source, with Sunni elder Imad al-Hashimi playing a supporting role. The accounts from anonymous residents were added in follow-up stories.

Now, the anonymous residents are suddenly more important Why? The "Sunni sheik" Imad al-Hashimi has renounced his statement. Funny how they neglected to mention that. As for the police officer, I doubt many will forget the name of their primary source for dozens of stories leading up to this one. Hiding the name of Jamil Hussein simply seems duplicitous at this point.

And so, a statement and two stories later, the following questions still remain purposefully ignored and unresolved:

Do Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll and International Editor John Daniszewski intend to stand behind the AP-reported claim that 18 people died in an "inferno" at the al-Muhaimin mosque?

Do Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll and International Editor John Daniszewski intend to stand behind the AP-reported claim that 6 men were pulled from the al-Mustafa mosque and immolated?

Whatever happened to the claim by AP that AP Television captured videotaped footage of the al Mustafa mosque after the attack? Why has (to the best of my knowledge) that film never been made public?

Do Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll and International Editor John Daniszewski intend to stand behind the AP-reported claims that the four mosques "burned and blew up"?

Does the AP intend to issue any corrections or retractions based upon new evidence showing that the initial claims were over-exaggerated and inaccurate?

Does the AP feel it was responsible to refer to the Association of Muslim Scholars and an "influential" Sunni group, without revealing the fact that they are a radical Sunni group affiliated with the Sunni insurgency and al Qaeda that reputedly derives their income from kidnapping?

The Associated Press has not used Jamil "Hussein" as a source since the Hurriyah stories became contentious. Why has the Associated Press quit using him as a source?

Did Associated Press reporters in Baghdad ever question why "Hussein" was able to provide accounts far outside of his jurisdiction?

As more time goes by and the Associated Press story continues to founder, it appears more and more that their emphasis has changed from credible journalism to corporate damage control.

*added later. Following the link would have made it clear that an undeclared pseudonym, that is, a pseudonym that the author fails to identify as such, is unethical.

My Irony Meter Just Pegged

Barak Obama, Democratic Senator from Illinois: "The arguments of liberals are more often grounded in reason and fact."

Mary Landrieu, Democratic Senator from Louisiana: "we 'would have been better off if the terrorists had blown up our levees.'"

Comedy gold.

Oh No, Joe!

It seems the Delaware Senator that Mark Levin long-ago named "the dumbest man in the U.S. Senate" has proven that point, with his own "macaca" moment. Via Drudge:

Mr. Biden is equally skeptical—albeit in a slightly more backhanded way—about Mr. Obama. "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," he said.

I wonder how long long it will be before the members of the Congressional Black Caucus, a group Biden apparently considers marginalized, inarticulate, unintelligent, dirty, and ugly, issues a response.

Allah, as he often does, sums it up best:

Biden announces, immediately destroys presidential hopes.

Update: Even Kos agrees.

Oh, the Hysteria!

I'm rapidly losing faith in America's public education system.

I wrote a post yesterday titled The Case For Outing Jamil?, where I asked readers a rather simple rhetorical question:

Should I "out" Jamil Hussein, revealing his real, full, and complete name?

I stated specifically that I was leaning against publishing his name, but wanted to hear readers debate the pros and cons.

Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised at how so many of the middleweight liberal blogs decided to twist what I actually wrote to make the claim that I was attempting to get Jamil Hussein killed.

A sampling:

Sadly No!

Steve Gilliard

Jesus' General

Pandagon

Please keep in mind that many of the bloggers, and especially their commenters, seem to be afflicted with Tourettes, so if you don't desire to read truly foul language, you might want to skip these links.

There are probably other, more inconsequential liberal blogs feeding off their hysteria, but those links above provide a good cross-sampling of the willful ignorance they've displayed so far.

The delicious irony of all this, is that for their collective hysteria to have any merit whatsoever, then they would have to believe that the Associated Press is dishonest in this post where they claim Jamil Hussein's real name is... drumroll please... Jamil Hussein.

Even if I did theoretically find a compelling reason to release Hussein's real name—and just to remind you, I've said I'm leaning against it—then if the Associated Press account is accurate, then I'm just blowing smoke.

It is a simple "either/or" proposition: He's either actually Jamil Hussein as the Associated Press maintains, or he is who his personnel records say he is, which is definitively not Jamil Hussein.

But it seems that our liberal "friends" want to have their proverbial pie and eat it, too. They want to maintain on one hand that the Associated Press is being honest and truthful with their reporting, but they also want to rant and rave about this evil conservative blog.

They can't logically have both, but since when has logic ever been an impediment for them?

Keeping Enemies Close

When a CBS News reporter Lara Logan uses an al Qaeda propoganda film as part of her story, and refuses to identify it as such, do you begin to wonder just how credible and trustworthy of a journalist she is?

I do.

Update: Comments back open (mu.nu was under huge influx of comment spam last night, so I instituted a manual shutdown). I'd direct new visitors to read the comment policy before posting.

The Case for Outing Jamil?

I'm presenting working on what will likely be my last post on the Jamil Hussein/Hurriyah mosque attacks debacle. I've got some emails out to several sources and the AP itself attempting to tie up loose ends, and I won't write a final draft until those addressed have a reasonable amount of time to respond.

I did, however, have one question I addressed to all of those I queried, that I'd like to ask my readers as well:

Should I "out" Jamil, revealing his real, full, and complete name?

I'm generally quite opposed to the concept of outing. Interestingly enough, this is the entennial of outing as practiced by the leftist press. It is typically used typically to attack politicians for their sexual preferences, but occasionally to hurt celebrities as well. According the Wikipedia entry on outing linked above:

Gabriel Rotello, once editor of OutWeek, called outing "equalizing"...

If outing is an acceptable method of equalizing the gay and the straight, can't it also be applied to "equalize" claims made by the honest and dishonest?

A key contention made by "Jamil Hussein" and never retracted by either Hussein or the Associated Press is that Iraqi Army units were aware of the attacks on November 24, and stood by and did nothing.

According to an AP story printed in the Jerusalem Post on the day of the attack, Hussein claimed:

Revenge-seeking Shi'ite militiamen grabbed six Sunnis as they left Friday worship services, doused them with kerosene and burned them alive near an Iraqi army post. The soldiers did not intervene, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

Further down in the same article:

The Shi'ite-dominated police and Iraqi military in the area stood by, both residents and Hussein said.

Of course, AP never identifies these anonymous residents, nor does it mention that other anonymous area residents disputed these accounts, so with the anonymous residents canceling each other out, we're back to Jamil, once again.

In another, more detailed account, Hussein's statement attacking the Iraqi military are replayed:

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.

let’s overlook for a moment the fact that not a single soul died, and look at Jamil's claim about the IA "failing to intervene."

Interestingly enough, official accounts from the U.S. Army's Dagger Brigade and the 1/1/6 unit of the Iraqi Army indicate that IA soldiers were on a scheduled patrol in Hurriyah early in the morning, received word of the attacks late in the morning, and were on-scene within the hour and started securing the area. The exchanged fire with the militiamen in the vicinity of Nidaa Allah mosque, and drove them from the neighborhood.

Jamil's story does not match up with what American and Iraqi forces reported.

So...

Do you trust the single policeman hiding behind a pseudonym who lied to his superiors about his involvement with the AP, and who lied about other key elements of this story? Or is it much more likely that the dozens of involved American and Iraqi soldiers, policemen, and fire department personnel are telling the truth?

As someone involved with the story noted this morning, while playing devil's advocate:

Jamil is a proven bad source whose stories do seem designed to help the Sunnis and the insurgents at the expense of the Iraqi Army. That part in the original AP Hurriyah story about the IA doing nothing about the attacks is blatantly wrong and apparently an intentional smear. The unit that responded, which included an IA general, did what it was supposed to do according to the official report--it helped with the fire and it tried to catch the attackers. It is fair game to out sources who lie like that.

So should Jamil be outed, and why or why not? I'm leaning towards not, but would like to hear arguments either way.

Update: Comments back open (mu.nu was under huge influx of comment spam last night, so I instituted a manual shutdown). I'd direct new visitors to read the comment policy before posting.

Walkback?

In the wake of my January 25 26 letter to the Board of Directors of the Associated Press concerning the news organization's inaccurate reporting of the November 24 Hurriyah assault by Shia militias on Sunni mosques--a letter in which I provided to the Board of Directors the real name of AP source "Jamil Hussein"--the official Associated Press web site containing all of AP's official responses regarding Hurriyah has curiously withdrawn the January 4 article by AP reporter Steven R. Hurst claiming that Jamil Hussein is Jamil Hussein.

A screen capture of the AP web page from January 8 containing the Hurst article is captured here.

A screen capture of the AP Web page, minus the Hurst article, as captured this morning, is online here.

Is the Associated Press beginning a walkback of it's Hurriyah coverage? If so, quietly attempting to scrub their reporting to date is perhaps not the best way to do so.

Perhaps they should start with a formal retraction acknowledging their comedy of errors.

As I have stated from the very beginning of this debacle, what we are witnessing in action via the Hurriyah scandal and the 39 of 40 AP stories attributed to Jamil Hussein that cannot be corroborated by a rudimentary search of other English-language news organizations of the same events, what we are witnessing is a flawed methodology for gathering the news that places far too much credibility in the words of questionable sources and local stringers with dubious allegiances, and no readily apparent internal mechanism for fact-checking the reports provided.

The advice I issued on December 18 is looking better all the time.

Update: Curt at Flopping Aces notes (via email) that while the AP has scrubbed the one file linked above where AP has been consolidating their Hurriyah reporting, they still have the Hurst claim posted here. Don't worry... if they attempt to scrub that, I have a screen capture of that page, as well.

Update: By the way... notice anything funny about the image used by AP in their "Freedom of Information" section? It appears to be a photo of terrorist detainees at Guantanemo Bay.

Does the Associated Press consider capturing terrorists a violation of AP's freedom of information?

It certainly does not apply to Jamil Gulaim XXXXX XX-XXXXXXX, who is presently back at work as an Iraqi police officer.

Update: Confirmed. The picture was of detainees arriving at Camp X-Ray in 2002.

Update: Linda Wagner, Associated Press Director of Media Relations and Public Affairs, states that the disappearance of the Hurst article is "purely a technical issue." It has since been restored to the AP web site.

Does anybody here with an IT background want to explain precisely how AP's "technical issue" would delete just the one post on the page, and not all of the posts on that page? I assume it could be a technical glitch, but my experience tells me that human involvement is a far more likely culprit.

Update, for the kids over at Sadly No!: who apparently can't figure out how to click a link. A whole indignant post, dedicated to something that did not happen... how sad. No?

As for CMS systems, they are typically set to default to a set expiration after "X" days. This was not in evidence here, nor was this what AP's Linda Wagner alleged happened.

While you are at it, why won't you discuss the other mosques (not that you've finally learned to spell Nidaa Allah correctly), particularly how it is impossible for AP's al Qaeda-linked source of the Association of Muslim Scholars to be correct that one mosque was gutted in an "inferno" that left 18 dead, only to have the same mosque open for regular services the next day, and soot free at that?

Why, that might require independent thought and actually looking at facts instead of reflexively attacking any evidence brought forth by a conservative, and we can't have that, can we?

Bad Day For the Bad Guys

300 terrorists--including Afghans, Saudis and one Sudanese--were killed in a pitched battle near the Shiite holy city of Najaf, after Iraqi forces were tipped to a planned raid on Najaf that sought to kill Shia pilgrims and leading clerics at the Imam Ali Shrine. Among the targeted clerics was Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most revered of Iraq's Shia clerics.

The terrorists seemed to be composed of both Sunnis and a radical Shia sect. The goal of the attack seems clear: to plunge Iraq into a direct and all-out civil war along sectarian lines, dwarfing the present sectarian conflict and perhaps pre-empting the goals of the surge of American troops that hopes to stabilize Baghdad.

As Captain Ed notes:

The post-battle assessments should be interesting. Intelligence forces must be wondering why insurgents would attempt a straight-up fight against the Iraqis, and whether that indicates overconfidence or desperation.

Jules Crittenden brings up the very interesting point that the goal of the Shia sect involved in the attack, the Army of Heaven or Army of the Sky" depending on the translation, hoped to kill the assembled Shia Grand Ayatollahs to clear the way for the arrival of the Hidden Imam, also known as the Madhi.

It bears noting that this seems to be almost exactly in line with the goals and desires of the Hojjatieh sect of Shia Islam in Iran, the sect of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the mullahcracy of Iran.

While I've seen no accounts of the battle that explicitly or implicitly state and Iranian involvement in either the planning nor the pre-empted execution of the attack to date, I'll be very interested to see if any evidence emerges that indicates Iran may have either had advance warning of the attack, or if they had a role in its planning. Considering Iran's probable involvement in the Karbala attack nine days ago that saw American soldiers kidnapped and killed is a sophisticated attack that may have directly involved the Qods Force branch of the Iranian Republican Guard Corps, I'd say anything is possible at this point.

If it can be proven that Iran was behind this disastrous (for the bad guys) raid, it seems likely that Iran’s plans to expand its role in Iraq is far from benign, and may be setting both of our nations on a path towards a more direct conflict.

I sincerely hope that the Iranian leadership is not intent of forcing our nations into a direct conflict, but they seem increasingly willing to take that risk.

Iran is not nearly as strong militarily, economically, or diplomatically as they would like to appear, and we have two branches of our military—the Air Force and the Navy—which are quite capable of leveling Iran’s infrastructure, their fledging nuclear weapons program and their military (mostly composed of conscripts) before they penetrate the Iraq border, should it come to a direct confrontation between our nations.

I don’t think anyone in this country wants to fight in Iran and Iraq simultaneously, but as long as we don’t desire to physically invade Iran and hold ground (and we have no reason to want to do so), we can wreck far more havoc in 2007 with our assembled regional air power than we ever brought to bear in the 1990-91 Gulf War.

Then again, you cannot ascribe rational motives to a group so radicalized that it was once outlawed by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1983. The Hojjatieh do not think in mortal terms and are obsessed with bringing about their sect’s "End of Days" to usher forth the Hidden Imam. What we would see as an irrational escalation that could only bring about their defeat on the battlefield, may be exactly what they hope would trigger their hoped-for apocalypse.

Strange days, indeed.

Clinging to Truthiness

It is quite amusing to see the braintrust at liberal blog Sadly No! go after Michelle Malkin's debunking of the AP's Hurriyah reporting.

First, if you are going to claim to link to the original AP report, make sure that you are, in fact, linking to the original AP report.

SN! links to an ABC News report that was released sometime on November 25, in a report that appears to be no better than the third version of the story. The best I can determine, this report is a day ahead of Sadly's "original" post, and this account published at 6:01 AM on November 25 claimed that:

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

"Burned and blew up," said Captain Jamil not-Hussein.

There is quite a bit of difference between Sadly No!'s hand-picked "original" article saying mosques were "burned" and the earlier article's claim that the mosques were "burned and blew up." Cherry-pick much?

Why, of course they do.

They focus almost exclusvely on the fact that the abandoned Nidaa Allah mosque took an RPG round which collapsed much of the dome. I'd like to make two points about this.

First, "Allah" is not spelled "Alah," you morons. We've been at war with radical Islam for five years, and you can't even spell the name of their God right?

Second, a partially collapsed dome does not a destroyed building make. To be sure, Nidaa Allah took some serious damage to its dome and some fire damage to several rooms, but this damage is still quite a stretch from what I picture when I hear that a building has been "burned and blew up."

Let me break it down to something even Sadly No! readers can understand... pictures.

Burned and blew up:

This was a building in Lebanon before Israel took exception to it. Notice most of it is rubble. This is what most people think of when they hear burned and blew up.

Not burned and blew up:

This mosque, the al-Muhaimin, looks pretty good for one of the four "burned and blew up" mosques. This specific mosque is where the AP uncritically relayed a report from the al Qaeda-affiliated Association of Muslim Scholars that "18 people had died in an inferno." Some inferno. To date, the AP still officially stands behind the claim of this terrorist-related group over that of coalition forces.

Of course, Sadly No! doesn't want to discuss this mosque's inconvenient intactness, any more than they want to look at any of the other AP claims about their Hurriyah reporting that simply doesn't stand up to further scrutiny.

The Associated Press claimed that 24 people died when four mosques were "burned and blew up." More than two months later, the damage they've claimed to the mosques has been conclusively proven to be exaggerated, and the Associated Press has been completely unable to substantiate one death, much less the 24 deaths they claimed.

But Sadly No! has little interest in presenting any of the other evidence that does not support their narrative. Instead, they side with the media and their terrorist-supplied storyline over that of American forces and our Iraqi allies. Does that surprise me?

Sadly, no.

Update: Bryan guts Sadly No! further.

Careful what you wish for

Since C.Y. isn't around and I found my spare keys to this joint I figured I'd try them out, at least 'til they get repossessed.

This can't be good, can't be good at all.

It really looks like the Democrats and Ma Pelosi are going to be able to keep that promise of a "new direction" they made to the American people. I give it six weeks tops before we start that "phased redeployment" they've been after for so long.

Too bad they weren't specific enough.

If I were a betting man I'd say we'll start dropping bombs in the next couple of months, if Israel doesn't beat us to it.

update: Of course we'd learn about Iran building Centrifuges as John Kerry's making nice with the Iranian President and blaming Americans for the world's problems. Mr. Kerry for one welcomes our new Muslim overlords.

Right to the Top

One thing I've learned over the course of my 35 years, is that when you have a customer service issue and the lower level support staff won't help you, it helps to go to their supervisors to get a satisfactory resolution. So what do you do when the person blocking your attempted to remedy the situation is senior management?

You go straight to the Board of Directors.

Julie Inskeep
Publisher
The Journal Gazette
Fort Wayne, Indiana
jinskeep@jg.net

David Lord
President
Pioneer Newspapers, Inc.
Seattle, Washington
dlord@pioneernewspapers.com

R. John Mitchell
Publisher
Rutland Herald
Rutland, Vermont
john.mitchell@rutlandherald.com

Jon Rust
Publisher
Southeast Missourian
Co-president, Rust Communications
Cape Girardeau, Missouri
jrust@semissourian.com

William Dean Singleton
Vice Chairman and CEO
MediaNews Group Inc.
Denver, Colorado
deansingleton@medianewsgroup.com

Jay R. Smith
President
Cox Newspapers, Inc.
Atlanta, Georgia
Jay.Smith@coxinc.com

Dear Publisher Inskeep, President Lord, Publisher Mitchell, Publisher Rust, CEO Singleton, and President Smith:

I write to you today as members of the Board of Directors for the Associated Press, asking you to write a wrong that Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll has steadfastly refused to address, even after being confronted with the evidence.

On November 24, 2006, a series of stories was published by the Associated Press concerning a series of Shia militia attacks upon Sunni mosques in the Hurriyah neighborhood of Baghdad, Iraq. Two these reports have been attached as PDFs, as they were published by Gainesville.com and the Jerusalem Post (gainesville11_25_26.pdf and jeruslampost11_24_06.pdf, respectively).

These reports allege that four Sunni mosques were "burned and blew up" and that 24 Sunni civilians (18 at one mosque, six at another) perished as a result of these attacks as nearby Iraqi Army units looked on. A particularly gruesome detail of the attacks were claims made by a long-time Associated Press source, Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein, that when the al-Mustafa mosque was attacked, six Sunni men were pulled outside by Shia militiamen, doused in kerosene, and immolated—burned alive.

From that time until today, Associated Press Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll and International Editor John Daniszewski have officially held the position that these attacks occurred just as they have described.

These claims are:

The Associated Press originally claimed four mosques were "burned and blew up" in Hurriyah according to Police Captain Jamil Hussein, along with several houses.
That 24 people were burned to death. Six were pulled from the Ahbab al-Mustafa as it was attacked, the were doused and set on fire, according to AP source Captain Jamil Hussein. The AP also printed a claim by the Association of Muslim Scholars (a group suspected of strong ties to al Qaeda, a detail the AP left out of their reporting) that 18 more people, including women in children, were burned to death in an "inferno" resulting from a Shiite militia attack at the al-Muhaimin mosque.
The Associated Press initially claimed that Associated Press Television had video showing damage to the Ahbab al-Mustafa mosque where they claim these six men were immolated.
Executive Editor Carroll insists that their long-time source, Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Gholaiem Hussein, is exactly who they said he is.
The problem I've written to you to address, as the Board of Directors of the Associated Press, is that every single claim listed above is highly questionable; some have been proven to be exaggerated with photographic and videotaped evidence, and it is quite likely that some of the claims were fabricated entirely.

Once you read the evidence compiled below, I hope that you will consider having the Associated Press run an article correcting the mismanaged Hurriyah coverage issued so far, and perhaps several other issues as well.

To begin with, the Associated Press has never retracted nor corrected the claim that four mosques were "burned and blew up" (see the attached Gainesville article), even though photographic evidence was taken the following day (November 25) shows that all four mosques are still standing. Information about all four mosques are available for your review here:

Print:
http://www.nypost.com/seven/01212007/postopinion/opedcolumnists/
destroyed___not_opedcolumnists_michelle_malkin.htm?page=0

Pictures from the day after the attacks took place:
http://michellemalkin.com/archives/006728.htm

Video from two weeks ago:
http://hotair.com/archives/2007/01/22/hurriyas-mosques-still-standing/

All four mosques sustained small arms fire. One abandoned mosque was fired upon with a rocket-propelled grenade that damaged its dome and a firebomb did burn two rooms. Another mosque had two rooms damaged by a firebomb. Of the two remaining mosques, neither one suffered any fire damage, though one had exterior damage due to an RPG strike.
In addition to grossly exaggerating the damage inflicted upon these four mosques, the Associated Press accounts of 24 deaths attributed to these attacks may have been entirely fabricated.

The largest number of casualties in the Associated Press accounts of the Hurriyah attacks was a claim sourced by the AP to the "influential"Association of Muslim Scholars, which claimed that 18 people burned to death in an "inferno at the al-Muhiamin mosque."

The Association of Muslim Scholars is a group deeply involved with the Sunni insurgency, including elements of al Qaeda. The Associated Press accounts conveniently skipped over that fact in order to carry their allegation, which is completely fabricated.

I return you once again to the pictures provided by Michelle Malkin in the link to her site above, which shows RPG and rifle fire damage to the exterior of the mosque, but also shows that Sunni worship service in that mosque the very next day. For the Associated Press claim to be true, there must have been a fire; there was none, and this account has conclusively been debunked. Even with this conclusive evidence, Kathleen Carroll stands behind the AP's reporting, and refuses to issue either a correction or a retraction.

In addition to these 18 AP-reported deaths that categorically did not happen, there is exactly zero corroborating evidence to support the AP-run claim of Jamil Hussein that six Sunnis were pulled from the al-Mustafa mosque, doused in kerosene, and burned alive. the AP account hangs squarely upon the word of Jamil Hussein; a "Sunni elder" the AP chose to cite as a secondary witness recanted his statement almost immediately, and AP reporters flatly buried denials made by other areas residents, including two local imams, that these alleged immolations never occurred.

And what of long time AP source Captain Jamil Hussein, the man who broke the story of the immolations, and still the only source saying the immolations occured?

He has been cited as an Associated Press source by name on 61 stories between April and November of 2006, and Editor Carroll claims that the AP has been using him as a source for up to two years. Interestingly enough, I did an English language Google search of the first 40 of the 61 accounts attributing Hussein as a source, and was able to verify just one of the 40 with corroborating accounts from other news organizations. Of those 39 accounts that were not corroborated by any other English-language accounts from other news organizations, research into both English and Arab language accounts of one assassination, along with Iraqi Police casualties accounts provided to Multinational Corps Iraq (MNC-I) and relayed to me for the day of June 20, 2006, seems to suggest that one story, the assassination of Iraqi Police Captain Amir Kamil, may have been fabricated entirely.

Jamil Hussein is not a source who's stories have been easy to corroborate, and the fact that his accounts came from all over Baghdad, mostly well outside of his jurisdiction, should have thrown his veracity into question months before Hurriyah became and issue.

Two variations of a map showing Hussein's duty stations and the locations of his alleged accounts show just how suspicious accounts are, and are located here:

http://confederateyankee.mu.nu/archives/211760.php

By way of comparison, this is the equivalent of a New York Police Department officer based in Staten Island being used as source in Brooklyn, Long Island, the Bronx, Queens, and Harlem. Would you allow the reporters in your own organizations to get away with this? Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll and International Editor John Daniszewski apparently did.

Another point of contention is that she still maintains that "Jamil Hussein" is, in fact, the name of her source. This is patently untrue.

According to MNC-I, there is no police officer named Jamil Hussein, despite a January 4, Steven Hurst article (surprising enough, an AP-written article by someone who used Hussein as a source repeatedly) saying otherwise. According to a MNC-I email, Interior Ministry personnel records show that "Jamil Hussein" is actually Jamil Gulaim XXXXX XX-XXXXXXX [name redacted for blog publication]. If this is true--and MNC-I has been right on almost everything so far--then one of two things has occurred.

Either the Associated Press is guilty of extremely shoddy reporting, and has been duped as to XX-XXXXXXX's identity for two years, or the Associated Press reporters and editors involved, in direct violation of the organizations own code of ethics, used a pseudonym for their source.

Considering how rapidly Director of Media Relations and Public Affairs for the Associated Press Linda Wagner contacted me with a denial after I attempted to confirm to XX-XXXXXXX's identity with Steven Hurst (within 1.5 hours), I feel the second is more likely.

Let me now take a moment to review the case I've made:

The Associated Press reported 4 mosques were "burned and blew up." the physical evidence shows that this claim was greatly exaggerated, as all four building still stand.

The Associated Press claims that 24 people died as a result of these attacks. The same photographic evidence cited above flatly debunks the claim of 18 people dying in an inferno, as there was no fire. As for the claim that six people were immolated, there has never been the first bit of evidence to suggest this is true, and local civilians dispute that such an event ever occurred, as does all involved Iraqi Ministries (Interior, Health, Defense) and American military units in the area.

Jamil Hussein, who Kathleen Carroll would seem to imply is a rock-solid source, is not even Jamil Hussein, but Jamil Gulaim XXXXX XX-XXXXXXX. Jamil Hussein seems to be an unacknowledged (and therefore unethical) pseudonym. Only one of 40 accounts provided by Hussein can be readily verified, and it appears that one account, the assassination of Amir Kamil, may have been fabricated.

With all of this known, I hope that you act to restore integrity to the reputation of the Associated Press by correcting the inaccurate Hurriyah stories, and consider investigating how "Jamil Hussein" could have been allowed to be a source for AP for so long when his accounts seemed almost always uncorroborated and well outside of his jurisdiction.

I hope that you also take steps to assure that this kind of journalistic malpractice and "faith-based" reporting does not happen again.

Thank you very much for allowing me to present this matter to you.

Respectfully,

Update: Heh. I take it somebody read it.

Nothing to See Here: Move Along

It's only the attempted trafficking of weapons-grade uranium:

A top official at a Russian state scientific institute confirmed Friday that Georgia had sent Russia a sample of uranium allegedly seized in a sting operation and that it was weapons-grade, Russian news agencies reported.

However, Igor Shkabura, deputy director of the Bochvar Inorganic Materials Institute, said the size of the sample provided by Georgia was too small to determine its origin, the RIA-Novosti and ITAR-Tass news agencies said.

At least this buy last year was a sting; other developments make me wonder of other attempts to sell weapons-grade uranium were successful:

The standoff between Iran and the West over its alleged clandestine nuclear programme looks set to increase with a report emerging on Wednesday in a British newspaper asserting that Tehran has been acquiring North Korean assistance in preparation for its first underground nuclear test, which European officials believe could take place as early as the end of the year.

According to The Daily Telegraph, Tehran and Pyongyang have expanded their traditional military ties to the nuclear level, with the reclusive Stalinist state sharing with Iranian nuclear scientists all data and information pertaining to the first-ever North Korean underground nuclear test conducted last October.

The news is set to exacerbate tensions between Tehran and western capitals. However, it appears that Iran was aware that the development would soon be made public. Just two days earlier, it barred 38 nuclear inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from operating on its territory, in a move that has already been slammed by France as evidence of Iranian discrimination against westerners from the United Nations nuclear watchdog’s inspection team.

This is of course merely speculation (that's what you guys pay me the big blogging bucks for, isn't it?), but it would appear to make quite a bit of sense.

If Western intelligence agencies are correct then Iran's own nuclear weapons program should not have yet been able to yet develop weapons-grade uranium from the cascade of centrifuges they currently have in their possession, why is Iran seeking help to prepare for a nuclear weapons test now, unless they either have, or anticipate having, a warhead ready to test in the near future?

If Iran was angling for foreign weapons-grade uranium, it might also be worthwhile to imply a far more nefarious purpose... plausible deniability. Nuclear weapons have signatures that can be traced back of their country of origin. Should a nuclear weapon be smuggled overland into the target area, a la the "neo-con" episode of 24 and then detonated, then it would be more difficult to conclusively prove who was behind the blast.

Were Tel Aviv or San Diego to suddenly disappear in a blinding flash and the uranium signature trace back to Georgia instead of Iran, then it is much less likely that the United States would have the immediate justification for a nuclear counterstrike.

This of course, is all idle speculation. Right?

WaPo Appalled at Concept of Killing the Enemy

You've just got to love how Allahpundit nailed the right level of near-hysteria in his headline about this Washington Post article: WaPo: U.S. declares war on Iran in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine.

The actual lede seems to me as a "about damn time" directive but WaPo somehow figures this is front page news:

The Bush administration has authorized the U.S. military to kill or capture Iranian operatives inside Iraq as part of an aggressive new strategy to weaken Tehran's influence across the Middle East and compel it to give up its nuclear program, according to government and counterterrorism officials with direct knowledge of the effort.

For more than a year, U.S. forces in Iraq have secretly detained dozens of suspected Iranian agents, holding them for three to four days at a time. The "catch and release" policy was designed to avoid escalating tensions with Iran and yet intimidate its emissaries. U.S. forces collected DNA samples from some of the Iranians without their knowledge, subjected others to retina scans, and fingerprinted and photographed all of them before letting them go.

Last summer, however, senior administration officials decided that a more confrontational approach was necessary, as Iran's regional influence grew and U.S. efforts to isolate Tehran appeared to be failing. The country's nuclear work was advancing, U.S. allies were resisting robust sanctions against the Tehran government, and Iran was aggravating sectarian violence in Iraq.

"There were no costs for the Iranians," said one senior administration official. "They are hurting our mission in Iraq, and we were bending over backwards not to fight back."

Three officials said that about 150 Iranian intelligence officers, plus members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Command, are believed to be active inside Iraq at any given time. There is no evidence the Iranians have directly attacked U.S. troops in Iraq, intelligence officials said.

I guess this is an example of the difference between those of us who desire to actually succeed in Iraq, and those of us who don't.

Perhaps it is just my perception, but it seems to me that Dafna Linzer is gob-smacked at this idea that we would be targeting those training terrorists, and perhaps even filled with appropriate levels of self-righteous heartache, but my response is simply this: what took so freaking long?

Iranian foreign policy is in direct conflict with that of the United States across the Middle East, and they have provided military support, training, and presumably intelligence assets in both Iraq and Lebanon. They seek not to just destroy the tenuous democratic governments in these two nations and (no doubt) hopefully install puppet regimes of their own beholden to Tehran, but hope to destroy both the United States and Israel. Of course, we can't been sure of that last claim... Ahmadinejad has only stated it publicly about a dozen times, so we might be missing some nuance there.

I look upon this as a favorable development, but Allah has his full weltschmerz on:

The aim, obviously, is to beat back Iran influence across the region until they’re back to this point and are ready to make a deal on nukes. Like the surge, it’s a good idea that’s years too late. Unlike the surge, which will be led by Petraeus, it’s being run by Bush’s same old crew. I have no faith in them at this point to anticipate contingencies or react effectively when they occur, so color me reluctantly, cautiously pessimistic.

He makes a very valid point; we've been very reactive in Iraq instead of pro-active, which to my mind, means we've still got far too much of the war-fighting decision-making coming out of the White House instead of in the theater of operations, where these decisions should be made.

I have some hopes that nomination of Army Lt. Gen. David Petraeus to command American forces in Iraq will change how we fight there. Petraeus has been in Iraq twice, and has learned from the school of hard knocks what doesn't work, and also, hopefully, what might, as he helped draft the Army's new counterinsurgency manual.

In the past, the United States Army has excelled at countering insurgencies and perhaps with the right leadership, it can do so again, but it remains to be seen if a lame-duck Administration and a mewling Congress will actually allow the military the time, resources, and rules of engagement necessary to win.

Thank You, President Bush

I just filled up my tank for $1.979/ gallon. Finally, the War for Oil is paying off!

Now, if it will just keep going down to the $1.679 a gallon I was paying before the invasion...

Update: That really ought to help those Two Americas we've heard so much about.

Sign the NRSC Pledge

Hugh Hewitt started the idea, N.Z. Bear whipped it into shape, Dean Barnett provided the FAQ and here it is, with over 12,000 signatories so far in the first full day.

What's it all about? It's simple, really:

If the United States Senate passes a resolution, non-binding or otherwise, that criticizes the commitment of additional troops to Iraq that General Petraeus has asked for and that the president has pledged, and if the Senate does so after the testimony of General Petraeus on January 23 that such a resolution will be an encouragement to the enemy, I will not contribute to any Republican senator who voted for the resolution. Further, if any Republican senator who votes for such a resolution is a candidate for re-election in 2008, I will not contribute to the National Republican Senatorial Committee unless the Chairman of that Committee, Senator Ensign, commits in writing that none of the funds of the NRSC will go to support the re-election of any senator supporting the non-binding resolution.

What did I think of it? Of more than 12,000 signatories, I'm #7. What are you waiting for; McCain to grow a spine?

I've Heard This Song Before

Salon.com, which I rarely read any more (and perhaps this is why), has published a historical account of how Democratic doves won their war in southeast Asia.

On the third page of this even-handed academic work (so even-handed it labeled President Bush as "war-mongering president" in the first paragraph of the post, but I digress) the author, Rick Perlstein, states:

...McGovern-Hatfield failed because of presidential intimidation, in the face of overwhelming public support. Nixon and Nixon surrogates pinioned legislators inclined to vote for it with the same old threats. A surviving document recording the talking points had them say they would be giving "aid and comfort" to an enemy seeking to "kill more Americans," and, yes, "stab our men in the back," and "must assume responsibility for all subsequent deaths" if they succeeded in "tying the president's hands through a Congressional Appropriations route."

But isn't that interesting: There wouldn't have been subsequent deaths if they had had the fortitude to stand up to the threats.

What Perlstein means, of course, is that there wouldn't have been subsequent American deaths if liberal doves had forced an earlier withdraw from southeast Asia.

There are a number of deaths--just a few-- that Perlstein doesn't address that occurred after we ceded southeast Asia to communism.

These skulls represent just a few of the estimated 1.7-3.0 million Cambodians who died on Pol Pot's killing fields. 165,000 perished in Vietnamese "re-education camps" after doves forced our withdrawal, and South Vietnam collapsed. Millions more fled the country in fear for their lives. The mass exodus gave birth to the term "boat people," as a description of the resulting international humanitarian crisis.

Perlstein advocates today's liberal doves to follow the strategies of their past, even though those policies resulted in the murder of millions and the displacement of millions more.

How many more Iraqis may die as a result of the near-term withdrawal from Iraq that Perlstein and other doves desire? How many Iraqis can and will flee?

What kind of failed nation-state would remain? How many more Muslims would be wooed to the cause of Jihad as they see America defeated?

Perlstein and his fellow doves refuse to look that far down the road, in either direction. To defeat a "war-mongering president" and teach America a lesson, the sacrifices are worth it... just so long as those sacrificed aren't Americans.

Partial Scores

According to a centcom.mil press release, 100 members of "The Council" in Diyala were killed and 50 more were detained in operations of the past few weeks. They were all terrorists.

U.S. and Iraqi forces killed 100 terrorists, detained 50, and dismantled a large terrorist group in January during Operation Turki Bowl, the senior U.S. Army officer in Iraq’s Diyala province said yesterday.

The operation, conducted from Jan. 4 to 13, occurred south of Balad Ruz in the Turki Village, Tuwilla and 30 Tamuz areas of the province. During the operation, U.S. Army and Iraqi soldiers isolated and defeated a terrorist group known as “The Council,” Col. David W. Sutherland, commander of 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, told reporters via satellite connection from a news conference in Iraq.

“The group, made up of former Baath Regime members, al Qaeda and Sunni extremists, refused to participate in any political dialogue and preferred attacking innocent civilians in the Diyala province,” Sutherland said.

Did U.S. media outlets cover this victory where 100 terrorists were killed and 50 were captured? No. They responded with hardly a whisper.

They certainly found plenty of time to discuss it when 100 civilians were killed, however.

100 dead civilians is front page news around the globe, especially here in the United States, but 100 dead terrorists? It barely garners a mention.

It seems it has become a fairly standard practice to report half the war in the American media, so perhaps it should come as no surprise that Americans are against a war where all that ever seems to occur the deaths of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians.

To use a metaphor of a basketball game (and I'm shamelessly stealing this from a local radio host by the name of Bill Lumaye), it is as if the media consistently reports that the local college team scored 70 points in Wednesday night's game after scoring 68 the Saturday before and 63 the Wednesday before that; you're only getting part of the story, and certainly not enough to know who won.

Without knowing how the other team did, you don't know the whole story, and as the on-going saga of the Associated Press/Jamil Hussein scandal reminds us, it doesn't help when even that partial score is grossly exaggerated.

Live-blogging the State of the Union

You're kidding... right? Pardon me if I have better things to do than to listen to President Bush disappoint me once again on a whole raft of issues where he holds positions far from conservative (my first choice) or libertarian (my second).

The only thing tonight I'm anticipating less? Jim Webb's rebuttal.

Perhaps it shouldn't surprise me that the Democrats would turn to another war veteran to do their dirty work, though perhaps Webb should wonder why liberals only turn to veterans when they endevour to find a beard to help them lose wars.

Update: Using MKH's live-blogging as a guide, it looks like I didn't miss much, though it might have been mildly entertaining to watch Speaker of the House "Blinky."

Dangerous? I'll Show You Dangerous

Glenn Reynolds links today to an Ed Morrissey article in the Washington Examiner stating that: "Richardson could be '08's most dangerous candidate."

Pshaw.

You want a "dangerous" candidate?

We've got you covered. In more ways than one...

CRACKDOWN: Iraqi PM Locks Down Official Media Access to Key Government Ministries

An anonymous source from within Baghdad's Green Zone has provided me with a copy of a document issued from the office of Iraqi Prime Minster Nouri Al-Malki, ordering the shutdown of contacts with the world press on "any topics that relate to security issues."

The document was directed to "the official speakers or the media advisors" within the Iraqi Interior and Defense Ministries.

No context was provided.

This will likely mean an increased reliance upon anonymous sources in regards to security-related news coming out of Iraq.

This is not a good development for transparent government nor for Iraqi democracy.

Copies of the document in it's original and translated formats are provided below.

Copy of Original:

Copy of Translation:

Crittenden for White House Speech Writer

At Pajamas Media, Jules Crittenden delivers the State of the Union Address that President Bush should make tonight.

A taste:

I will engage evil directly where I find it, in Iraq and in Iran. With an aggressive and ruthless new strategy and a plan to build our army as we should have a long time ago, I will show the American people that we can fight and we can win. I expect that the American people, though misled by their press and many of their elected representatives, will see results and will get it. Because the American people are a people who in the end don't give up, don't stop fighting, refuse to lose, and will choose to win. I have faith in them.

Oh, there's another one of those words you don't like.

Granted, Bush won't make this speech, but he should have, and long ago...

Neigh Means Neigh

From Robert Redford's upcoming film, The Horse Whisperer: Saddled by Love*

TOM: You see how he keeps pointing his hindquarters in at me? Well, I'd guess the reason he seems reluctant to move out is because when he does, he gets in trouble for it.

THE WOMAN: He's not good at transitions, you know? When I want him to move from a trot to a lope, say...

TOM: (smiles) Well, I'm sure that's what you think but that's not what I'm seeing. You may think you're asking for a lope, but your body may be saying something else altogether. You might be putting too many conditions on him. For instance, you might be saying "GO, but, hey, don't go too fast." He can tell that from the way you feel. Your body can't lie.You ever give him a kick to make him move out?

THE WOMAN: He won't go unless I do.

TOM: And then he goes and you feel like he's going too fast, so you yank him back? (she nods) And next thing you know, he's bucking. (she nods again) Well, if someone told you to go, stop, go, stop -- you'd buck too.

The people laugh. The Woman smiles self-consciously.

TOM: It's a dance, see... Somebody has to lead and somebody has to follow.

TOM: Oh, Baby...somebody's gotta lead. Now bring me that bag of fermented oats, and leave us alone for a while.

* From the script of The Horse Whisperer (1998), with the addition of the line Oh, Baby... implied from this.

Redford's Next Film: "The Deer Humper?"

This is depraved:

"Zoo" is a documentary about what director Robinson Devor accurately characterizes as "the last taboo, on the boundary of something comprehensible." But remarkably, an elegant, eerily lyrical film has resulted.

"Zoo," premiering before a rapt audience Saturday night at Sundance, manages to be a poetic film about a forbidden subject, a perfect marriage between a cool and contemplative director (the little-seen "Police Beat") and potentially incendiary subject matter: sex between men and animals.

We're real proud of ya there, Sundance. Now take off the saddle.

Up next for Devor: Big Fish, Twelve Monkeys, The Silence of the Lambs, Raging Bull, and of course, Groundhog Day.

Fox Pulls an AP

And Captain Ed has the details:

The curse of single sourcing has bitten more than just the AP lately. Insight Magazine, a publication of the Washington Times, ran a single-sourced story last Friday about Barack Obama regarding the choice of school his stepfather made while they lived in Indonesia, and Fox News spent all day talking about it. In this case, Fox used the news item to hit at both Obama and Hillary Clinton without ever confirming anything about the sourcing. Howard Kurtz, in his indispensable media-watch column, explains:

Insight, a magazine owned by the Washington Times, cited unnamed sources in saying that young Barack attended a madrassah, or Muslim religious school, in Indonesia. In his 1995 autobiography, Obama said his Indonesian stepfather had sent him to a "predominantly Muslim school" in Jakarta, after two years in a Catholic school -- but Insight goes further in saying it was a madrassah and that Obama was raised as a Muslim. Fox News picked up the Insight charge on two of its programs, playing up an angle involving Hillary Clinton. The magazine, citing only unnamed sources, said that researchers "connected" to the New York senator were allegedly spreading the information about her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination. ...

On the morning show "Fox & Friends" on Friday, co-host Steve Doocy said that madrassahs are financed by Saudis and teach a radical version of Islam known as Wahhabism, though he said there was a question whether that was the curriculum in the late 1960s, when Obama attended the school. Another co-host, Gretchen Carlson, said that those on the show weren't referring to all Muslims, only "the kind that want to blow us up." ...

On Friday afternoon, John Gibson, host of Fox's "The Big Story," began a segment this way: "Hillary Clinton reported to be already digging up the dirt on Barack Obama. The New York senator has reportedly outed Obama's madrassah past. That's right, the Clinton team reported to have pulled out all the stops to reveal something Obama would rather you didn't know -- that he was educated in a Muslim madrassah."

Kurtz reminds readers that reputable news agencies used to refuse to run stories from anonymous sources unless they could get independent confirmation. Those days are apparently over. Instead, we have the dynamic of one news agency running a story, and then other news agencies report on the reporting of that story, until everyone forgets that the basis of the entire issue came from one source, and one who refused to go on the record at that.

I'm admittedly very late to the table on this one, but both Insight and Fox were well out of bounds in heaping such uncorroborated scorn upon Barack Obama. Politics is a hard-nosed business, but no child can control what school he goes to, and to imply that Obama is some sort of Islamist Manchurian candidate—the angle Fox seemed to be trying to promote across several shows—goes beyond the pale.

Fox and Insight should either produce named sources to back their allegations—I find that doubtful—or they should retract their commentary during these same time slots by these same hosts and publicly apologize to both Barack Obama for making the slur, and to Hillary Clinton for stating her campaign was behind it.

I disagree with the politics of both individuals, but there are certainly valid issues upon which someone can criticize either of these candidates without having to stoop to such scurrilous single-sourced accounts.

Update: Insight strikes back. Ouch. Getting catty...

Update: Allah has CNN's debunking.

George Bush Hates British People

Directly ignoring the pleas of police and other authorities, looters wade through debris-filled water to take away anything they could carry, despite warnings that toxic chemicals in the mix could pose a dangerous hazard.

New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina? Try England, today.

Hell of a job.

Feed the Link Whore

He's hungry.

When I first started taking money in the Bloviating Arts, I was working on a typewriter. Answering machines were exotic. You had to find someone with access to a printing press who would agree to pay you if you wanted to do this. That was a long time ago. A lot has changed. More or less everything. I think I stumbled on the Internet about the time Al Gore did, but he gets the credit. That was a while ago, and it was only last November that I started blogging. I don’t know what took me so long. This is like a candy store. It’s a playground. I love it. Now, I just need to figure out how to make money doing it. Please click on my ads.

If this works for him, I might even try it...

Hurriyah: Where We Go From Here

As you well know by now, thanks to a n investigation launched by Curt of Flopping Aces and followed up on by Michelle Malkin and Bryan Preston's visit to the Hurriyah neighborhood of Baghdad as reported in the NY Post, Michelle's personal blog, and now via video at Hot Air, the Associated Press' reporting of massacres on November 24 were grossly exaggerated, and parts were apparently fabricated by a longtime Associated Press source they still call Jamil Hussein, even though we know otherwise.

The Associated Press released several very graphic versions of what they claimed occurred in Hurriyah on November 24, 2006. I'll now reproduce the relevant portions of two of those Associated Press accounts, so that you will know exactly what they claimed.

On November 24, the day of the attack, the Associated Press ran this version of the story, as captured in the Jerusalem Post:

Revenge-seeking Shi'ite militiamen grabbed six Sunnis as they left Friday worship services, doused them with kerosene and burned them alive near an Iraqi army post. The soldiers did not intervene, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

The savage revenge attack for Thursday's slaughter of 215 people in the Shi'ite Sadr City slum occurred as 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.

[snip]

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.

The Shi'ite-dominated police and Iraqi military in the area stood by, both residents and Hussein said.

Later Friday, militiamen raided al-Samarraie Sunni mosque in the el-Amel district and killed two guards, police 1st. Lt. Maitham Abdul-Razaq said. Two other Sunni mosques in west Baghdad also were attacked, police said.

A day later, on November 25, the Associated Press ran this version of the story, as captured for posterity on Gainesville.com:

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.

[snip]

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.

[snip]

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.

For those of you following this story closely, you know that Imad al-Hasimi quickly retracted his claim when asked for details by the Iraqi Interior Ministry, and that the Associated Press was perhaps deceptive in not noting that the Association of Muslim Scholars is "the most influential Sunni organization in Iraq" largely because of their deep suspected ties with both the Sunni insurgency and al Qaeda itself:

The Association of Muslim Scholars ... ...also sometimes called Association of Muslim Clerics or Muslim Scholars Association), are a group of Sunni Muslim religious leaders in Iraq. The Association is believed to have strong links with Al-Qaeda terrorists...

They did not recognize the U.S. appointed government as legitimate and have at times questioned any democratically elected government and democracy itself. They have previously asked for withdrawal of American troops, who they accuse of causing the deaths of over 30 000 Iraqis since the war began. They publicly support Al-Qaeda and support the car bombs and the sectarian violence. The group has negotiated (along side with the Iraqi Islamic Party) the cease-fire for the city of Fallujah and the release of several hostages for money. They have poor relations with nearly all Iraqi groups, most notably Shia groups, including followers of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

The Association claims dozens of its members have been killed by US troops, Sunni militants and Shi'ite militias.

[snip]

It was formed on the 14th of April 2003, only four days after the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad by a U.S.-led invasion in 2003 by a group of former regime loyalists who oppose any democratic changes and consider democracy as and ant-Islamic concept. They finance their activities through the ransoms they get from the kidnapping activities in Iraq.

Of course, we can't forget "Jamil Hussein," the long-time (two year) source for the Associated Press, who it is turns out, isn't Jamil Hussein at all.

Is it now time to serve AP and their defenders a nice, heaping serving of you know what? Perhaps, but what, precisely, would that accomplish?

I'm not absolving the Associated Press of their faulty response by any means—I still think the manner in which AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll in particular handled this incident requires her organization to ask for her resignation, and perhaps some AP reporters and local editors deserve dismissal—but I am far more interesting in fixing what I first postulated was a terminally-flawed methodology for gathering the news way back on November 30, 2006, when this story was in its infancy:

In short, we aren't questioning all of AP's stories based upon a single story, we are questioning a broken methodology that lead to such a story. There exists in the media’s reporting in Iraq no effective editorial checks at the very root level of reporting, to verify that the most basic elements of the story are indeed factual, much less biased.

This is not just about one questionable story, or even one questionable source.

[snip]

The flawed methodology that weakens the essential credibility of the news-gathering process effects the overwhelming majority of stories printed and broadcast about Iraq each week. This weakness, this inherent and unchecked instability and inability to verify the core facts and actors in the most basic of stories, points out a methodological flaw in the news gathering efforts common to every major news organization reporting in Iraq.

Am I attempting to say that all AP reporting, or all news media reporting in general coming from Iraq, is fraudulent? Of course not. There is a great deal of violence occurring in the city, a fact buttressed by verified and corroborated news accounts every day.

But what is strongly suggested by Jamilgate is that the media in general, and the Associated Press in this instance, are simply unable to account for how sectarian, tribal and political biases may shape the information passed from source to reporter, from reporter to editor, and editor to publication.

It seems at readily apparent that due to the dangers of reporting in a warzone, and the language barriers that are in place, that it is very difficult for the Associated Press and other news organizations to verify the facts of stories before they are published using their current fact-checking methodologies.

They are, in many instances, apparently reduced to "faith-based reporting, " where sources who have been reliable in the past are taken at their word once they have established a certain degree of credibility. This leads us to a situation where those with biases can entrench themselves as credible sources, and then use their trusted relationship with the media to disseminate agenda-based information after that credibility has been established.

Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll herself based her defense of Jamil Hussein thusly (my bold):

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.

Jamil Gulaim "XX" sold himself to the AP, and Carroll's apparent defense is that no one questioned his reporting before. Of course, not. He was establishing his credibility in the period before AP started using him as a named source, and afterward... well, that is where we stand now.

The current situation, where we know that the overwhelming majority of reporting coming out of Iraq is more than likely accurate, but because of such egregious failures as evidenced by AP's Hurriyah reporting (and perhaps other "Jamil Hussein" stories that I am still following up on) and pattern of denials and ignoring valid criticism to the point of attacking those that dare question their methods and accuracy from top AP officers, we find it difficult to trust even this mostly accurate reporting for fear another Hurriyah is lurking just outside the headline.

It is past time for an independent investigation to determine how AP not only fell for a story with elements both grossly exaggerated and in parts falsified, but to come up with a new and more rigorous methodology to verify the factual accuracy of its reporting.

I begrudge no one their view of what the think of the success or failures of the Iraq War thus far may be, but they have the right to base those opinions upon factual, transparent reporting, something that the Associated Press under Kathleen Carroll's "stonewall and deny" leadership cannot apparently provide.

Hussein of Cards

And finally, we get to the truth of the matter:

AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll indignantly attacked those who had questioned the global news organization's reporting: "I never quite understood why people chose to disbelieve us about this particular man on this particular story," she told Editor and Publisher. "AP runs hundreds of stories a day, and has run thousands of stories about things that have happened in Iraq."

Well, Bryan Preston and I visited the area during our Iraq trip last week. Several mosques did, in fact, come under attack by Mahdi Army forces. But the "destroyed" mosques all still stand. Iraqi and U.S. Army officials say that two of them received no fire damage whatsoever. Another, which we filmed, was abandoned and empty when it was attacked.

WE obtained summary reports and photos filed at the time by Iraqi and U.S. Army troops on the scene. They contain no corroborating evidence of Hussein's claim that "Shiite militiamen grabbed six Sunnis as they left Friday worship services, doused them with kerosene and burned them alive near Iraqi soldiers who did not intervene."

There is more, much more, in Michelle's NY Post article, and I suggest that you take the time to read it all, but the heart of the matter is that AP's reporters seem to have greatly exaggerated what took place in Hurriyah on November 24.

Not a single mosque was "burned and blew up" as AP reported, though they did come under some small arms fire and two were attacked with primitive Molotov cocktails. Not a single soul died in an "inferno" at the al-Muhaimin (var. al Muhaymin) mosque, much less the 18 including women and children, as reported by an al-Qaeda-aligned group (the Association of Muslim Scholars) that the AP wouldn't even identify as extremists as other news organizations have done.

AP's most graphic element, missing from all other news organizations' coverage of Shia attacks in Hurriyah and elsewhere, was a single-sourced report by longtime AP source Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein (an apparent pseudonym) that six men had been pulled from the al-Mustafa mosque, doused in kerosene, and burned alive. While al-Mustafa was subject to small arms fire and an attack with a crude incendiary device, no one was pulled into the street and immolated.

The Associated Press reporting of the incident in Hurriyah doesn't stand up.

And did I mention that this wasn't the only account sourced to Jamil Hussein that cannot be corroborated?

I've continued to do some digging into one of the stories sourced to Jamil (not really) Hussein, the alleged assassination of Iraqi Police Captain Amir Kamil on June 20, 2006.

According to AP:

Elsewhere in the capital, police Capt. Amir Kamil, who provided security for Yarmouk hospital, was shot to death Tuesday at a bus station, Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

Unlike most of Hussein's rather vague claims, this one provided specific detail I could attempt to follow up on. We know the name of the victim, who he worked for, where he worked, and at what rank, and even know how and where (in general terms) he was killed.

Unlike all of AP's other stories sourced to Jamil Hussein (including the Hurriyah attacks), this story even has a picture associated with it.

A caption provided with the picture in a sidebar here reads:

Two friends of police Capt. Amir Kamil comfort each other at al-Yarmouk hospital after he was shot...

It seems like this story could be easily verified, doesn't it? Alas, that is not the case. As I noted previously, I was unable to find any English-language stories from other news agencies corroborating the AP's claim of Captain Kamil's assassination. A reader with Lexis-Nexis access reported the same.

Hoping to run it down through other channels, I asked CPATT and MNC-I to also try to verify this account, and turned it over to a journalist with solid ties to the Arab Press (the journalist wishes to remain anonymous) to see if any local Iraqi or Middle Eastern Press agencies might have corroborating accounts. Previously, they (CPATT, MNC-I, Arab media contacts) were able to confirm the assassination of Iraqi Defense Ministry employee Mohammed Musaab Talal al-Amari. To date, the al-Amari murder remains the only Jamil Hussein account of 40 I investigated that was conclusively corroborated.

Two sources, CPATT and MNC-I PAO, often work together on MOI related issues, and this is what MNC-I PAO Lt. Michael Dean was able to relay to me via email about police deaths reported to MNF-I in Baghdad on June 20:

Mr. Owens:

On June 20, 2006, MNCI has reports of only 2 incidents that
involved the deaths of Iraqi Police.

1) At 11:28 a.m., the Iraqi Police reported murder of 1 civilian (unknown employment) and 2 National Police officers. Mehmond Hamade's corpse was reported to be located at the Kadhimiya Hospital (northern Baghdad on east side of Tigris). Also, the heads of two 1-1 National Police officers, NOC Monsa Uttawi and SGM Mehmond Muter Lefta, were discovered in the Tigris.

2) A 4.5-hour small arms fire incident in Al Rasafah in eastern Baghdad (Yarmok is on the western side of Tigris) during the afternoon of June 20 beginning at approximately 1:30 p.m. resulted in one Iraqi Police officer killed, one Iraqi Police officer wounded, 2 Iraqi soldiers wounded, 5 civilians killed and 5 civilians wounded. The incident consisted of small arms fire being received from nearby building. No mention of the name of the Iraqi Police officer killed.

Vr,
LT Dean

He adds:

Please keep in mind that MNCI is not the collector of all information regarding incidents involving Iraqi Security Forces, including police.

Neither event even remotely describes the bus station assassination described by Jamil Hussein, though Lt. Dean mentions that they do not collect all information regarding police casualties and deaths.

A report from my journalistic source indicates that his Arab media contacts could not easily turn up Arab-language accounts of Captain Kamil's assassination as they had been able to in the al-Amari murder, and that they would attempt to dig deeper. He also cautioned that there might be no "definitive answer."

No definitive answers, and no corroborating accounts.

Stop me if you've heard this one before.

Update: Michelle has photos of the not-quite blown up mosques at MichelleMalkin.com.

AP: The Art of the Dodge

Almost two months after the Associated Press ran the story that six Sunnis were pulled from a mosque in the Baghdad neighborhood of Hurriyah, doused in kerosene and set ablaze, the Associated Press continues to dodge a series of very simple questions surrounding their alleged deaths, and the deaths of 18 other Sunnis their reports claim were murdered.

Four days ago, I sent a simple series of direct questions to Linda M. Wagner, Director of Media Relations and Public Affairs for the Associated Press.

On November 24 and 25, 2006, AP reported four mosques--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 and blew up." These allegations were directly attributed to Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein. Successive AP coverage has dropped all mention of three of the mosques. Does the Associated Press still maintain that four mosques were attacked in Hurriyah on November 24, 2006 with RPGs, heavy machine guns and assault rifles, and that these four mosques were burned and blown up?

The AP also cited the Association of Muslim Scholars as a source for a claim that at one of these mosques (al-Muhaimin) "18 people had died in an inferno" as a result of these attacks. Do you think it was responsible of the Associated Press to run these allegations considering that the Association of Muslim Scholars is alleged to have strong ties with both the Sunni insurgency and al Qaeda? Should AP have mentioned these ties to terrorist groups when it cited the AMS as a source? These 18 claimed dead have also disappeared for subsequent AP reports. Does the Associated Press still stand behind this claim they reported?

In both instances, if the Associated Press no longer feels these accounts are credible, don't you have a responsibility as an ethical news organization to print a correction or a retraction of these charges?

Further, I have seen written claims shortly after the first AP claims of an attack that AP Television has video footage of damage to the Ahbab al-Mustafa mosque, where AP source Jamil Hussein claims six men were pulled from the mosque and immolated. Does the Associated Press indeed have such footage? If so, why has it not been mentioned since November 30, and can I obtain a copy of that footage?

If the Associated Press does not have the video footage of damage to the Ahbab al-Mustafa mosque from the attack that left six men immolated, the why has the Associated Press not acknowledged this, and printed a retraction or a correction for this claim?

As you can see, my primary line of questioning is wondering why the AP has back of claims made in the first several days of reporting, without printing a correction or a retraction of these claims.

I'd also like to know if the Associated Press still stands behind the accounts sourced to Jamil Hussein by the Associated Press between April and November of 2006.

Late Friday afternoon, Wagner finally offered a response... just no direct answers to any of my questions:

When following up on past reports that feature new information, news agencies do not repeat all of the details that were in their original breaking news reports. This does not mean that they are retracting what they had published previously unless a new report, correction or clarification states that explicitly. A search of news reports in Nexis and Reuters shows that reporters for numerous news agencies, including The New York Times, Washington Post, and Reuters reported attacks on four or five Sunni mosques in Hurriyah (also spelled Hurriya) and additional sites elsewhere in Baghdad on Friday, November 24, 2006. As may happen in breaking news reports from active combat zones, the precise toll of death and injury can be difficult to establish. Below are relevant passages from several news accounts of the incidents in Baghdad on that date. I have sent your questions to our International news desk. If any new information about this topic becomes available, I'll let you know.

Wagner also provided a list of other news sources that wrote about mosque attacks in Hurriyah on November 24.

Despite providing some interesting reading, Wagner still avoided answering the questions I asked.

Stripped of the background information, I asked Wagner a total of 10 questions:

1. Does the Associated Press still maintain that four mosques were attacked in Hurriyah on November 24, 2006 with RPGs, heavy machine guns and assault rifles, and
2. that these four mosques were burned and blown up?
3. Do you think it was responsible of the Associated Press to run these allegations considering that the Association of Muslim Scholars is alleged to have strong ties with both the Sunni insurgency and al Qaeda?
4. Should AP have mentioned these ties to terrorist groups when it cited the AMS as a source?
5. These 18 claimed dead have also disappeared for subsequent AP reports. Does the Associated Press still stand behind this claim they reported?
6. In both instances, if the Associated Press no longer feels these accounts are credible, don't you have a responsibility as an ethical news organization to print a correction or a retraction of these charges?
7. Further, I have seen written claims shortly after the first AP claims of an attack that AP Television has video footage of damage to the Ahbab al-Mustafa mosque, where AP source Jamil Hussein claims six men were pulled from the mosque and immolated. Does the Associated Press indeed have such footage?
8. If so, why has it not been mentioned since November 30, and can I obtain a copy of that footage?
9. If the Associated Press does not have the video footage of damage to the Ahbab al-Mustafa mosque from the attack that left six men immolated, the why has the Associated Press not acknowledged this, and printed a retraction or a correction for this claim?
10. I'd also like to know if the Associated Press still stands behind the accounts sourced to Jamil Hussein by the Associated Press between April and November of 2006.

Wagner's response only provided three answers:

1. When following up on past reports that feature new information, news agencies do not repeat all of the details that were in their original breaking news reports. This does not mean that they are retracting what they had published previously unless a new report, correction or clarification states that explicitly.
2. A search of news reports in Nexis and Reuters shows that reporters for numerous news agencies, including The New York Times, Washington Post, and Reuters reported attacks on four or five Sunni mosques in Hurriyah (also spelled Hurriya) and additional sites elsewhere in Baghdad on Friday, November 24, 2006.
3. As may happen in breaking news reports from active combat zones, the precise toll of death and injury can be difficult to establish.

So let's see what the Associated Press response does not answer:

1. Wagner does not say that the Associated Press still maintains that four mosques were attacked with RPGs, heavy machine guns and assault rifles.
2. Wagner does not say that the AP still maintains these four mosques were burned and blown up.
3. Wagner does not address whether or not it was responsible of the Associated Press to run allegations made by the Association of Muslim Scholars, a group alleged to have strong ties with both the Sunni insurgency and al Qaeda, or
4. whether or not the Associated Press should have mentioned these terrorist ties to their readers
5. Wagner does not answer whether or not AP television captured video footage showing damage to the al-Mustafa mosque as the previously claimed
6. Wagner does not mention whether or not the Associated Press stands behind the accounts sourced to Jamil Hussein

For those of you counting, Wagner also didn't answer this question:

In both instances, if the Associated Press no longer feels these accounts are credible, don't you have a responsibility as an ethical news organization to print a correction or a retraction of these charges?

Wagner appears to avoid any direct statements saying that the Associated Press stands behind their Hurriyah reporting, does not acknowledge the existence of the AP television video AP once claimed to have, and most noticeably, refuses to state whether or not they stand behind the stories sourced to the man they call Jamil Hussein.

These are not what I would consider encouraging answers.

Hot Air: Tomba Kids

Bryan could have--and I'll argue he should have--named this post something else.

How about Why We Fight.

This is what I want you to think of when you hear Democrats in the House and Senate (along with the Republicans defectors) talking about defunding the troops and argue against the very surge of troops so many of them supported until Bush agreed with them.

Photo courtesy of Michael Yon.

Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer and so many others argue that they have the views on the Iraq War that they do "because of the children." Which children? These that they would abandon?

My Three Jamils

Right idea, wrong Jamil(s). Well, maybe not.

Jamil Hussein—all three of them—have been arrested in the West Bank:

In the town of 'Azzoun, Israeli forces arrested three brothers: Mahmoud Mohammed Jamil Hussein, Bilal Mohammed Jamil Hussein and Maher Mohammed Jamil Hussein.

Palestinian security sources report that Israeli forces have intensified its military operations in the city of Qalqilia in recent times. The number of military operations has risen and the number of political prisoners from Qalqilia in Israeli prisons is currently around 600.

Up to 150 of them are Jamil Hussein... actually, I'm just making that part up.

That said, if there were more of the Iraqi Jamil Hussein's—the guy we now know is actually Jamil Gulaim "XX" (not Hussein), despite AP protestations to the contrary followed by their sudden silence—it would go a long way towards describing how one of the Associated Press' most prolific sources could possibly be reporting from almost everywhere in Baghdad except his own location as shown in this map (red areas indicates Jamil XX's assigned neighborhoods, orange areas neighboring neighborhoods, and the red sunbursts indicating the location of the attacks he alleged occurred):

Having multiple Jamils is every bit as credible as expecting one police officer to able to provide accurate accounts from all across a city of 8 million people, don't you think? I think so, and the Associated Press editors should have wondered about that, but obviously, they didn't, and there is no public indication they've changed their ways.

It's too bad, really.

They could stand to learn a lot from Reuters, who has now tightened their standards as a result of the Adnan Hajj scandal (h/t Pajamas Media):

The agency had tightened editing procedures to ensure that only senior photo editors dealt with sensitive images, invested in more training and supervision and strengthened its code of conduct for photographers, Schlesinger said.

He named Stephen Crisp, a Briton who has worked for Reuters in a variety of senior positions since 1985, as the new chief photographer for the Middle East and said he had taken up his assignment in Dubai this month.

"His predecessor in the Middle East role was dismissed in the course of the investigation for his handling of the case," Schlesinger wrote.

A company spokeswoman, Eileen Wise, said Reuters would not provide further details, citing staff confidentiality.

As senior members of the Associated Press continue to claim they stand behind their Jamilgate reporting on one hand while rewriting it on the other, it appears that Reuters is not the only news agency needing to have staff members dismissed.

I even think I could even suggest where to start...

Update: Dang it, Jules Crittenden took this and did it much better. I guess that's why he's the professional.

Who Bent? Who Cares?

It certainly seems tough to tell exactly what transpired as the NSA terrorist communication intercept program is once again back in the headlines:

Bush Retreats on Use of Executive Power (Washington Post)

Court to Oversee U.S. Wiretapping in Terror Cases (NY Times)

Administration to let court monitor domestic spying (CNN)

Attorney General Gonzales to Brief Senate Panel on Oversight of Domestic Spying Program (Fox News)

So what really took place? As legal expert Orin Kerr notes at The Volokh Conspiracy:

What's going on? As with everything about this program, we can't be sure; we don't know the facts, so we're stuck with making barely-educated guesses. But it sounds to me like the FISA Court judges have agreed to issue anticipatory warrants. The traditional warrant process requires the government to write up the facts in an application and let the judge decide whether those facts amount to probable cause. If you were looking for a way to speed up that process — and both sides were in a mood to be "innovative" — one fairly straightforward alternative would be to use anticipatory warrants.

An anticipatory warrant lets the government conduct surveillance when a specific set of triggering facts occurs. The judge agrees ahead of time that if those facts occur, probable cause will exist and the monitoring can occur under the warrant. The idea is that there isn't enough time to get a warrant right at that second, so the warrant can be "pre-approved" by the Judge and used by the government when the triggering event happens.

While some pundits seem content to label this as a defeat of sorts for the Bush Administration (see the WaPo headline above) and some conservative legal experts are inclined to agree, I'm not sure. I'm not disagreeing necessarily, but this seems to be a case of We Don't Know What We Don't Know, and I'm not sure that is such a bad thing.

Perhaps Mark Levin is right, and Bush ceded the Constitutional authority of the Executive Branch when he should not have. If so, it would not be the first time President Bush made a mistake.

On the other hand, what little we can discern from all the posturing and spin is that the NSA program not only lives, but the FISA court appears to have possibility modified itself in such a way as to be more compatible with the goals of the program... or vice versa, or maybe a little bit of both.

The end result is that the program will continue, and that terrorists attempting to communicate with their allies within the United States will continue to be watched, tracked, and eventually, captured or killed.

Isn't that what really matters?

Jamilgate Hits the Airwaves (Bumped)

Update & Bump: My interview on Melanie Morgan's show regarding the Associated Press and Hurriyah is online:

Part 1 (MP3)
Part 2 (MP3)

If you happen to be in the San Francisco area this morning, I'll be discussing Jamilgate with Melanie Morgan on KSFO 560 AM at 7:35 AM PST.

You can listen live here, and we'll try to get up a version in MP3 format later today.

Update: Welcome KSFO listeners. To catch up on the Jamilgate scandal, please go to this link and read the collected accounts.

Fallen Angels

Just... read.

And keep in mind that this is the fate Dean, Pelosi, Durbin, Hagel, etc would abandon even more Iraqi families to face.

Back From Iraq

The Hot Air crew of Bryan Preston and Michelle Malkin are safely back from Iraq and their embed at Forward Operating Base Justice, and are rolling out reports pretty fast and furious.

Michelle previews their reporting with video from Baghdad in her latest Vent, and also provides commentary on MichelleMalkin.com, in a post titled, Back From Baghdad.

Bryan Preston begins an analysis of his view of what they learned in Assessing Iraq on Hot Air.

Michelle notes that the soldiers at FOB Justice would welcome MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews as embeds, and I'm fairly certain that MSNBC could probably pick up the tab of such a trip.

Do you think they'll take up our troops on the offer?

Me neither.

Michelle and Brian also note in their reports that they did make it into Hurriyah, where the Associated Press still apparently maintains that 24 Sunnis were killed and four mosques were "burned and blew up" by Shia militiamen. Do you think they Associated Press is worried? I do.

After last week's bombshell that AP's source is not named Jamil Gholaiem Hussein as AP insists, but instead Jamil Gulaim "XX" (his second middle name and last name redacted) according to his personnel records, Linda M. Wagner, Director of Media Relations and Public Affairs for the Associated Press, contacted me within 1.5 when I pressed AP reporter Steven R. Hurst for confirmation.

She stated in part:

Steve Hurst passed your e-mail inquiry along to me. AP stands by the story below, which provides the full name of the source whose existence was acknowledged to AP by Iraq's Interior Ministry spokesman Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf in an interview on Thursday, January 4. I have bolded the relevant passages for ease of finding them in the text.

In short, they were standing behind the name Jamil Gholaiem Hussein. But did AP intend to stand behind all their claims made during their reporting of the Hurriyah incident, where AP reported a total of 24 people killed, and four mosques attacked, "burned and blew up?"

And so I sent the following questions to Linda Wagner yesterday afternoon:

I have some questions for you regarding the Associated Press' reporting of the Hurriyah reporting.

On November 24 and 25, 2006, AP reported four mosques--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 and blew up." These allegations were directly attributed to Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein. Successive AP coverage has dropped all mention of three of the mosques. Does the Associated Press still maintain that four mosques were attacked in Hurriyah on November 24, 2006 with RPGs, heavy machine guns and assault rifles, and that these four mosques were burned and blown up?

The AP also cited the Association of Muslim Scholars as a source for a claim that at one of these mosques (al-Muhaimin) "18 people had died in an inferno" as a result of these attacks. Do you think it was responsible of the Associated Press to run these allegations considering that the Association of Muslim Scholars is alleged to have strong ties with both the Sunni insurgency and al Qaeda? Should AP have mentioned these ties to terrorist groups when it cited the AMS as a source? These 18 claimed dead have also disappeared for subsequent AP reports. Does the Associated Press still stand behind this claim they reported?

In both instances, if the Associated Press no longer feels these accounts are credible, don't you have a responsibility as an ethical news organization to print a correction or a retraction of these charges?

Further, I have seen written claims shortly after the first AP claims of an attack that AP Television has video footage of damage to the Ahbab al-Mustafa mosque, where AP source Jamil Hussein claims six men were pulled from the mosque and immolated. Does the Associated Press indeed have such footage? If so, why has it not been mentioned since November 30, and can I obtain a copy of that footage?

If the Associated Press does not have the video footage of damage to the Ahbab al-Mustafa mosque from the attack that left six men immolated, the why has the Associated Press not acknowledged this, and printed a retraction or a correction for this claim?

As you can see, my primary line of questioning is wondering why the AP has back of claims made in the first several days of reporting, without printing a correction or a retraction of these claims.

I'd also like to know if the Associated Press still stands behind the accounts sourced to Jamil Hussein by the Associated Press between April and November of 2006.

Thank you very much for your time.

So far, the AP's Director of Media Relations and Public Affairs that contacted me within 1.5 hours of my contacting another AP employee last week has been silent on this longer list of questions.

Perhaps teh Assocaited Press hasan inkling of what Michelle and Bryan's Excellent Adventure may mean to their Hurriyah reporting. I have a feeling we will all know very soon.

Update: Audio of Michelle's interview on The Laura Ingraham Show.

Live The Flavor

A bit off-topic from the regular fare here at CY I know, but a couple of local guys (how local? They sat two rows in front of me in church this past Sunday) have a shot at getting a commercial they shot for a grand total of $12.79 run during the Super Bowl, providing they win a contest run by Doritos.

Watch the commerical, and if you think this home-grown advertising agency deserves their shot at the majors, please consider voting for them.

Insty Talks Guns in the Times

Glenn Reynolds has an interesting op-ed in the NY Times today noting that communities with higher levels of legal gun ownership face less criminal activity.

Me?

I'm all for it, providing that those who own those firearms use them responsibly, and don't use them to chase down those who may have committed minor property crimes. Do that, and you might just find yourself in front of a grand jury, potentially facing a multitude of charges.

An increase in gun ownership can lead to a safer society, but only if gun owners use those firearms responsibly, as the overwhelming majority of citizens do.

Update:

Via email, a counterargument. It might be worth noting that Darwinism takes care of this counterargument.

Pretty Boy

What's in a name?

Cartoons and Caricatures

Far too often, we tend to oversimplify things, especially when demonizing out ideological opposites. I am as guilty as anyone (my own tagline of "Liberalism is a persistent vegetative state" is a prime example), and yet, that in no way excuses the practice.

I mention that introducing two blog posts that have come to my attention over the course of the past week, one from someone who solicited comment, and one I stumbled across on Memeorandum.com yesterday evening.

Jay Rosen runs NYU's PressThink blog, and sent along a link to his January 9 post Grave and Deteriorating for the Children of Agnew, asking for comment and discussion. I hadn't the time to read it in any detail until yesterday evening, and once I'd completed it, I must admit I was disappointed. Go read it for yourself. I'll wait.

Back? Good.

As a media commenter, educator and critic, I was hoping that Rosen had decided to tackle, at least peripherally, the subject of the Associated Press' questionable (to put it mildly) coverage an apparent cover-up of the Hurriyah incident, that he would approach the problem critically, perhaps looking at the many inconsistencies in AP's ever-evolving storyline, such as the fact that they cited a group with strong ties to the insurgency and al Qaeda (the Association of Muslim Scholars) as a source without disclosing what their ties were or finding a single account corroborating their claim of 18 men, women and children burned alive at the al-Muhaimin mosque, that four mosques were attacked with rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), heavy machine guns and assault rifles before being "burned and blew up,", and that AP Television shot video of one of the attacked mosques. All of these claims have quietly disappeared from the AP's subsequent coverage without correction or retraction... and yet Rosen seems interested in none of it. Nor does he seem to have any interest in the fact that the overwhelming majority of stories sources to Jamil Hussein had no independent verification from other news agencies.

No, Rosen was only interested in the Hurriyah story in that it served as an excuse to vilify those conservative bloggers he calls "the children of Agnew," referring to a man who last cast a long shadow on politics most of a decade before many of us commenting on this story were even born.

To pt it mildly, Rosen's post was a whitewash on one hand, and a smear on the other. Quite intent on shooting messengers, he was far more interested in making caricatures of conservative bloggers than objectively looking at the reason for our complaints. To say I was disappointed puts it mildly.

Likewise, I was a bit disgusted by Why the right doesn’t get Martin Luther King on The Carpetbagger Report, a blog run by Steve Benen. The blog post attacks conservatives, as you might guess by the title, for "not getting" Dr. Martin Luther King, and apparently attempting establish that only liberals have the ability to claim credit to any part of Dr. King's legacy.

I don't claim to understand everything Dr. King means to most people, and I'd lay for the argument that no-one can claim to understand that legacy and what it really means unless you happen to be an African American born prior to 1958, or thereabouts.

I say that, in the simple understanding that only African-Americans who were at least ten years old (and I think I'm being very charitable with the maturity of 10-year-olds) at the time of Dr. King's assassination can have any claim to understanding what Dr. King really represented in the context of the civil rights struggle that occurred in this country at that period in history.

To hear a white male 33-year old from Miami representing a group that is 83% white and young claim to be some sort of ideological heir to Dr. King's legacy with a Clintonesque "I feel your pain" screed would be merely laughable if it wasn't so disgusting.

It is sad we so often we try to reduce our ideological opposites to caricatures and cartoons. Now that I see how pathetic the practice is (one I've clearly participated in myself, I readily admit), perhaps I'll do a better job of shying away from such buffoonery in the future.

More Sectarian Violence

This time it struck not the Hurriyah neighborhood of Baghdad, but my hometown of Greenville, NC. Coincidence?

Probably.

While two churches were burned and another was broken into, there have no Associated Press reports of Baptists being pulled out of Sunday school, doused in moonshine, and burned alive by a mob of Methodists in four-by-fours.

Yet.

In all seriousness, I'm thankful that no one was hurt. As Memorial Baptist's associate minster Rick Bailey noted, "That's bricks and concrete, and that stuff can be replaced."

The Wild, Wild West of... Ohio?

The dateline is Indian Hill, and he's acting like a one-man posse, so close enough:

An Iraq war veteran who drew national attention when he ran for Congress criticizing the president chased three men who had crashed into a fence outside his home, then guarded them with an assault rifle until police arrived, according to police reports.

[snip]

According to a police report, officers were called to Hackett's home on Nov. 19 after a car crashed into a fence and sped away. The officers arrived to find three men lying face down near their car and Hackett with an assault rifle slung over his shoulder.

"He said he had done this about 200 times in Iraq, but this time there was not a translation problem," the police report said.

Hackett told police later that he was carrying a civilian model of an AR-15 and that one round was in the chamber but the safety was on. He said he never aimed the weapon at the men or put his finger on the trigger.

The driver of the car was charged with failure to maintain reasonable control, driving under suspension and carrying a concealed weapon, a pair of brass knuckles.

Admittedly, I'm a couple of days late to this, but how is it that the cops show up to find three guys face-down on the ground in front of a guy that chased them down and then displayed an AR-15, and the guy with the rifle doesn't get arrested?

Even when smothered with lawyerly talk, this seems like a fairly cut-and-dried case of brandishing a weapon, if not assault with a deadly weapon, depending on what the victims/defendents here have to say about the matter. You simply cannot go chase down someone and use a weapon to get them to comply to your demands.

While I am not a lawyer, I have heard of similar circumstances where people "compelled" other people to remain on the scene until the cops arrived with the use of a firearm, and when the cops arrived, they charged the person with the firearm for several crimes, including with something akin to kidnapping or unlawful detainment.

I thank Hackett for his service to our nation in Iraq, but Paul--can I call you Paul?--You are no longer in Iraq.

You simply can't chase someone down for a property crime with a weapon. That is a crime. Potentially, it is more than one crime. I'm rather disappointed he wasn't charged on the scene, but at least a grand jury is investigating.

Somehow, I doubt that the (generally gun-hating) netroots would be nearly as accommodating as they seem to be in this case, if any other former soldier decided to use his weapon to enforce the law once he was back home.

Does Tony Snow Read CY?

This snippit of a transcript from Hugh Hewitt (h/t Gerald Hibbs) kind of makes me wonder (my bold):

HH: All right, yesterday, the President also mentioned that there will be lots of carnage on television screens. Is the administration, and especially the Pentagon, prepared to fight the new media war when that starts to happen, Tony Snow?

TS: We'e been fighting it. I mean, it's not that it has started to happen, it's been going on for some time. What is interesting, Hugh, and you know this as well as anybody else, you're also starting to see little glimmers of guys like Michael Yon and others who get over there and they basically embed themselves in Iraq, and Michelle Malkin's over there now.

HH: Bill Roggio, you bet. They go over and do first hand reporting.

TS: And what ends up…I think what’s likely to happen over time is that people there, and you and I have both seen forces come back completely disheartened and disgusted by the kind of reporting that goes on here, I would not be surprised to see some of those people not going out in the field, but maybe back at barracks, turning on the video camera, shooting a picture, and saying you know what? Let me tell you what's really going on here, and why, and how I see it. That sort of stuff gets on a Youtube, or a Livelink, or any of these other things. It'soing to get out. I mean, there are many different ways now for people to get a glimpse of what' actually happening. And the new media war can take many different fronts, and while Al Jazeera or Al Arabia, or even Al Houra, which is financed by the U.S. Government, they all have cable presence there. But you know, in this day and age, it' exploding more rapidly, and more people are just pulling their news and pulling their video off the internet.

HH: As we saw during the summer war between Hezbollah and Israel, Tony Snow, Hezbollah went to such lengths as to stage atrocities, buildings blown up, and victims left in there.

TS: Yeah.

HH: Are you, as the head of the White House communications operation, prepared to immediately get out there and quarrel with that and stop those sorts of stories from metastasizing?

TS: Yeah, I am looking forward to meeting Captain Jumil Hussein, but other than that, yes. You'e seen the latest on that, right?

HH: No, I haven't I haven't read today. Is he back and not existing again?

TS: He’s back to non-existence.

HH: (laughing) But that’s the new media war…

TS: Yeah.

Was Snow's comment, "He's back to non-existence," a reference to posts put up by Curt and myself yesterday that "Jamil Hussein" is a apparently a pseudonym used by the Associated Press in what appears to be a direct breach of their own code of ethics?

Interesting...

Leftists Attack American Interests, Hit Crap

Don.t shoot the messenger, I'm just repeating what Sky News said:

A leftist group has reportedly claimed responsibility for a rocket attack on the US embassy in Athens.

The Greek government said it had received two calls claiming the guerrilla group Revolutionary Struggle was behind the attack.

Public Order minister Vyron Polydoras said it was "very likely" a domestic group was behind the blast.

The rocket slammed into the embassy toilet in the early morning strike, causing slight damage but no injuries.

Reuters more clearly defines the weapon as an RPG-18, a kind of rocket-propelled grenade.

It's too bad for Huff 'n Puffer Mark Seery; no American soldiers died.

Hungry, Hungry Hypos

Via SFGate.com:

For the past year, Spocko has been e-mailing advertisers of KSFO-AM with audio clips from its shows and asking sponsors to examine what they're supporting. Some sponsors have pulled their ads, after hearing clips like one of KSFO's Lee Rodgers suggesting that a protester be "stomped to death right there. Just stomp their bleeping guts out."

Now, bloggers and media freedom advocates are concerned about the legal reaction from Disney/ABC-owned KSFO. Shortly before Christmas, an ABC lawyer demanded that Spocko remove audio clips from his blog on the grounds that Spocko's posting of KSFO content was illegal. Digital freedom advocates counter that the clips constitute fair use and worry that critical voices could be silenced by corporations threatening legal action for violation of copyright law.

I agree.

Stop the Censorship!

AP: Discrediting Jamil's Sources

A wise and well-traveled journalist spoke with me via email yesterday regarding the stupidity of mistakes made by the large and the arrogant Goliaths of our world:

...One thing they ALWAYS do, in my experience, is make MAJOR mistakes in the very beginning. Mistakes that are so major that people say, "Nope, that can't be true. They never would do something that stupid." But they do. And then the big people usually rely on intimidation...and if that doesn't work (and it's not with you on this), those initial huge errors they make become HUGE and inescapable...

And so back to the beginning I went, and indeed, the Associated Press seems to have done an excellent job of discrediting Jamil Huss—excuse me, "Jamil XX" on their own. How much did they discredit him?

To the point most rational people would question why he was ever allowed to continue as an Associated Press source at all.

Do you remember this JunkYardBlog post, where See Dubya marveled at the ability of Captain Jamil XX to be report incidents of violence from literally all over Baghdad?

See Dubya noted:

I think I may have been the first to notice the significance of the wide variety of Baghdad locations from which "Captain Jamil Hussein" had reported incidents of violence to the AP. On November 26th, I said he was

...reporting chaos and mayhem in Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods all over Baghdad--Sadr City, Dora, Mansour, and others.

In other words, it looks less like Capt. Hussein is an eyewitness to this event, and more like he's just an unofficial spokesman. But a spokesman for whom?

(As it turns out, Sadr City is one of the few places in Baghdad he hasn't reported from.) The problem of the geographical plausibility of Captain Hussein's claims has been commented on several times since then, most recently by Lt. Col. Bob Bateman, who noted that the distance between Hurriyah and Yarmouk made him an odd choice to comment authoritatively on the Hurriyah mosque burning:

In other words, in going to their "normal" source for this story, the AP went to the equivalent of a Brooklyn local police precinct for a story that occurred in northern Yonkers! Hello? What would a cop in Brooklyn know about a crime in Yonkers? That's what doesn't make sense to me. (And why didn't the AP reveal, until challenged, that this source was not from the district where the events allegedly occurred, or even from a neighboring district, but is from a moderately distant part of this 7-million-person city?)

Actually, though, it's worse than that. If I can continue Col. Bateman's analogy, since April, the AP has been relying on that same Brooklyn cop for reports on violence in not just Yonkers, but the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island, and Jersey City.

To prove that point, See Dubya and and geoff of Uncommon Misconceptions created the following map.

As you can see, Jamil provided information on incidents of violence from neighborhoods all over Baghdad, and the majority of these reports occurred outside of his jurisdiction.

How far outside of his jurisdiction?

I took the map created by See Dubya and geoff, compared it to the detailed NIMA map, and, as best as I could, filled in the Khadra and Yarmouk districts where the Associated Press claimed Jamil had been stationed, and marked a rough outline of those neighborhoods in red. It is quite logical to expect for police officers to be familiar with, and perhaps on rare occasions even be a witness of, violent crimes in the neighborhoods in which they patrol.

It is also plausible that Jamil might "rub shoulders" with officers in surrounding neighborhoods, and thus have access to stories in the neighborhoods of Ma'mun, Mansur, Qadisyiyah, Ummal, Jahid, Hamra, Firdaws, Hayy at Tayran, al 'Adl, and Andalus. These bordering neighborhoods were noted in orange, as they surrounded the two neighborhoods where the Associated Press says Jamil XX served.

This is the result.

In all of the stories plotted on the map by See Dubya and geoff, six took place in surrounding neighborhoods, only one took place in Yarmouk, and none took place in Khadra.

Time and again, reporters for the Associated Press used Captain Jamil as their source for reports of violence in Baghdad far outside of his jurisdiction. It seems highly likely that almost everything Jamil reported to the Associated Press was second-hand information, provided to him by another party or parties. As a legal matter, this kind of evidence would most likely be considered hearsay, and in most instances, would be inadmissible as evidence.

Obviously, the Associated Press has much lower standards of proof than the legal system would require (presumably even in Durham), but just how low are their standards? Are those standards below what we should expect from a professional news organization that claims:

...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.

As the maps above strongly suggest, Jamil XX was relying upon accounts from people other than himself, and was relaying those accounts to the Associated Press, who consistently cited Jamil Hussein as the source. If Jamil is not the actual source, but is merely relaying these accounts from around Baghdad, can the Associated Press claim that they are acting ethically by citing him as their source?

Shouldn’t they have suspected months ago that he was only serving to forward information from others that the Associated Press should have known were apparently in direct contradiction to it’s own policies of identifying all sources?

The questions that arise are thus:

• Who was providing Jamil XX with these stories of violence from outside of not only Yarmouk and Khadrah, but even outside nearby neighborhoods?
• Did the Associated Press ever question him as to why or how he was able to provide reports from all over Baghdad?
• How could the Associated Press ethically cite Jamil Hussein as source if he was only serving to relay stories from all over Baghdad? Wouldn't that be highly deceptive, and against their own stated ethical guidelines?

As Jamil could not reasonably be expected to provide these dozens of accounts from all over Baghdad through first-hand knowledge, where did he get his information? Did he get it from other police officers around Baghdad?

If so, those are the same police officers and other MOI employees that Associated Press Editor Kathleen Carroll continuously attacked for being suspect and I would posit, unreliable sources:

They felt understandably nervous about bringing their accusations up in an area patrolled by a Shiite-led police force that they suspect is allied with the very militia accused in these killings.

Is Executive Editor Carroll implying that the Baghdad police are untrustworthy killers? It sure seems that way. Just paragraphs later, Carroll states even more damningly:

As careful followers of the Iraq story know well, various militias have been accused of operating within the Interior Ministry, which controls the police and has long worked to suppress news of death-squad activity in its ranks. (This is the same ministry that questioned Capt. Hussein’s existence and last week announced plans to take legal action against journalists who report news that creates the impression that security in Iraq is bad, “when the facts are totally different.”)

It seems highly likely that if Jamil XX did get his accounts through official channels, then he got them through the same police officers and MOI employees that Kathleen Carroll excoriated as belonging to death squads and murderous militias.

In her own words, AP's own executive editor discredits the only possible credible and quasi-official providers of Jamil's information.

Of course, their is a "third way."

Would Carroll prefer to discuss which militias or insurgent factions that would be the next most likely unofficial providers of Jamil XX's information? I didn't think so.

To say so much to discredit the Interior Ministry police, and then argue that Jamil Hussein is a credible source, would seem to stretch the credibility of the Associated Press to (or past) the breaking point.

Kathleen Carroll cannot credibly both attack the Iraqi Interior Ministry, and then defend the accounts of Jamil XX that necessarily rely upon the Interior Ministry to provide the information he used in Associated Press accounts.

But oh, will she try...

J-DAMN

And so a major Associated Press claim in "Jamilgate" takes an apparently fatal hit.

According to Bill Costlow of CPATT (Civilian Police Assistance Training Team) in Baghdad, and as forwarded by Lt. Michael Dean of Multinational Corps-Iraq/Joint Operations Command Public Affairs, our now infamous police captain in Iraq appears to be definitively not Jamil Hussein.

Nor is his name Jamil Gholaiem Hussein as stated repeatedly by the Associated Press Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll and other Associated Press employees.

Nor is his name Jamil Ghdaab Gulaim, as he has been called previously in other accounts. According to his personnel records at MOI, confirmed with BG Abdul-Kareem and then reportedly verified by BG Abdul-Karim Khalaf with AP's Baghdad sources, his name is actually Jamil Gulaim "XX".

The "XX" protects his second middle name and real last names, of which "Hussein" is not a part.

To sum up the current situation as things now appear to stand:

• There is no Baghdad police officer at the Khadra police station named Captain Jamil Hussein, and never has been. Jamil Hussein, and Jamil Gholaiem Hussein are pseudonyms for Jamil Gulaim "XX".
• The Associated Press published a pseudonym without acknowledging that fact, apparently knowing, if BG Abdul-Kareem is correct, that they were publishing a false identity. Is that a big deal? HUGE. This is a major breach of journalistic ethics.
• The Associated Press has heavily modified the "facts" of their claims since these two stories here and here on November 24 and November 25. Those claims are:
  1. That 24 people were burned to death; Six were pulled from the Ahbab al-Mustafa as it was attacked, the were doused and set on fire, according to AP source Captain Jamil Hussein, and that AP also printed a claim by the Association of Muslim Scholars (a group suspected of strong ties to al Qaeda, a detail the AP left out of their reporting) that 18 more people, including women in children, were burned to death in an "inferno" resulting from a Shiite militia attack at the al-Muhaimin mosque. Current AP accounts have dropped the claims of the 18 killed at al-Muhaimin completely, without a retraction or a correction.
  2. The Associated Press originally claimed four mosques (Ahbab al-Mustafa, Nidaa Allah, al-Muhaimin and al-Qaqaqa) were attacked in Hurriyah according to Police Captain Jamil Hussein, along with several houses. AP has since revised its claim down to one mosque instead of four (presumably the Ahbab al-Mustafa where it says the six men were claimed immolated) and they have curiously dropped the mosque's name from their reporting. They have issued neither a retraction nor a correction for the three mosques they have written out of successive narratives
  3. The Associated Press initially claimed that Associated Press Television had video showing damage to the Ahbab al-Mustafa mosque where they claim these six men were immolated. After November 30, they have made no further mention of this video that would seem to buttress their claims, nor have I been able to find anyone who has seen it. They have not issued a retraction, nor a correction for this claim. Do they still claim to support it?
• AP's Executive Editor and Senior vice President Kathleen Carroll, and AP's International Editor John Daniszewski have both insisted that Jamil Gholaiem Hussein is real. To make this claim, they presumably knew they were pushing a pseudonym to the public, presumably violating their own stated values and principles.
• The Associated Press has claimed that BG Abdul-Karim Khalaf verified the existence of Jamil Hussein. According to Bill Costlow of CPATT, he did no such thing.
• As this new revelation apparently shows, AP knew they were foisting a pseudonym upon the public, and even when questioned, continued to persist in denying what appears to be the truth.

Further, the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior claims that their is still no evidence that the six murders by immolation in Hurriyah on November 24 ever occurred.

I await Kathleen Carroll's response.

Update: Broken link fixed.

Update: I just got a response from Linda M. Wagner, Director of Media Relations and Public Affairs for the Associated Press, which read in part:

Steve Hurst passed your e-mail inquiry along to me. AP stands by the story below, which provides the full name of the source whose existence was acknowledged to AP by Iraq's Interior Ministry spokesman Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf in an interview on Thursday, January 4. I have bolded the relevant passages for ease of finding them in the text.

A fascinating response, for a couple of reasons.

First, the Associated Press insists Jamil Gholaiem Hussein is a Iraqi police Captain at the Kharda police station in Iraq, circa the Jan 4 story they still stand behind (and Wagner referenced). I have a January 11 release saying something quite different, attributed to the same general.

While I have absolutely no power, influence, etc., I did suggest to LT Dean at MNC-I PAO that it might help if Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf spoke at a press conference and squared away these two contradicting stories that are both officially sourced to him. Obviously, they cannot both be correct.

The second reason I found this fascinating, which you may have caught if you were reading Wagner's comment closely, is that she was responding to something I sent to Steven R Hurst. Hurst wrote the January 4 story, and so I'd contacted him, saying that:

Mr. Hurst, I refuse to publish his second middle or last name, but I hear that Jamil Hussein is actually Jamil Gulaim [names redacted], and that AP has been using Jamil Hussein as a pseudonym to protect him. Is that correct?

Hurst, instead of ignoring my comment or deleting it, forwarded it upward to Wagner, and I had an official response from AP brass within 1.5 hours.

Now, it very well could be Associated Press policy to forward any and all email inquiries to AP reporters to the Director of Media Relations and Public Affairs, and that those inquiries are quickly and courteously answered within an hour and a half by such senior AP officers, but somehow, I doubt it.

While it is blind speculation, I somehow doubt that a senior staff member would be the one issuing a denial unless there was some substantial reasons to involve a senior staff member. I'd further opine that known the exact real name of their source might just rise to that level of importance.

Tuesday, With Morays

With any luck, John Seery, a Pomona College professor and Huffington Post contributor, will die a horrible, painful death-by-eel-bite in the next year... preferably on Tuesday, March 13.

Why?

Irony.

HuffPuffer Seery seems absolutely giddy at the prospect of calculating the deaths of American soldiers over the next year, which--let's face it--is a game his base doesn't mind playing...

Greg Gutfeld is, well, less than amused with Seery's sick game:

The more that die, he understands, the smarter he looks. As a college professor, he's hoping for an invite to a cocktail party where he doesn't have to serve the drinks.

It only leads me to ask: When, and how, will John Seery be killed?

I'm just curious, of course, in the same manner Mr. Seery is. He's asking you to submit a number - the larger the better - which is perfectly appropriate for the Huffington Post - where hoping for the worst is the only hope allowed.

So certainly, me asking the same question about John should be treated with the same respect - don't you think? I mean, of course - the Huffpo won't dare remove me, or hide my post, when I ask for such a somber prediction. After all, Seery is practically lubricating over expected casualties - his summer will be awash in misery if American blood doesn't flow. What if I feel the same way, about him?

While I might not "lubricate" over Seery's impending death this year, I do have to ask:

What dates and methods are you guys picking?

As Seery himself says:

I'm not sure, however, what you'll win, or even if you could call it a victory. But Americans like to play to win, we've been told.

And though we do love to play, and get things when we win, I'd suggest against a pool... once it gets to a certain point, it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

After contributing to Jamil Hussein's imminent date with a drill, I don't know if I can have that on my conscious as well.

The "New Way Forward"

From yonder White House.

Have at it. I'm going to be a bad political blogger and not read this until after Bush's speech, but I'm guessing the new way farward is neither through Damascus nor Tehran, so I'm sure I'll be disappointed anyway.

Update: Bush's speech, as prepared for delivery (via Drudge):

Good evening. Tonight in Iraq, the Armed Forces of the United States are engaged in a struggle that will determine the direction of the global war on terror – and our safety here at home. The new strategy I outline tonight will change America’s course in Iraq, and help us succeed in the fight against terror.

When I addressed you just over a year ago, nearly 12 million Iraqis had cast their ballots for a unified and democratic nation. The elections of 2005 were a stunning achievement. We thought that these elections would bring the Iraqis together – and that as we trained Iraqi security forces, we could accomplish our mission with fewer American troops.

But in 2006, the opposite happened. The violence in Iraq – particularly in Baghdad – overwhelmed the political gains the Iraqis had made. Al Qaeda terrorists and Sunni insurgents recognized the mortal danger that Iraq’s elections posed for their cause. And they responded with outrageous acts of murder aimed at innocent Iraqis. They blew up one of the holiest shrines in Shia Islam – the Golden Mosque of Samarra – in a calculated effort to provoke Iraq’s Shia population to retaliate. Their strategy worked. Radical Shia elements, some supported by Iran, formed death squads. And the result was a vicious cycle of sectarian violence that continues today.

The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people – and it is unacceptable to me. Our troops in Iraq have fought bravely. They have done everything we have asked them to do. Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.

It is clear that we need to change our strategy in Iraq. So my national security team, military commanders, and diplomats conducted a comprehensive review. We consulted Members of Congress from both parties, allies abroad, and distinguished outside experts. We benefited from the thoughtful recommendations of the Iraq Study Group – a bipartisan panel led by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Congressman Lee Hamilton. In our discussions, we all agreed that there is no magic formula for success in Iraq. And one message came through loud and clear: Failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the United States.

The consequences of failure are clear: Radical Islamic extremists would grow in strength and gain new recruits. They would be in a better position to topple moderate governments, create chaos in the region, and use oil revenues to fund their ambitions. Iran would be emboldened in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Our enemies would have a safe haven from which to plan and launch attacks on the American people. On September the 11th, 2001, we saw what a refuge for extremists on the other side of the world could bring to the streets of our own cities. For the safety of our people, America must succeed in Iraq.

The most urgent priority for success in Iraq is security, especially in Baghdad. Eighty percent of Iraq’s sectarian violence occurs within 30 miles of the capital. This violence is splitting Baghdad into sectarian enclaves, and shaking the confidence of all Iraqis. Only the Iraqis can end the sectarian violence and secure their people. And their government has put forward an aggressive plan to do it.

Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two principal reasons: There were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents. And there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have. Our military commanders reviewed the new Iraqi plan to ensure that it addressed these mistakes. They report that it does. They also report that this plan can work.

Let me explain the main elements of this effort: The Iraqi government will appoint a military commander and two deputy commanders for their capital. The Iraqi government will deploy Iraqi Army and National Police brigades across Baghdad’s nine districts. When these forces are fully deployed, there will be 18 Iraqi Army and National Police brigades committed to this effort – along with local police. These Iraqi forces will operate from local police stations – conducting patrols, setting up checkpoints, and going door-to-door to gain the trust of Baghdad residents.

This is a strong commitment. But for it to succeed, our commanders say the Iraqis will need our help. So America will change our strategy to help the Iraqis carry out their campaign to put down sectarian violence – and bring security to the people of Baghdad. This will require increasing American force levels. So I have committed more than 20,000 additional American troops to Iraq. The vast majority of them – five brigades – will be deployed to Baghdad. These troops will work alongside Iraqi units and be embedded in their formations. Our troops will have a well-defined mission: to help Iraqis clear and secure neighborhoods, to help them protect the local population, and to help ensure that the Iraqi forces left behind are capable of providing the security that Baghdad needs.

Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Here are the differences: In earlier operations, Iraqi and American forces cleared many neighborhoods of terrorists and insurgents – but when our forces moved on to other targets, the killers returned. This time, we will have the force levels we need to hold the areas that have been cleared. In earlier operations, political and sectarian interference prevented Iraqi and American forces from going into neighborhoods that are home to those fueling the sectarian violence. This time, Iraqi and American forces will have a green light to enter these neighborhoods – and Prime Minister Maliki has pledged that political or sectarian interference will not be tolerated.

I have made it clear to the Prime Minister and Iraq’s other leaders that America’s commitment is not open-ended. If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people – and it will lose the support of the Iraqi people. Now is the time to act. The Prime Minister understands this. Here is what he told his people just last week: “The Baghdad security plan will not provide a safe haven for any outlaws, regardless of [their] sectarian or political affiliation.”

This new strategy will not yield an immediate end to suicide bombings, assassinations, or IED attacks. Our enemies in Iraq will make every effort to ensure that our television screens are filled with images of death and suffering. Yet over time, we can expect to see Iraqi troops chasing down murderers, fewer brazen acts of terror, and growing trust and cooperation from Baghdad’s residents. When this happens, daily life will improve, Iraqis will gain confidence in their leaders, and the government will have the breathing space it needs to make progress in other critical areas. Most of Iraq’s Sunni and Shia want to live together in peace – and reducing the violence in Baghdad will help make reconciliation possible.

A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations. Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see that military operations are accompanied by visible improvements in their neighborhoods and communities. So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.

To establish its authority, the Iraqi government plans to take responsibility for security in all of Iraq’s provinces by November. To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis. To show that it is committed to delivering a better life, the Iraqi government will spend 10 billion dollars of its own money on reconstruction and infrastructure projects that will create new jobs. To empower local leaders, Iraqis plan to hold provincial elections later this year. And to allow more Iraqis to re-enter their nation’s political life, the government will reform de-Baathification laws – and establish a fair process for considering amendments to Iraq’s constitution.

America will change our approach to help the Iraqi government as it works to meet these benchmarks. In keeping with the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, we will increase the embedding of American advisers in Iraqi Army units – and partner a Coalition brigade with every Iraqi Army division. We will help the Iraqis build a larger and better-equipped Army – and we will accelerate the training of Iraqi forces, which remains the essential U.S. security mission in Iraq. We will give our commanders and civilians greater flexibility to spend funds for economic assistance. We will double the number of Provincial Reconstruction Teams. These teams bring together military and civilian experts to help local Iraqi communities pursue reconciliation, strengthen moderates, and speed the transition to Iraqi self reliance. And Secretary Rice will soon appoint a reconstruction coordinator in Baghdad to ensure better results for economic assistance being spent in Iraq.

As we make these changes, we will continue to pursue al Qaeda and foreign fighters. Al Qaeda is still active in Iraq. Its home base is Anbar Province. Al Qaeda has helped make Anbar the most violent area of Iraq outside the capital. A captured al Qaeda document describes the terrorists’ plan to infiltrate and seize control of the province. This would bring al Qaeda closer to its goals of taking down Iraq’s democracy, building a radical Islamic empire, and launching new attacks on the United States at home and abroad.

Our military forces in Anbar are killing and capturing al Qaeda leaders – and protecting the local population. Recently, local tribal leaders have begun to show their willingness to take on al Qaeda. As a result, our commanders believe we have an opportunity to deal a serious blow to the terrorists. So I have given orders to increase American forces in Anbar Province by 4,000 troops. These troops will work with Iraqi and tribal forces to step up the pressure on the terrorists. America’s men and women in uniform took away al Qaeda’s safe haven in Afghanistan – and we will not allow them to re-establish it in Iraq.

Succeeding in Iraq also requires defending its territorial integrity – and stabilizing the region in the face of the extremist challenge. This begins with addressing Iran and Syria. These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq. Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.

We are also taking other steps to bolster the security of Iraq and protect American interests in the Middle East. I recently ordered the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the region. We will expand intelligence sharing – and deploy Patriot air defense systems to reassure our friends and allies. We will work with the governments of Turkey and Iraq to help them resolve problems along their border. And we will work with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating the region.

We will use America’s full diplomatic resources to rally support for Iraq from nations throughout the Middle East. Countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf States need to understand that an American defeat in Iraq would create a new sanctuary for extremists – and a strategic threat to their survival. These nations have a stake in a successful Iraq that is at peace with its neighbors – and they must step up their support for Iraq’s unity government. We endorse the Iraqi government’s call to finalize an International Compact that will bring new economic assistance in exchange for greater economic reform. And on Friday, Secretary Rice will leave for the region – to build support for Iraq, and continue the urgent diplomacy required to help bring peace to the Middle East.

The challenge playing out across the broader Middle East is more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of our time. On one side are those who believe in freedom and moderation. On the other side are extremists who kill the innocent, and have declared their intention to destroy our way of life. In the long run, the most realistic way to protect the American people is to provide a hopeful alternative to the hateful ideology of the enemy – by advancing liberty across a troubled region. It is in the interests of the United States to stand with the brave men and women who are risking their lives to claim their freedom – and help them as they work to raise up just and hopeful societies across the Middle East.

From Afghanistan to Lebanon to the Palestinian Territories, millions of ordinary people are sick of the violence, and want a future of peace and opportunity for their children. And they are looking at Iraq. They want to know: Will America withdraw and yield the future of that country to the extremists – or will we stand with the Iraqis who have made the choice for freedom?

The changes I have outlined tonight are aimed at ensuring the survival of a young democracy that is fighting for its life in a part of the world of enormous importance to American security. Let me be clear: The terrorists and insurgents in Iraq are without conscience, and they will make the year ahead bloody and violent. Even if our new strategy works exactly as planned, deadly acts of violence will continue – and we must expect more Iraqi and American casualties. The question is whether our new strategy will bring us closer to success. I believe that it will.

Victory will not look like the ones our fathers and grandfathers achieved. There will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship. But victory in Iraq will bring something new in the Arab world – a functioning democracy that polices its territory, upholds the rule of law, respects fundamental human liberties, and answers to its people. A democratic Iraq will not be perfect. But it will be a country that fights terrorists instead of harboring them – and it will help bring a future of peace and security for our children and grandchildren.

Our new approach comes after consultations with Congress about the different courses we could take in Iraq. Many are concerned that the Iraqis are becoming too dependent on the United States – and therefore, our policy should focus on protecting Iraq’s borders and hunting down al Qaeda. Their solution is to scale back America’s efforts in Baghdad – or announce the phased withdrawal of our combat forces. We carefully considered these proposals. And we concluded that to step back now would force a collapse of the Iraqi government, tear that country apart, and result in mass killings on an unimaginable scale. Such a scenario would result in our troops being forced to stay in Iraq even longer, and confront an enemy that is even more lethal. If we increase our support at this crucial moment, and help the Iraqis break the current cycle of violence, we can hasten the day our troops begin coming home.

In the days ahead, my national security team will fully brief Congress on our new strategy. If Members have improvements that can be made, we will make them. If circumstances change, we will adjust. Honorable people have different views, and they will voice their criticisms. It is fair to hold our views up to scrutiny. And all involved have a responsibility to explain how the path they propose would be more likely to succeed.

Acting on the good advice of Senator Joe Lieberman and other key members of Congress, we will form a new, bipartisan working group that will help us come together across party lines to win the war on terror. This group will meet regularly with me and my Administration, and it will help strengthen our relationship with Congress. We can begin by working together to increase the size of the active Army and Marine Corps, so that America has the Armed Forces we need for the 21st century. We also need to examine ways to mobilize talented American civilians to deploy overseas – where they can help build democratic institutions in communities and nations recovering from war and tyranny.

In these dangerous times, the United States is blessed to have extraordinary and selfless men and women willing to step forward and defend us. These young Americans understand that our cause in Iraq is noble and necessary – and that the advance of freedom is the calling of our time. They serve far from their families, who make the quiet sacrifices of lonely holidays and empty chairs at the dinner table. They have watched their comrades give their lives to ensure our liberty. We mourn the loss of every fallen American – and we owe it to them to build a future worthy of their sacrifice.

Fellow citizens: The year ahead will demand more patience, sacrifice, and resolve. It can be tempting to think that America can put aside the burdens of freedom. Yet times of testing reveal the character of a Nation. And throughout our history, Americans have always defied the pessimists and seen our faith in freedom redeemed. Now America is engaged in a new struggle that will set the course for a new century. We can and we will prevail.

We go forward with trust that the Author of Liberty will guide us through these trying hours. Thank you and good night.

Dueling Incompentencies

As if having Mike Nifong as the District Attorney in neighboring Durham wasn't bad enough:

A Cary High School student has been released on bond after allegedly spiking a science teacher's water bottle with acid.

Zachary Midgette, 17, was arrested Monday on a charge of assault on a government official. The misdemeanor carries a maximum sentence of 150 days in jail.

Police said Midgette admitted putting hydrochloric acid and zinc chloride from the school science lab in his teacher's water bottle last Friday.

You heard it here, folks: try to kill your teacher with two potentially fatal poisons in Wake County, and all you will be charged with is a misdemeanor that carries a maximum of 150 days in jail.

I think it's time for the North Carolina Bar to lay off the hard stuff.

Senator's Condition Upgraded

Glad to hear it:

Sen. Tim Johnson's condition has been upgraded from critical to fair, four weeks after he was hospitalized for a brain hemorrhage, his office said Tuesday.

The South Dakota Democrat, who was rushed to the hospital December 13 and underwent emergency surgery, remains in intensive care, said his spokeswoman, Julianne Fisher.

"The senator continues to make progress," Fisher said. "The next step would be rehabilitation and we hope that would happen within the week."

Johnson's office has said that his recovery is expected to take several months.

He underwent surgery to correct a condition called arteriovenous malformation, involving tangled arteries in his brain.

The senator's doctors said last week that Johnson was improving but still needed a ventilator at night to help him breathe. The ventilator has required a tube to be placed down Johnson's throat, making it impossible for him to talk.

His long-term prognosis is unclear. He has been responsive to his family and physicians, following commands, squeezing his wife's hand and understanding speech.

Senator Johnson's ordeal is not just one he experiences, but one his entire family must endure. If you're of a mind to, prayers certainly wouldn't hurt.

Did the AP Lie About Jamil Hussein Being Found?

Or is this just being lost in translation? Curt, at Flopping Aces with the apparent bombshell:

Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf never acknowledged that there was a Capt. Jamil Hussein assigned to the Khadra station, he confirmed to the AP that there was a Capt. Jamil Ghdaab Gulaim assigned there. Apparently he is the source for the AP even though he still, to this day (according to Bill Costlow), denies being the source.

So what do we have so far?

That the AP has lied again in their response. The AP specifically stated that Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf acknowledged Jamil Hussein exists when he did no such thing. He acknowledged a completely different name the AP gave him but not a Jamil Hussein.

This, of course, means that Michelle Malkin nailed it on December 20. Anyone got a good crow recipe for Eric Boehlert?

I'll have more on this as I process the implications...

Update: Before I get to worked up about this one way or the other, I'm going to want some verification that Costlow is correct. This is something that Curt is asking Costlow to triple-check, and I am also asking MNF-I PAO to verifiy as well. Until then, let's agree to take this with a grain of salt.

Why?

Because if Brig. General Abdul-Karim Khalaf did not tell the Associated Press that there was a Captain Jamil Hussein at the Khadra police station, then we have what many would interpret as an attempt by the Associated Press to deceive it's readership, which numbers roughly one billion people on this planet every day. That would be big news, and potentially indicate there are yet bigger fish to fry.

Likewise, it would be big (though not nearly as big) news if Brig. General Abdul-Karim Khalaf told both AP and Bill Costlow what they wanted to hear. Such a revelation would destroy his credibility as one of the Iraqi Interior Ministry's main spokesmen.

More as this develops...

The Beginning of Surge Combat?

It looks like both coalition forces and the insurgents might be changing tactics in Baghdad, as a signifigant combat operation in Baghdad enters a fourth day:

Hundreds of U.S. and Iraqi troops battled with insurgents in a stronghold of the Sunni insurgency in central Baghdad Tuesday.

The firefight began before dawn and followed two days of violence in the neighborhood that left as many as 50 insurgents dead.

The U.S. and Iraqi troops came under attack by snipers, mortar rounds, and small arms fire.

By midday Tuesday (4 a.m. ET), the U.S. military sent in fixed-wing aircraft and Apache attack helicopters to support the ground forces.

U.S. military sources said the insurgent group included elements from the Saddam Hussein regime, foreign fighters, and members of al Qaeda in Iraq.

They said the group was waging a sophisticated, coordinated battle, and was fighting against 400 U.S. troops and 500 Iraqi soldiers.

Combat started Saturday when Iraqi troops came under fire when trying to recover bodies dumped near a cemetery.

At this stage of the war it is rare for Sunni insurgents to engage in a multi-day battle against coalition forces, for obvious reasons: they have lost every single major engagement they have ever engaged in since the 2003 invasion, usually suffering heavy losses. They simply lack the training, support, weaponry or numbers to prevail in such conflicts, and so it is of note that they seem to have chosen to make a stand, of sorts, in this Baghdad neighborhood at this time. Why? What are they protecting, and what are they trying to prove? Why have they not slipped away under the guise of civilians as they so often do?

There is some sort of prize involved here, be it material, personnel, or philosophical. I'll be watching this story with great interest, and will provide updates as I can. This particular battle bears watching as a portent of what "surge" operations in Baghdad may look like in months to come.

What Happened to the AP's Hurriyah Mosque Attack Video?

Kathleen Carroll continues to attack those questioning her news organization’s ability to turn four burned mosques and several homes into one burned mosque, and their ability to turn 24 dead men, women and children into six, while still not acknowledging that they cited an al Qaeda-linked source to get the number up to 24 in the first place. The Associated Press and Executive Editor Carroll are still claiming to stand behind their reporting when the "facts" of the story have been rewritten in the neighborhood of 75-percent...

Oh wait, where was I going with this?

...Ah yes, I remember now.

Kathleen Carroll says she still stands behind the AP's reporting from Hurriyah.

There are reportedly just four mosques in the Hurriyah neighborhood, pulled from this 2003 map:

That would be the four mosque locations noted in the bottom left quadrant. Is it accurate? Perhaps, perhaps not. It is after all, three years old, and apparently generated by a U.S.-government agency known as the National Imagery and Mapping Agency . How accurately they map specific buildings in a foreign capital seems to be open for debate.

The AP claims four mosques in Hurriyah were destroyed:

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.

Now, let's leave aside the inconvenient fact that apparently none of these mosques seem to have actually been destroyed, that American units no longer patrol this neighborhood, and that the Associated Press has decided to write three of the mosques out of their narrative by November 30, less than a week after the news organization's previous claims:

AP journalists have repeatedly been to the Hurriyah neighborhood, a small Sunni enclave within a larger Shiia area of Baghdad. Residents there have told us in detail about the attack on the mosque and that six people were burned alive during it.

Let's ignore that AP dropped the number of attacked mosques from four to one, and that the 18 dead people claimed by their pro-al Qaeda source have suddenly vanished from their reporting without correction or retraction. Let's instead concentration on this interesting detail from AP reporter Steven R Hurst (scroll down):

The attack on the small Mustafa Sunni mosque began as worshippers were finishing Friday midday prayers. About 50 unarmed men, many in black uniforms and some wearing ski masks, walked through the district chanting "We are the Mahdi Army, shield of the Shiites."

Fifteen minutes later, two white pickup trucks, a black BMW and a black Opel drove up to the marchers. The suspected Shiite militiamen took automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers from the vehicles. They then blasted open the front of the mosque, dragged six worshippers outside, doused them with kerosene and set them on fire.

This account of one of the most horrific alleged attacks of Iraq's sectarian war emerged Tuesday in separate interviews with residents of a Sunni enclave in the largely Shiite Hurriyah district of Baghdad.

The Associated Press first reported on Friday's incident that evening, based on the account of police Capt. Jamil Hussein and Imad al-Hashimi, a Sunni elder in Hurriyah, who told Al-Arabiya television he saw people who were soaked in kerosene, then set afire, burning before his eyes.

AP Television News also took video of the Mustafa mosque showing a large portion of the front wall around the door blown away. The interior of the mosque appeared to be badly damaged and there were signs of fire.

Somehow, I'd missed this where the AP specified that it was the Mustafa (Ahbab al-Mustafa) mosque where these men were abducted from and burned, possibly because in later AP stories and releases the exact name of the mosque was dropped. AP also says that AP television took video of the Mustafa mosque after it was attacked...

So why haven't we seen the AP video of the attacked mosque yet?

Why has that part of the Associated Press narrative disappeared? It seems odd that after being bombarded by critics for weeks because they haven't produced any evidence to back up their claims that they would pass on the chance to show the very evidence that they once seemed to think would bolster their claim.

Monday Morning Jamil Roundup

While I've been busy over the weekend doing family stuff, other bloggers have kept up the pressure on the continuing on-going scandal called Jamilgate, where the Associated Press claimed that 24 people were burned to death and four mosques were rocketed, machine gunned, burned and blown up along with several homes burned in a Baghdad neighborhood on Friday, November 24, 2006.

The AP has since attempted to rewrite their story after the fact, now only maintaining that six people were immolated and that only one mosque was attacked. Though the claims made in the story have been changed by roughly 75-percent, one of their primary sources is facing arrest, another retracted his claim, and another key source was a group aligned with al Qaeda, the AP's executive editor Kathleen Carroll continues to prove she is the Mike Nifong of professional journalism.

Carroll says she stand by AP's reporting on this story, even as her reporters have dramatically changed it over time (See Protein Wisdom for an excellent summary of the events so far).

Among the bloggers that continued to cover the AP over the weekend have been Dafydd ab Hugh and Sachi X of Big Lizards. On Friday, Sachi released a three-part critique on the main defenders of the Associated Press, Eric Boehlert of Media Matters. Start with Media Matters In the Meme Streets of Baghdad - 1 and read all three parts. Sachi's partner in crime, Dafydd released So Where IS Lieutenant Kije? yesterday afternoon, wondering what, if anything, Jamil Hussein might have in common with an eight-foot tall invisible rabbit named Harvey (I'd point out as an aside that Harvey was at least "seen" by a decorated U.S. Air Force combat pilot who retired as Brigadier General James Stewart. To the best of my knowledge, that is one more U.S. military officer than has seen Jamil Hussein).

On Saturday, Kurt at Flopping Aces revealed an email exchange he had with Bill Costlow, CPATT (Civilian Police Assistance Training Team) representative on his way back to Baghdad to work with the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior. Costlow points out something I've heard, but haven't previously commented on: Jamil Hussein may have been difficult to find because that is not the name he is known under as an Iraqi police officer. While the AP credits him as Jamil Hussein, the Iraqi Police Captain calls himself Jamil Gulaim, and when an officer by the name of "Captain Jamil Ghlaim" was questioned several weeks ago, he denied being AP's source.

If Jamil Ghlaim Hussein is the AP's source, and is the same man denying being the AP's source, what kind of position does it place the Associated Press in, on not just the immolation stories, but the dozens of other stories sourced to Jamil Hussein since April of 2006?

Of course, it isn't just bloggers that are concerned over the implications of Jamilgate. Mark Tapscott of the Washington Examiner hits the same point I've been repeating that liberal bloggers and liberal blog commenters either don't seem able to grasp, or would prefer to overlook:

But even if it is stipulated that AP has been right all along, it has been using a source who is an Iraqi Police Captain by name of Jamil Hussein, that isn't proof that he is a credible source.

Don't forget that al Qaeda and the insurgents have made clear that they consider learning to manipulate the western press is a major front in their war of Jihad.

And there is abundant evidence that there are significant numbers of insurgent sympathizers among the Iraqi Police forces. Neither is it beyond the realm of possibility that Hussein is in fact a double agent.

I talked earlier today with an old journalism friend who has covered just about every significant foreign military action involving U.S. troops in the past 15 years, including both the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and Iraq War of 2003.

My friend explained the difficulties faced by AP and other Western journalists in the theater. Because it is so dangerous outside the Green Zone in Baghdad, few Western journalists venture out beyond its confines.

So they have to rely upon local stringers drawn from among the Iraqi population. Because being a news stringer can put dollars in the pocket, there is a tremendous competition among these folks to bring the Western journalists the best stories.

That competition is, of course, an open invitation to exaggeration, rumor and outright lies being peddled as legitimate news. It is also an opening for a resourceful insurgent or al Qaeda operative to become a source for Western journalists.

Because of AP's ill-advised "trust me" attitude when bloggers first began questioning the credibility of Hussein as a source, the emphasis was on proving his existence.

Proving that he exists is not the same thing as establishing his credibility as a source, especially since there is so much contrary evidence regarding the six Sunnis being burned alive.

Going back to the Duke Lacrosse rape case that I used as an analogy last week, merely proving that the accuser exists does not prove the story, especially when the stories keep changing, the credibility of the witnesses is in jeopardy, and there is little or no physical evidence supporting any of the ever-changing allegations made.

Of course, Tapscott is far from being the only professional journalist concerned over the AP's apparent shifting stories and dubious claims. Jules Crittenden of the Boston Herald posts at his blog Forward Movement:

The AP publishes hundreds of stories a day. Why should anyone give a damn if any of them are accurate? Grubby impertinent news reader people. Just because the AP's claim of four mosques torched and six people burned to death as troops looked on was outlandish, remains unsubstantiated and government officials said the source didn't exist.

E&P scribbler Joe Strupp and Carroll enthusiastically repeat several times that "Hussein" has been threatened with arrest for talking to reporters. They fail to mention that's for unauthorized blather about incidents that may not have actually occurred and could represent insurgent propaganda. If in fact Jamil exists, of course. The Ministry of Interior's record on that is spotty and the AP seems to have lost track of him just as he's been "found."

Crittenden and Tapscott hit at the heart of the matter: the stringer-based reporting methodology and apparently weak editorial checks-and-balances indicate that the world's largest news organization highly susceptible to insurgent propaganda efforts. After all, one of the sources AP used in its Jamilgate coverage is a Sunni group affiliated with al Qaeda that the Associated Press ran without any apparent concerns as to their credibility. If the Associated Press will run claims made by known terrorist supporters, how susceptible do you think they are to running claims by those who first establish an air of legitimacy?

Jamil Hussein is one source cited by name in more than five dozen AP stories, and used anonymously an unknown number of times as an AP source since 2004 to provide information on stories well outside of his jurisdiction as a police officer. You wouldn't cite a Brooklyn cop on stories occurring in Queens or Harlem, any yet, that is precisely what the Associated Press did, time after time after time as the used Jamil Hussein. I checked 40 of the 61 AP stories where Jamil Hussein was cited as a source, and have been able to convincingly verify just one, the death of a Defense Ministry Public Affairs employee, and that only through research done by a native Arab-speaker in the Arab press.

The Associated Press may have very good reasons for failing to account for the varied storylines they've presented, for attempting to shift the blame from themselves to the Iraqi Government, the American military, and various bloggers, but the fact remains that they've had more than six weeks to provide these very good reasons, and the only defense they 've offered so far is to repeatedly attack their critics, and claim they stand behind their reporting, even as they feverishly rewrite it.

Slowly, but surely, the AP’s story and credibility are falling apart.

And the Questions Remain the Same

I'd never quite appreciated how amusing the Leftist swarm could be until last night and this morning, where an Associated Press report that Iraqi Interior Ministry spokesman Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf had finally, at long last confirmed the existence of Captain Jamil Hussein hit the wires, and liberals around the country (and around the world) conflated Hussein's ability to exist with the veracity of his claims.

The illogical leap this took—to purposefully decide that someone's state of existing is an immediate and overwhelming vindication that everything he claimed was true—is massive in its undertaking, and truly staggering to behold. Rarely have so many been willing to overlook so much in the simple hope of being able to say—or in many cases shriek—"I told you so!"

But the simple fact of the matter is that simply existing does not grant validity to the stories that several someone’s purport to have occurred.

The accuser in the Duke Lacrosse rape case assuredly exists, but it is her multiple stories and the lack of evidence that throws her accounts of what happened on the night of March 13, 2006 into question. She has presented multiple accusations, and multiple versions of her accusations, and yet, nearly the overwhelming majority of people following the case to any degree feel she probably falsified the events she reported. The feel this way because her story kept changing, and while there should have been copious evidence to support her claims, none has thus far been found.

And so it is with the on-going Associated Press scandal that started with the claim of one Iraqi Police Captain by the name of Jamil Hussein on November 24, 2006.

Karl, a guest poster at Protein Wisdom provides an excellent and well-documented summary of the events leading us to this point.

It is a history both intertwined with the existence of Captain Hussein as a long-running Associated Press source, and separate, in that so many of the claims made by this accuser seem to have no basis in fact. As these claims have become problematic, the Associated Press has quietly attempted to write them out of existence without an acknowledgement that these claims were unsupported, without issuing a retraction, or even so much as a correction. In their dogged pursuit of faith-based journalism, they are praying that no one will notice that they have presented a story that reeks of incompetent and biased journalism from bottom to top.

Regardless of Hussein's existence, Kathleen Carroll and the Associated Press have much to account for in their varying, oft-changing accounts of what happened on November 24 in the Baghdad neighborhood of Hurriyah.

In the span of less than a day, they claimed that Iraqi soldiers allowed the alleged murders of two dozen of their fellow citizens right under their noses, that four mosques were attacked with rocket-propelled grenades, heavy machine guns, and assault rifles, and then these four mosques were set on fire and blown up, with a total of 24 Sunni civilians burned to death.

How do we know this? Because the Associated Press tells us so in a story published around the world.

Jamil Hussein, and Jamil Hussein alone, stated:

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.

To the best I can determine, not another source made such a claim, and yet the Associated Press felt that this single-source claim was enough to level such an inflammatory charge.

Further down in the same Associated Press account, they run the following accusation, again apparently single-sourced to Jamil Hussein:

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

Has the Associated Press brought forth another witness to buttress this claim? On the contrary; the Associated Press has since backed away from such a claim... and it is not the only one.

In the very same article, the Associated Press cites the following account:

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

This is a fascinating "fact," in that Kazamiyah Hospital does not have a morgue, but instead a freezer, as stated by the same Iraqi General that now vouches for Jamil Hussein's existence. Any dead at Kazamiyah Hospital are transported by the police to the Medical Jurisprudence Center at Bab Almadham. Is this general credible, or not? I'll leave that for you to decide.

But even that troublesome and apparently incongruous statement pales in comparison to the next single-sourced claim regurgitated by the Associated Press:

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.

So who is this organization called the Association of Muslim Scholars? The Associated Press cites them as a single source, and yet leaves out this very important detail found in Wikipedia:

The Association of Muslim Scholars... are a group of Sunni Muslim religious leaders in Iraq. The Association is believed to have strong links with Al-Qaeda terrorists.[citation required]

They did not recognize the U.S. appointed government as legitimate and have at times questioned any democratically elected government and democracy itself. They have previously asked for withdrawal of American troops, who they accuse of causing the deaths of over 30 000 Iraqis since the war began. They publicly support Al-Qaeda and support the car bombs and the sectarian violence.

Do you think that having such strong alleged tied to al Qaeda might warrant a mention by the Associated Press, if for no other reason than to establish that they might be providing a potentially biased account? If you though so, you obviously disagreed with the Associated Press.

But the apparent affection between al Qaeda and the AP's single-sourced statement is far from being the only item of note in this paragraph; indeed, they make the very specific claim that "18 people had died in an inferno at the al-Muhaimin mosque."

In another version of this story, the Associated Press claims specifically 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. 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 easily extinguished by an Iraqi fire company.

Military units in the area late claimed the al-Muhaimin mosque was never attacked at all. Within days, the 18 people that "died in an inferno" quietly left AP's narrative, never to be seen again, as did the allegations of attacks on all the mosques but Nidaa Allah, which suffered only minor fire damage. To this day, neither Jamil Hussein nor the Associated Press has told us which mosque the “burning six” were pulled from, a relevant fact that again, somehow slipped away from the AP, unnoticed.

And so we now find ourselves in a curious position, where AP claims to still stand behind their reporting on one hand, while on the other, dropping the number of alleged fatalities from 24 to six, and the numbers of mosques burned and blown up from four to one.

The Associated Press has not even begun to account for how their story has shifty almost completely from one account, into another story entirely.

They claim to still stand behind their reporting... but which reporting would that be?

Libs on Jamil

The overwhelming majority of liberal bloggers were dead silent from late November throughout the month of December, and into January in regards to the Jamil Hussein affair, with the rare exception of those who feverishly insisted upon misconstruing what conservative bloggers were attempting to discover about Husseins' dubious track record, and those who hoped these same bloggers would go to Baghdad unescorted and get gunned down.

Now that the Associated Press has come forth with an admission from the Iraqi Interior Ministry that Hussein does exist, and precisely where AP said he was, many of these same bloggers that refused to comment on the situation before are now bravely attacking those who questioned the AP and accepted to competency of the MOI to be able to read a list.

My favorite emerging narative from the left on this are the sudden woeful claims of concern: "What happens to Jamil Hussein now that you've exposed him? He's going to be arrested, tortured, and killed, and it's ALL YOUR FAULT!"

Get a grip.

The Associated Press "exposed" Jamil Hussein 61 times between April and November using him as a named police source in articles published around the world. It was the Associated Press that provided Husseins' full name, and the Associated Press that named his past and present duty stations. Blaming anyone other than Jamil Hussein himself (he did, after all, decide to go on the record to begin with) and the AP for "exposing" him is especially dim, yet perfectly predictable leftist rhetoric.

As for the sudden liberal concern for this one Iraqi police officer, I find it laughable.

This sudden compassion for Jamil Hussein's is coming from the very liberals that so desperately want us to withdrawal immediately and precipitiously from Iraq, further endangering not one, but 26 million people. This same sudden concern for Jamil Hussein's well-being is coming from the same people opposed to a surge that we hope may help slow or halt the the daily sectarian and terrorist attrocities occurring across Iraq. These same people who now suddenly care so much about the life of a single police captain whine almost daily about the cost of the war, never caring that cost includes the price of arms, ammunition, training. body armor, and other equipment for these same policemen.

Bloody Joseph Stalin is credited with saying, "One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic." Based upon today's faux outrage from those who wail for one man out of one side of their mouths, and the abandonment of the entire nation of Iraq on the other, it becomes painfully obvious that the radical left wing apple never falls very far from that same rotten tree.

Game On: AP Claims Jamil Hussein Is Real, Faces Arrest

Well now, aren't things just getting lively?

The Interior Ministry acknowledged Thursday that an Iraqi police officer whose existence had been denied by the Iraqis and the U.S. military is in fact an active member of the force, and said he now faces arrest for speaking to the media.

Ministry spokesman Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, who had previously denied there was any such police employee as Capt. Jamil Hussein, said in an interview that Hussein is an officer assigned to the Khadra police station, as had been reported by The Associated Press.

The captain, whose full name is Jamil Gholaiem Hussein, was one of the sources for an AP story in late November about the burning and shooting of six people during a sectarian attack at a Sunni mosque.

The U.S. military and the Iraqi Interior Ministry raised the doubts about Hussein in questioning the veracity of the AP's initial reporting on the incident, and the Iraqi ministry suggested that many news organization were giving a distorted, exaggerated picture of the conflict in Iraq. Some Internet bloggers spread and amplified these doubts, accusing the AP of having made up Hussein's identity in order to disseminate false news about the war.

We'll get to those accusations momentarily, but lets jump down to the end of the article.

Khalaf did not say whether the U.S. military had ever been told that Hussein in fact exists. Garver, the U.S. military spokesman, said Thursday that he was not aware that the military had ever been told.

Khalaf said Thursday that with the arrest of Hussein for breaking police regulations against talking to reporters, the AP would be called to identify him in a lineup as the source of its story.

Should the AP decline to assist in the identification, Khalaf said, the case against Hussein would be dropped. He also said there were no plans to pursue action against the AP should it decline.

He said police officers sign a pledge not to talk to reporters when they join the force. He did not explain why Jamil Hussein had become an issue now, given that he had been named by AP in dozens of news reports dating back to early 2006. Before that, he had been a reliable source of police information since 2004 but had not been quoted by name.

When contacted for a response moments ago, the U.S military (MNF-I PAO) stated:

Mr Owens,

The validity of the AP story below has not been confirmed at this time.

As it is just several hours after midnight in Iraq, the key players in MNF-I PAO were probably caught in bed, something probably not entirely surprising to the Associated Press. I question the timing.

As far as the AP's story goes, it does raise some very interesting questions, and I think I'll have a very entertaining weekend trying to make sense of it all (which is part of the fun of blogging; I'm loving this).

So it appears Jamil Hussein may be real. Good. that means there is a real person to question regarding 61 mostly uncorroborated stories provided as exclusives by Hussein to the Associated Press.

This includes the story that made him (in)famous, where Hussein and the AP claimed 24 people were killed--six by being pulled from a mosque, doused in kerosene, and purposefully burned alive, where the other 18 merely died in an "inferno" at another mosque under attack--during a series of four mosque attacks. In later AP stories, the four mosques trickled down to one, and 18 of the 24 dead mysteriously disappeared, without the Associated Press releasing a retraction or a correction.

I can hardly wait to see where this leads. Is "Jamilgate" over?

Heck no. It's just getting good...

Update: Allah encapsulates things nicely:

I speculated about a mix up due to the conventions of Arabic names back on November 30th, mainly because Khalaf himself had initially been included on Centcom’s list of suspect sources. But that got eaten up by the other (still outstanding) questions: How is it that Hussein was able to comment on attacks all over Baghdad, including some far away from his precinct? How come the AP dropped the detail about four mosques being burned when it was challenged after their first report? Why couldn’t Bob Owens find corroborating stories from other media outlets on so many incidents sourced to Hussein? And why weren’t Armed Liberal’s sources, Eason Jordan’s sources, and Michelle’s sources collectively able to find this guy? I said last week in writing about Zombie’s response to HRW re: the Israeli ambulance attack that “I’ve reached the point where, when one of these blogstorms kicks up, I half-hope the media will produce the smoking gun that proves them right, just so we can have a little faith that they’re covering sensational incidents with due diligence.” Well, here’s the smoking gun. And while I have more faith now in the AP, I have less faith in the certainty of any information I get from Iraq. It took six weeks, with multiple people checking, to confirm the mere existence of a guy whose name, rank, and location were publicly known — and the issue would still be in doubt if Khalaf hadn’t come clean.

Update: Michelle has a nice cross-section of comments in her post on the subject.

The more I look at this, the more I realize that Mickey Kaus got it right:

Capt. Jamil Hussein, controversial AP source, seems to exist. That's one important component of credibility!

Yep, they've got a source that seems to exist. Kathleen Carroll now has the same level of credibility as Mike Nifong. For her sake, I hope she can build a more convincing case.

01/04/07 Update: Corroboration! Sure, it isn't in English and only addresses one story of 61 sourced to Jamil Hussein, but it is a start.

Iranian Dies Natural Death

Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has apparently succumbed to cancer. It is the first natural death reported in Iran this year.

Typically, Iranians are very unlucky people, with many public figures dying as a result of accidents.

Update: Oops. Not Dead. this means no Iranians have died of natural causes this year, right?

Squawk Like an Egyptian

If the United States would like to keep Islamic terrorism from despoiling the "final frontier," it needs to start considering the best way to pull the plug on Egypt's powerful NileSat, an Egyptian government-run satellite broadcasting "al Qaeda TV," 24 hours a day.

As noted in the Weekly Standard:

Al Qaeda and its allies now have their own 24-hour television station. Based at a secret studio in Syria, its signal is broadcast to the entire Arab world from a satellite owned by the Egyptian government. This development highlights al Qaeda's increasingly sophisticated propaganda efforts.

Al Qaeda placed great emphasis on communicating its message effectively throughout 2006. Osama bin Laden and deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri issued more tapes in 2006 than in any year since the 9/11 attacks. In the past, al Qaeda tapes were generally released to Al Jazeera, but 2006 saw more Internet releases: the terrorist group's message was thus more quickly disseminated. Al-Zawraa TV, the 24-hour insurgent station, is an extension of this trend.

Al-Zawraa hit the airwaves on November 14. According to Middle East-based media monitor Marwan Soliman and military analyst Bill Roggio, it was set up by the Islamic Army of Iraq, an insurgent group comprised of former Baathists who were loyal to Saddam Hussein and now profess their conversion to a bin Laden-like ideology.

The Islamic Army of Iraq is subordinate to the Mujahideen Shura Council, an umbrella organization of Sunni insurgent groups, including al Qaeda in Iraq. The Al-Zawraa channel is not only viewed as credible by users of established jihadist Internet forums, but as a strategically important information outlet as well. Moreover, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, is delighted by the station. A U.S. military intelligence officer told us that al-Masri "has long-term and big plans for this thing."

Al Qaeda's previous attempts at setting up propaganda outlets have been limited to satellite radio and the Internet. Al-Zawraa, however, appears to be well financed and may find a much broader audience. The channel is broadcast on Nilesat, a powerful satellite administered by the Egyptian government. Through Nilesat, Al-Zawraa's signal blankets the Middle East and North Africa, thus ensuring that the insurgents' message reaches every corner of the Arab world.

Al-Zawraa's content is heavy with insurgent propaganda, including audio messages from Islamic Army of Iraq spokesman Dr. Ali al-Na'ami and footage of the group's operations. The station calls for violence against both Shia Iraqis and the Iraqi government. According to Marwan Soliman, the station's anchors appear in military fatigues to rail against the Iraqi government while news crawls urge viewers to support the Islamic Army of Iraq and "help liberate Iraq from the occupying U.S. and Iranian forces."

I don't much care how the government chooses to end Al-Zawraa's broadcasting. They should certainly start by withholding or canceling the substantial financial aid given to Egypt by the United States. If political pressure fails, we certainly have the technical means to disrupt or block NileSat’s communications and navigation capabilities, meaning we can simply switch it off, or adjust it's flight path to turn it into a multi-million dollar shooting star as it burns up on re-entry. Frankly, I think the later would send a far more dramatic, and perhaps more suitable, message to those who would choose to broadcast terrorist TV, but then, perhaps that is why I'm not a diplomat.

But we do have diplomats, and they are beholden to our elected representatives. I suggest that anyone concerned about this should contact their Congressmen and Senators. Democrat of Republican, they have no excuse to continue subsidizing a government that sells satellite time to the highest terrorist bidder.

Lateral or Downward? The Negroponte Shuffle

John Negroponte is stepping down from his Cabinet-level position as Director of National Intelligence to become the #2 man in the State Department, backing Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. What does it all mean? I think Captain Ed has a better feel for this story than most, and even that seems uncertain:

The position carries a high profile and arguably has more influence on policy formulation, but it still represents a step down and a move out of the Oval Office inner circle. The change reflects a possible loss of confidence in Negroponte, especially given his proximity to the President and the obvious opportunity to influence his decisions on policy on a whole range of issues.

Congress appears taken aback by the change. Susan Collins, a Republican who pushed hard for the 9/11 Commission recommendations that created the DNI post, expressed her disappointment at Negroponte's resignation. Jane Harman, who would have been the new House Intel chair had Nancy Pelosi not fumbled the assignment after the election, also objected, making the criticism bipartisan.

With the available information, it looks like Negroponte got shuffled downward as part of the review finishing up on Iraq and the war on terror. The quality of intelligence coming from Iraq has come under some fire over the last couple of years, and eventually that responsibility rests with Negroponte. Alternatively, it could be that Negroponte's experience in Iraq was necessary for Rice to push through Bush's new strategies for Iraq and the Middle East. Negroponte was the first American emissary to Iraq, and with the resignation of Zalmay Khalilzad, Bush may have wanted the most experienced hands focusing directly on Iraq.

It's a puzzlement, without a doubt. I don't recall any recent moves where a Cabinet officer resigned to take a deputy post for another Cabinet officer.

Memorandum.com is all over the NY Times version, and while other bloggers (mostly on the left) seem to be commenting on it, they don't seem to have anything solid to go on either. At this point, it all seems to be mostly blind speculation... so why not add to it?

Liberal Booman Tribune floats a couple of theories, including the theory that that Negroponte is being primed to take over for an incompetent Rice (hey, this is his theory, not mine), who will resign for health reasons after an appropriate amount of time, at which point Negroponte will be elevated to Secretary of State. This is not outside the realm of possibility; as far as politics goes, crazier things have happened. But if we're going to go for wild speculation, shouldn't we go "whole hog?"

So here is my completely groundless theory:

Negroponte is moving in to be in a position to take over for Rice, but not because Rice is going out of office, but up. Vice President Dick Cheney will resign due to much more plausible health problems (the poor guy has worn-out defibrillators, hasn't he?), and Dr. Rice will step in as our first female Vice President sometime during the summer or early fall of 2007. She will then be "pushed" into running as the Republican contender against Hillary, setting up our first guaranteed female president as a result of the 2008 elections. At this point, Pat Robertson will quote some obscure translation of the Book of Revelations and declare this is proof of the End of Days, at which point we all laugh at him.

Again.

Of course, that's just my theory. I could be wrong.

You've Got Jmail

click to enlarge

Hates The Troops

Who said this today?

"We didn't put you in power to work with the people that have been murdering hundreds of thousands of people since they have been in power."

Yeah, you guessed right.

The outburst caused Bob Fertik to declare Sheehan was "the most influential person in America!"

Somehow, I doubt Sheehan is even the most influential person in her chatroom, but I guess that is what separates us from the "reality-based" community.

He Must Be Real

After all, he has a blog, and everything.

BREAKING: Jamil Hussein Arrested for Filming Saddam's Execution on Cell Phone

Upon reading that headline, AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll probably became faint.

Luckily, that was (or should be) just one of many comments in Ace's Cool Facts About Police Captain Jamil Hussein, which now has about 300 comments, and is still growing.

Many of the comments are crude... and I mean very, not-for-your-kids-to-read crude... but many are laugh-out-loud funny.

My favorite (republishable) comments so far:

Jamil Hussein singlehandedly implemented an ISO 9000 Quality Certification program for Halliburton, over the weekend of Dec. 2-3.

His name does not appear in any of the documentation.

Posted by Dave in Texas at January 2, 2007 04:32 PM

In the early 80's, Jamil Hussein and Barak Hussein Obama ran a truckload of Coors from Texarcana to Altlanta in 24 hours for Big Enos and Little Enos.

Posted by Rosetta at January 2, 2007 04:51 PM

when he drinks he is often heard to say"man, I really miss Tenille".

Posted by mark c. at January 2, 2007 05:35 PM

In grade school, Jamil Hussein started a band called "The Netherwind Pipers" as a childish fart-joke.

You've might know them by their current name -- OPEC.

Posted by ObserverAce at January 2, 2007 10:13 PM

Jammies Hussein thinks Margaret Cho is funny; and when he's in the audience, she is.

Posted by MikeB at January 3, 2007 12:17 AM

Head on over and add your own.

An Offensive or Defensive Surge?

John Keegan has an article today in the U.K. Telegraph titled, 50,000 more US troops can save Iraq. His article refers to the expected surge of US troops into Iraq, presumably to engage and suppress Sunni and Shia terror groups.

All sorts of pundits have all sorts of opinions on whether or not a surge would be effective. In very general terms, those pundits that are left of center, and a few on the right, hold the view that sending in more soldiers is simply giving the various terror groups more American soldiers to shoot at, and that adding more troops will not appreciably change the military of political situation on the ground in Iraq.

These concerns are not without some merit. If we send more soldiers over to merely increase the number of patrols and IED hunts (like the one Bill Aradalino just completed) without any sort of a change to our offensive strategic and/or tactical goals, then yes, all we are effectively doing is providing more targets with very little chance of seeing much in the way of a long-term change.

That said, in his article Keegan speaks of the kind of offensive-minded surge that could make a profound difference on the shape of the conflict, and potentially shape Iraqi politics as well:

The object of the surge deployment should be to overwhelm the insurgents with a sudden concentration, both of numbers, armoured vehicles and firepower with the intention to inflict severe losses and heavy shock. The Mahdi Army in Sadr City should prove vulnerable to such tactics, which would of course be supported by helicopters and fixed-wing aviation.

Hitherto most military activity by coalition forces has been reactive rather than unilateral. Typically, units have become involved in fire fights while on patrol or on convoy protection duties. During the surge, the additional troops would take the fight to the enemy with the intention of doing him harm, destabilising him and his leaders and damaging or destroying the bases from which he operates.

The cost of such tactics is likely to be high but not unbearable if enough armoured vehicles are used to protect the attacking troops. The advantage of committing recently arrived troops to such operations is that they will come to operations fresh and enthusiastic. Though there is the disadvantage that they may not be familiar with local conditions or topography, this need not be a disqualification since the purpose of a surge strike would be to create a shock effect, not to alter local conditions by informal action.

The British contingent recently demonstrated that such overwhelming tactics have their effect. After their surprise move into Basra with massed columns of fighting vehicles and Challenger tanks, they succeeded in dominating the chosen area and evoking respect from the local militias.

If additional forces are specifically sent in with the goal of crushing the Sadrist Mahdi Army, affiliated criminal gangs and Shia death squads operating out of Baghdad's Sadr City and Najaf, along with elements of the Sunni insurgency and al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists operating out of Ramadi and other areas, then this will be a worthwhile operation to surge in these additional troops.

As I've noted previously, Sadr City may be a slum that is home to two-million people, but it is a compact slum, which can be cordoned off relatively easily and systematically demilitarized by whatever means are deemed necessary. Some will be quick to attempt to compare it to Fallujah, but the simple fact of the matter is that there is little indication that the Mahdi Army is as dedicated or as well-trained as were the terrorists of al Qaeda, despite any expected interference of Iranian Special Forces, and I doubt there will be a full-on military assault as a result. Odds are that most Sadrists will surrender or run, not fight, leaving their weapons caches behind.

Once Sadr City is cleared, US forces can (and probably should) impose checkpoints to keep the surviving Shiite death squad members from picking hteri habits back up after the sweep, even as they consider whether or not they need to also pay a visit to Najaf, an Iraqi city where U.S. Marines previously battled the Mahdi Army, and where al-Sadr's family traditionally draws power. One thing is almost certain: Muqtada al-Sadr should not be allowed to survive. Period.

Once the Madhi Army is fractured and Sadr City's remaining death squads under lockdown, the US military's attention should turn to the Sunni insurgency in Ramadi, where local forces and the U.S. military is slowly taking back the city from Sunni insurgents and al Qaeda on a block-by block basis. While it has gone mostly underreported in the media, this city is where the battle against the Sunni insurgency seems to be at it's most concentrated, even as al Qaeda forces and influence seem to be a on a slow constant ebb.

If the Shiite militias in Baghdad and southern Iraq can be curbed, and the Sunni terrorists in al Anbar are forced into retreat, then the surge will have been worthwhile. If we fight an offensive campaign with the 30,000-50,000 troops projected to be sent to Iraq, then we have a chance to win. If we don’t use our soldiers in an offensive manner, and use them to merely augment our currently forces on their current, mostly defensive missions, then I fear this surge will have been wasted.

While I'm sure he doesn't even know I exist, my counsel to the President would be this: Send them in for combat, or don’t send them in at all.

Now That You Mention it, Yes, Mine is Bigger Than Yours...

A little Presidential Directive here, a little tug there, and my friend Ward Brewer becomes the first blogger with a military vessel of his very own.

The ship you see is the E-01 Cuitlahuac, formerly and soon again to be the DD 574 John Rogers, the longest-serving of the World War II-era Fletcher-class destroyers.

Ward will restore the ship into a floating museum, or begin pillaging, depending on his mood.

Nice Friends You've Got There

When it comes to the subject of the Iraq War, bloggers on the right support the military, the general concept (if not necessarily the execution) of establishing democracy in Iraq, media accountability, and defeating Islamic terrorism.

Bloggers on the left want bloggers on the right—a lot of them—to go to Iraq, without escort, presumably on the hope that they—we—will get killed.

Character. Some folks have it...

Update: Michelle Malkin prepares to journey to Iraq, and invites AP's Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll to come along with her. I can only imagine how quickly our "friends" on the Left will respond with veilled blog posts and comments hoping for Michelle's demise.

Fulla Crop

As I've stated previously, I'm not real thrilled with those who have decided to prostitute the Saddam Hussein execution video, and now that Allah tells me what the executioners were shouting, I'm even more disgusted.

Instead of professionalism, we get an execution rushed by the Iraqi government, and featuring the taunting of the condemned dictator by Sadrist Shiite guards. It's a throughly digusting display expected of primitives.

That said, the media's reaction in hunting and almost hoping for a Sunni uprising as a result of this travesty of an execution is mockable in its own right.

Dafydd at Big Lizards has a field day mocking the media response:

In a stunning display of perspicacity and sophisticated nuancing, if I'm allowed to coin that neologism, the drive-by media has discovered that long-time supporters of Saddam Hussein in Iraq are irked that he was hanged.

[snip]

So, what are we talking about, how large a "mob of angry protesters?" Was it ten thousand rallying in Samarra? A hundred thousand rocking Baghdad?

[snip]

Great Scott, if we add hundreds to hundreds, we get hundreds -- possibly a thousand. Out of a population of 8.5 million Sunnis.

The photographic evidence seems to bear Dafydd out.

Truly amazing. I haven't seen such a massively cropped protest photo since...

Zoom in tight enough, and crop it tight, and you, too, can have your very own media-worthy mob.

Gone in 60 Stories

On December 5 of this year, I wrote a blog post entitled 60 Billion Minutes, where I wrote:

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.

In the weeks since that date, the Associated Press has maintained that the stories they originally reported on November 24-25 of burning mosques and burning men is true, even though almost every single factual claim made in the account has been disputed. The AP maintains this position today, even after the Iraqi Interior Ministry Officially stated that the AP's source, Captain Jamil Hussein, simply didn't exist, and that no one by that name ever worked at the two police stations where AP said he did.

To all of this, Associated Press Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll stated:

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.

That last paragraph printed above has bothered me since I first read it. Executive Editor Carroll, you see, is absolutely correct.

No one raised questions about Hussein's accuracy or his very existence for a span of run of stories starting on April 24 until his late November unmasking as a probable specter; a remarkable run that Curt at Flopping Aces pegged at 61 stories. This run as a named source doesn't begin to account for any stories he may have contributed anonymously as "an Iraqi Police Captain" or "according to Iraqi Police" over his two-year relationship with AP.

And so it was more than a month after Hussein was compromised that I did what the Associated Press editorial process should have been doing the entire time: I began attempting to fact-check the claims made by Jamil Hussein. I took the list of 61 AP stories citing Hussein, opened my web browser to Google.com, and went to work.

In eight hours over three days last week, I tracked down online examples of the first 40 of 61 Associated Press stories citing Jamil Hussein, as replicated in news outlets and even official government press offices around the world. I then took keywords, dates, and phrases from the paragraphs citing Hussein, and attempted to find corroborating accounts from other news organizations.

I am by no means perfectly suited to do the work here that needs to be done. I lack access to LexisNexis, a powerful popular subscription-based searchable archive of periodicals such as newspapers, and I'm not about to pay for their AlaCarte service, where reading this single blog post would cost you $3. Nor do I speak any of the languages of the Middle East in which one might encounter variations of these stories, meaning I am limited to searching English-only content. That said, I did the very best I could with a limited set of skills and tools. The detailed results of my search are here. Knowing what I now know, I don't think that the editorial processes of the Associated Press even put forth that paltry effort.

Put bluntly, a search for other news agency accounts of the events described by Jamil Hussein seems to indicate that most of these events simply do not exist anywhere else except in AP reporting. I was completely unable to find a definitive corroborating account of any of Jamil Hussein's accounts, anywhere.

That I was unable to find corroborating accounts for some stories is quite understandable; even in non-war-torn countries some news organizations have access to some stories denied others, as reporting assets and sources are not evenly distributed. Most of the AP dispatches using Jamil Hussein as a source were simply not that big in the wider and often larger chaos of the bloody sectarian conflict whirling through Baghdad; a gunbattle killing two suicide bombers, or even a non-fatal car-bombing is something that has sadly become far too common in many parts of Iraq, and Baghdad in particular. That other news agencies don't account for every single attack of this kind is not surprising-though it should be somewhat suspect when in 40 straight stories, not a single one of your competitors captured the same event. Not one. At that point, some sort of editorial oversight should have kicked in, should it not?

And yet, in 40 AP stories checked, only in two instances covering a total of four stories did I run into anything approaching possible corroboration.

On May 10, AP reporter Thomas Wagner included in a dispatch the assassination of an Iraqi Defense Ministry Press Office employee:

In Baghdad, suspected insurgents riding in two BMWs assassinated a Defense Ministry press office employee as he drove to work at about 8:15 a.m., police said.

One of the BMWs stopped to block the car of Mohammed Musab Talal al-Amari, a Shiite, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein. Three men got out of the other BMW and opened fire in the residential neighborhood of Bayaa, killing al-Amari and wounding an Iraqi pedestrian, Hussein said.

The Defense Ministry controls Iraq's military.

A truism about people: they become involved in things that they can relate to. Journalists in a combat zone are acutely aware that becoming a casualty is a significant possibility, and so when someone in the business gets injured, people take notice. For example, Nabil al-Dulaimi is hardly a household name in the United States, but when this radio news editor was killed in an ambush near his home by gunmen on December 5, more than a dozen English language news accounts mentioned his death.

While Mohammed Musab Talal al-Amari was a Defense Ministry Press Office employee and as such perhaps not a recognized journalist, wouldn't you think that someone other than Jamil Hussein would mention his passing?

To date, we simply don't know if this account was correct. While AP mentioned al-Amari's assassination three times, no other news agency has covered his murder to the best I have been able to determine. The only thing close to corroboration that I have been able to determine so far is the recollection of a CPATT source that a Ministry of Defense Press Office official did die in May. I will have to probably wait several more weeks to get further information.

Likewise, AP had an apparent exclusive on the murder of Iraqi Police Captain Amir Kamil on Tuesday, June 10.

Elsewhere in the capital, police Captain Amir Kamil, who provided security for the Yarmouk hospital, was shot to death on Tuesday at a bus station, Captain Jamil Hussein said.

According to AP source Jamil Hussein, Kamil provided security for Yarmouk Hospital. Even in bloody Baghdad, the deaths of rank-and-file officers warrants notice by the various news services, so why isn't there any corresponding coverage from other news organizations of the assassination of a police captain? Once again, no other news agency reports this death, and I may have to wait for weeks to get word from Iraqi officials.

Over the course of the first 40 stories in which he provided apparently uncorroborated information, it seems that the Associated Press could have easily questioned how reliable of a source Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein might be before they were backed into the corner of having to defend the apparently fictional captain, the apparently fictional five dozen news accounts he fed them, and the eventual and righteous questioning of their basic journalistic methodologies that allowed something so wrong to run for so long.

And so, as Associated Press Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll noted previously:

No one - not a single person - raised questions about Hussein's accuracy or his very existence in all that time.

This includes the reporters, editors, and officers of an apparently unreliable and unrepentant Associated Press.

Update: We also learned last night from former CNN head honcho Eason Jordan of IraqSlogger that:

In statements, the AP insists Captain Hussein is real, insists he has been known to the AP and others for years, and insists the immolation episode occurred based on multiple eyewitnesses.

But efforts by two governments, several news organizations, and bloggers have failed to produce such evidence or proof that there is a Captain Jamil Hussein. The AP cannot or will not produce him or convincing evidence of his existence.

It is striking that no one has been able to find a family member, friend, or colleague of Captain Hussein. Nor has the AP told us who in the AP's ranks has actually spoken with Captain Hussein. Nor has the AP quoted Captain Hussein once since the story of the disputed episode.

Therefore, in the absence of clear and compelling evidence to corroborate the AP's exclusive story and Captain Hussein's existence, we must conclude for now that the AP's reporting in this case was flawed.

To make matters worse, Captain Jamil Hussein was a key named source in more than 60 AP stories on at least 25 supposed violent incidents over eight months.

Until this controversy is resolved, every one of those AP reports is tainted.

Update: Over at Pajamas Media, Richard Miniter brings some mostly constructive criticism of the assumptions I've made in writing this post. I'm not sure I agree with his conclusions completely, but he is certainly dead-on when it comes to why this matters.

01/04/07 Update: A source has provided me with a translation of this Arabic account, one of several verifying the death of MOD PAO Mohammed Musaab Talal al-Amari, killed on May 10. Why did you click the link? You don't speak Arabic any better than I do. We now have one of the 40 stories I inquired about corroborated by other news agencies.

Gone in 60 Stories: The Grunt Work

It has long needed to be done, and I kept hoping someone else would do it: checking out the list of 61 Associated Press stories ferreted out by Curt at Flopping Aces, where the AP used Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein as a source. Perhaps it has been done and nothing was found warranting suspicion, but that, too, warrants publication. Verifiable, unverifiable, or undetermined, we need to know if Jamil Hussein's stories prior to his very questionable "burning six" story also have reason to be suspect.

The only way I can do this is to take the 61 stories Curt found, Google the keywords and dates of the described events, and see if other news organizations can corroborate the details of the events provided. Those with LexisNexis access might be able to do a better job of verifying or disputing these accounts, but you get to research using the tool set you have, not the tools you would like to have. As I don't have the time to do a complete search, I'll attempt to search through roughly the first half of the 61 stories using Jamil Hussein as a source.

I'll provide the headline, byline, and brief description provided by Curt, along with any supporting evidence I can find, and attempt to render a judgement as to the likelihood of the AP story being verifiable, or unverifiable via the limited means at my disposable. Put on a pot of coffee, and perhaps consider printing this out, as this is going to be the longest blog post I've written. We're going to be here a while, and this is just Part I (Part 2 is here).

Let's begin.

HEADLINE: 7 car bombs explode in Baghdad, bodies of 20 other Iraqis are found

BYLINE: By THOMAS WAGNER, Associated Press Writer

That was followed by a car bomb that targeted a police patrol in the Mansur area of Baghdad, wounding three policemen and four civilians, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein.

That maps perfectly to this AP report captured by truthout.org. The relevant details of three policemen and four civilians injured in Mansur by a car bomb on or about April 24. An unattributed BBC report states that:

A car bomb explodes in the Mansur area of the city injuring seven people.

This BBC report corroborates the location and number of people in the attack as sourced by Hussein, but we don't know if this came from the AP reports or another source. al Jazeera published a similar account attributed only to "agencies."

It should be noted that most of the media's attention that day was likely focused on the Dahab resort bombings in Egypt that killed at least 23 and wounded dozens more. I am unable to either verify or dispute this account.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 1

The second and third accounts where Curt finds Jamil Hussein cited as a source describe the same event:

April 26, 2006

HEADLINE: 6 Iraqis, 14 suspected insurgents killed in Iraq

BYLINE: By LEE KEATH, Associated Press Writer

In southwest Baghdad, police received a tip that two men were traveling in the area with explosives hidden beneath their clothes, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein. After a brief gunbattle, the explosives detonated, killing both men, he said.

April 26, 2006

HEADLINE: U.S. Troops Kill 12 Militants in Iraq

BYLINE: By THOMAS WAGNER, Associated Press Writer

In southwest Baghdad, police received a tip that two men were traveling in the area with explosives hidden beneath their clothes, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein. After a brief gunbattle, the explosives detonated, killing both men, he said.

That would seem to be this AP story of April 26, as attributed to Keath. I cannot find any other reports to confirm or dispute these events.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 3

Two days later, we have another story by Thomas Wagner using Jamil Hussein as a source:

April 28, 2006

HEADLINE: Death of U.S. soldier makes April deadliest month for Americans this year

BYLINE: By THOMAS WAGNER, Associated Press Writer

On Friday, the weekly day of worship in mostly Muslim Iraq, a roadside bomb targeting an Iraqi police patrol exploded in southwestern Baghdad at 8:20 a.m., killing one policeman and wounding two, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein.

This account is cited here, though accounted to the AP as an organization, not Wagner. I can find no other accounts from any news organization claiming a similar event happened in Baghdad on this day.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 4

Next up, these two related stories:

April 29, 2006

HEADLINE: Iraqi official: Sectarian violence forces 100,000 families to flee homes

BYLINE: By ROBERT H. REID, Associated Press Writer

The 17 people killed Saturday included six men found dead in the Dora section of southwest Baghdad, police said. All were handcuffed, blindfolded and appeared to have been tortured, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

April 29, 2006

HEADLINE: New estimates of displaced families in Iraq as violence continues

BYLINE: By THOMAS WAGNER, Associated Press Writer

In Saturday's worst violence, the bodies of six handcuffed, blindfolded and tortured men were found in the Baghdad neighborhood of Dora, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein. The area has seen frequent sectarian violence.

Again, no reporter is credited, but the AP byline takes us to the story containing this claim here.

17 killed, six of them handcuffed, blindfolded, and tortured in Dora, Baghdad. That should be easy to corroborate. It isn't.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 6

METHODOLOGY BREAK: I find the original articles cited by Curt by copying the entire block of text into Google with quotes around them, and hitting search. I rather easily find the AP article, as you would expect, often a variant with a differing headline or credit, but the supposed factual information is consistent.

When I look for the defining characteristics, however, I look for the details that story that should make it unique, for instance using the details of the previous AP story-17 killed dora 6 handcuffed tortured April 29-and I'm unable to find it, Jamil Hussein or not.

Am I doing something wrong here?

Now back to your regularly scheduled, presently 0-for-April, source hunt. Let's try Sinan Salaheddin's similar account in the same neighborhood.

May 1, 2006

HEADLINE: Four Iraqis killed, protesters demand better security in Baghdad

BYLINE: By SINAN SALAHEDDIN, Associated Press Writer

The bullet-ridden, handcuffed and blindfolded bodies of three Iraqi men were found in Baghdad's southern Dora neighborhood, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein. A drive-by shooting also killed a Shiite grocer in his shop, Hussein said.

Right-wing and semi-reliable news site Newsmax runs those exact same AP-attributed words here. The Pakistani Daily Times seems to pull from this same account, but their account cites neither the writer nor the news service they got their information from, citing only "Iraqi police." I can find no other new agencies claiming these events took place.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 7

The next day, we have accounts of attacks on Iraqi military units.

May 2, 2006

HEADLINE: Official urges Iraqis to renounce violence, but insurgent attacks continue

BYLINE: By THOMAS WAGNER, Associated Press Writer

In Dora, one of the capital's most violent neighborhoods, a roadside bomb wounded three Iraqi soldiers in a convoy, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein.

The Houston Chronicle ran this account showing that same event, where it is also mentioned that coalition forces killed ten terrorists, three wearing suicide vests. I was finally able to corroborate something--the suicide vest account, but of course... I'm still O-for-Jamil.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 8

Next up, an assassination:

May 6, 2006

HEADLINE: 3 U.S. soldiers killed in roadside bombing south of Baghdad

BYLINE: By SINAN SALAHEDDIN, Associated Press Writer

An Iraqi police major was assassinated in a drive-by shooting in Diwaniyah, 80 miles south of Baghdad, police said. And a Shiite cleric, Hussein Ahmed al-Mousawi, was shot and killed near his home in Baghdad's Dora district, according to police Capt. Jamil Hussein.

I've never heard of the Seacoast Online but they have this AP account, and even give Salaheddin his byline. A Shiite cleric in Dora by the name of Hussein Ahmed al-Mousawi shouldn't be too difficult to track down, especially since we know when he was assassinated, and where. Once again, al Jazeera sources "agencies," and nobody else seems to have ever heard of such a man, alive, or dead.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 9

On May 8 we get this:

May 8, 2006

HEADLINE: U.S. soldier, dozens of Iraqis die in Iraq's latest bloodshed

BYLINE: By QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA, Associated Press Writer

Gunmen stopped a bus carrying Higher Education Ministry employees to work in western Baghdad, killing the driver and wounding a guard, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

Fox News runs this AP story citing this exact text, and so we have an AP match. What can we find from other news organizations regarding the May 8 attack on a busload of Higher Education Ministry employees? CNN offers up a version of it also attributed to AP, but drops the Jamil Hussein reference. Once again, no one else has the story brought forth by the Associated Press and Jamil Hussein. Am I doing something wrong? I don't have LexisNexis; does anyone know if Google simply isn't able to easily find other corroborating accounts for some reason? In any even the running tally hits double digits without a single corroborating hit.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 10

Back again to a series of Thomas Wagner articles, or perhaps just a series of updates to one article:

May 10, 2006

HEADLINE: Talabani says the kidnapping and killing of hundreds of Iraqis must stop

BYLINE: By THOMAS WAGNER, Associated Press Writer

One of the BMWs stopped to block the car of Mohammed Musab Talal al-Amari, a Shiite, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein. Three men got out of the other BMW and opened fire in the residential neighborhood of Bayaa, killing al-Amari and wounding an Iraqi pedestrian, Hussein said.

May 10, 2006

HEADLINE: 12 Iraqis killed in drive-by shootings, including government official

BYLINE: By THOMAS WAGNER, Associated Press Writer

In Baghdad, suspected insurgents fatally shot Mohammed Musaab Talal al-Amari, a Shiite who directs the Defense Ministry's public relations office, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein.

May 10, 2006

HEADLINE: Talabani Urges Unity Among Iraq Factions

BYLINE: By THOMAS WAGNER, Associated Press Writer

One of the BMWs stopped to block the car of Mohammed Musab Talal al-Amari, a Shiite, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein. Three men got out of the other BMW and opened fire in the residential neighborhood of Bayaa, killing al-Amari and wounding an Iraqi pedestrian, Hussein said.

"Winger" site Newsmax once again runs the AP story. Once a gain, you wold think that the killing of a specific person (Mohammed Musab Talal al-Amari) in a specific Baghdad neighborhood (Bayaa) might get picked up by another source and provided to another news agency. Once again, this story seems to start and end with AP-exclusive source, Captain Jamil Hussein.

I sent emails to both U.S. Central Command's PAO and to CPATT (Civilian Police Advisory Training Team ), to see if they can contact the Iraqi Ministry of Defense public relations office to see if Mohammed Musab Talal al-Amari ever existed, or worked for them, or was assassinated. Unfortunately, the primary CPATT contact and his assistant are both out of the country and so cannot verify this story with any certainty. The primary contact did say he recalls that a Ministry of Defense Public Information Office did lose an employee in May, but was unable to verify a name. He suggested another contact in U.S. Central Command's PAO that might be more familiar with this case, and I'm still awaiting verification. If it is obtained, then I will have one story in 13 using Jamil Hussein as a source verified, and ironically enough, verified by Central Command and CPATT, organizations that the Associated Press has attacked.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 13

Moving right along:

May 12, 2006

HEADLINE: Targeted attacks against Sunni Arabs spread as Iraq struggles to form government

BYLINE: By TAREK EL-TABLAWY, Associated Press Writer

A member of the Interior Ministry's elite Falcon Brigade was also shot dead by a sniper in southwestern Baghdad, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein.

I've been unable to find this AP article, and have been able to find precious few articles about the Iraqi Interior Ministry's Saqr (Falcon) Brigade, other than Mudville Gazette post noting that they are one of the units taking control over in Najef province. We'll skip this one.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 13 Skipped: 1

Back to Thomas Wagner again:

May 14, 2006

HEADLINE: 7 bombs explode in Baghdad killing 12 Iraqis; six Shiite shrines bombed around Baqouba.

BYLINE: By THOMAS WAGNER, Associated Press Writer

Two suicide car bombs exploded near a U.S. convoy at a checkpoint on Baghdad's airport road, wounding 18 Iraqis, six civilians and 12 security personnel, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein.

This time, the International Herald Tribune provides a link to the story. You would think that two suicide car bombs targeting a U.S convoy in Baghdad on May 14, 2006 wounding 36 people would get wider attention. Once again, nothing on a Google search by any other news agency.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 14 Skipped: 1

Now a pair stories on May 21 that seems to be a story and an update:

May 21, 2006

HEADLINE: Suicide bomber kills 13 in Baghdad restaurant, new government meets

BYLINE: By THOMAS WAGNER, Associated Press Writer

In southwestern Baghdad, a roadside bomb missed its target a police patrol but wounded five civilians at 8 a.m., in the mostly Sunni Arab neighborhood of Saidiyah, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein.

May 21, 2006

HEADLINE: Bombs, shooting kill 3 Iraqis in Baghdad

[No byline]

In southwestern Baghdad, a roadside bomb missed its target a police patrol but wounded five civilians at 8 a.m., in the Sadiyah neighborhood, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein.

USA Today runs the Jamil Hussein-sourced article under an AP byline. Once again, AP is the only purveyor of this news account, and Jamil Hussein is the only source.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 16 Skipped: 1

Are you getting tired of this? So am I.

Nevertheless:

May 24, 2006

HEADLINE: 19 Iraqis killed as Iraq's leader meets with the Danish prime minister

BYLINE: By THOMAS WAGNER, Associated Press Writer

In southwestern Baghdad, gunmen shot dead a grocery store owner in his shop, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein.

Can't find the AP story. Skipping.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 16 Skipped: 2

Now we have three related posts on May 27, all probably by Sinan Salaheddin, describing the same event.

May 27, 2006

HEADLINE: Iraqi politicians struggle to reach agreement on key security posts; 21 killed in violence

BYLINE: By SINAN SALAHEDDIN, Associated Press Writer

A bomb in a parked car exploded near a busy bus station in southern Baghdad, killing at least four civilians and wounding seven, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

May 27, 2006

HEADLINE: Iraqi politicians struggle to reach agreement on key security posts; car bomb near bus station kills 4

BYLINE: By SINAN SALAHEDDIN, Associated Press Writer

Violence resumed Saturday as a bomb in a parked car exploded near a busy bus station in southern Baghdad, killing at least four civilians and wounding seven, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

Gunmen in three speeding cars also ambushed a patrol in western Baghdad, wounding 10 people, including six policemen, and two other policemen were injured in drive-by shootings in a nearby neighborhood, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

May 27, 2006

HEADLINE: Bomb explodes in parked car near bus station in Baghdad, killing at least 4 and wounding 7

[No byline]

A bomb in a parked car exploded Saturday morning near a busy bus station in Baghdad, killing at least four civilians and wounding seven others, police said.

The attack occurred in the southern neighborhood of Dora, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said, a day after bombs hit three different outdoor markets in Baghdad, killing at least 18 people and wounding more than 60.

Here you go. And guess what? We've got pictures. Well, sorta. Once again they are from the Associated Press, and the picture itself is not exactly a smoking gun; a crying boy in a hospital beside an elderly woman on a stretcher is touching, but not conclusive, and not on-scene. Once again, there are no other sources than Jamil Hussein, and no other news organizations apparently involved other than the Associated Press.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 19 Skipped: 2

May 30, 2006

HEADLINE: Roadside bomb kills police officer, civilian dies when mortar lands at interior ministry

BYLINE: By PATRICK QUINN, Associated Press Writer

Police found the bodies of three blindfolded and handcuffed men who had been tortured and shot in the head. The bodies were found in central and southern Baghdad, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

Taipei Times has the AP story this time around. This is perhaps the most generalized story with Jamil Hussein's name attached: three men were tortured and shot in the head somewhere in central and southern Baghdad. Where, exactly? We don't know, and once again, other news agencies couldn't seem find these three men that Hussein alleges were found on May 30.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 20 Skipped: 2

Newly promoted Kim Gamel offers up this account:

June 1, 2006

HEADLINE: Iraqi premier to present choices for key security posts, announces investigation on Haditha killings

BYLINE: By KIM GAMEL, Associated Press Writer

Three gunmen shot to death two mechanics at their workshop in an industrial area in the al-Bayaa neighborhood in western Baghdad, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

ABC News provides us the link here, in a report contributed to by Bushra Juhi and Qais al-Bashir. Once again, no other news organization could corroborate these accounts.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 21 Skipped: 2

Also as we enter June:

June 1, 2006

HEADLINE: Mortar barrage kills 9 civilians, wounds 40 in southern Baghdad.

[No byline]

A mortar barrage Thursday killed nine civilians and wounded 40 in southern Baghdad, police said.

The attack occurred in south Baghdad's predominantly Sunni Arab Dora district and involved seven mortar rounds landing on four houses, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein.

The Pakistani Dawn provides a variation of this report. As is sadly becoming a trend, I can find no other news service reporting an attack on Dora using mortars on June 1.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 22 Skipped: 2

That brings us to June 5-6, where Kim Gamel goes on a three-story, two-day run on a string of kidnappings:

June 5, 2006

HEADLINE: Dozens kidnapped in Baghdad in new challenge to government

BYLINE: By KIM GAMEL, Associated Press Writer

According to Capt. Jamil Hussein of the al-Yarmouk police station, gunmen opened fire on a minibus in Dora's predominantly Sunni Arab Mahdiya neighborhood. He said 11 people were killed, but Al-Yarmouk hospital reported receiving only two bodies from a shooting. It was unclear if the victims were Sunni or Shiite. There was no one available at Baghdad's main morgue to confirm if it had received any bodies.

June 6, 2006

HEADLINE: Gunmen Kidnap Dozens in Baghdad

BYLINE: By KIM GAMEL, Associated Press Writer

Gunmen also killed a school watchman in Baghdad, and two other brothers were shot to death in a drive-by shooting elsewhere in the capital, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

June 6, 2006

HEADLINE: Dozens kidnapped in Baghdad in new challenge to government

BYLINE: By KIM GAMEL, Associated Press Writer

Gunmen also killed a school watchman in Baghdad, and two other brothers were shot to death in a drive-by shooting elsewhere in the capital, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said. ... According to Capt. Hussein of the al-Yarmouk police station, gunmen opened fire on a minibus in Dora's predominantly Sunni Arab Mahdiya neighborhood. He said 11 people were killed, but Al-Yarmouk hospital reported receiving only two bodies from a shooting. It was unclear if the victims were Sunni or Shiite. There was no one available at Baghdad's main morgue to confirm if it had received any bodies.

CBS News has the account, and it should be noted that even AP reporter Kim Gamel seems not to trust Hussein, noting that though Jamil Hussein said there were 11 people killed, only two bodies made it to the hospital. Kim Gamel is one of two AP reporters who wrote about Jamil Hussein who was promoted to a newly created position after "Jamilgate" broke (the other being Patrick Quinn). To use the left's favorite news-related phrase, "I question the timing." Again, no other news agencies can corroborate this Hussein-sourced story, at least not when it can be found by Google.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 25 Skipped: 2

Hussein was used as a source again twice on June 10:

June 10, 2006

HEADLINE: Bomb hits market in central Baghdad, killing 4 people and wounding 27, Iraqi police say

[No byline]

Gunmen in two cars also shot to death a Shiite metal worker and wounded two others in their shop in western Baghdad, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

June 10, 2006

HEADLINE: U.S. launches dozens of raids to find al-Zarqawi followers in Iraq

BYLINE: By SINAN SALAHEDDIN, Associated Press Writer

Gunmen also stopped a minivan carrying Sunni passengers on the highway from Baghdad to Abu Ghraib, ordered them off the bus and opened fire, killing four and wounding another, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

USA Today and Newsmax presents versions the first AP account (Newsmax does not use Hussein's name, but parrots the information he provided to the AP wire), and a Google search for "Shiite metal worker June 10" came up empty for reports from other news services, as all previous search have.

Hussein's' contribution to Sadaheddin's article, once again with Hussein's name stripped, was presented in the same Newsmax account . Once again, no news organization other than the Associated Press has this story, and once again, Jamil Hussein appears to be the only source for the information.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 27 Skipped: 2

AP Reporter Ryan Lenz joins Jamilapolloza on June 12:

June 12, 2006

HEADLINE: Raid by U.S. forces kills 9, including 2 children

BYLINE: By RYAN LENZ, Associated Press Writer

A bomb also struck a minivan in southern Baghdad, killing six people and wounding 10, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

Lenz's story was picked up by the Washington Post here, Fox News here, and once more, Jamil Hussein was the only source for that account. No other news organization corroborated this account.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 28 Skipped: 2

On June 18:

June 18, 2006

HEADLINE: Gunmen seize 10 workers from bakery in Baghdad, police say

[No byline]

Gunmen attacked a police checkpoint on a highway in the insurgent-infested neighborhood of Dora, wounding two policemen before fleeing, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

Irish site BreakingNews.IE provides this AP account. Again, no other news agency seems to have a corroborating version of this account.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 29 Skipped: 2

The next day:

June 19, 2006

HEADLINE: Explosions strike Baghdad area, killing at least seven people and wounding 16

[No byline]

The first attack was a car bomb that struck an Interior Ministry patrol in western Baghdad, killing four commandos and wounding six, Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

A CBS network news affiliate provides the Jamil link here. A Google Search for "car bomb Iraqi commandos Baghdad"--all the relevant terms you might expect here--again provided nothing related to this attack from any other wire service in a Google search.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 30 Skipped: 2

On June 20:

June 20, 2006

HEADLINE: Bomb hits square in central Baghdad, killing 2 civilians and wounding 18

[No byline]

Elsewhere in the capital, police Capt. Amir Kamil, who provided security for Yarmouk hospital, was shot to death Tuesday at a bus station, Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

Al Jazeera quotes "agencies" again; citing Hussein's name cements the agency for this as being an AP story. I thought I'd come close to being able to supply some photographic evidence of this account, but once again, it fell short. This cached version of an AP story on MyWay.com has the caption for a picture reading:

Two friends of police Capt. Amir Kamil comfort each other at al-Yarmouk hospital after he was shot...

Unfortunately, the picture was not saved in the cache, and even if it was, seeing two people crying doesn't really establish whom they are crying over with any degree of certainty.

Update: Eason Jordan of IraqSlogger founded and fowarded me the picture to the caption above:

But... if Iraqi Police Captain Amir Kamil, who provided security at Yarmouk Hospital and was shot at a bus stop on Tuesday, June 20 does exist, I know precisely who will be able to verify that story, and an email is on the way to Baghdad as we speak to verify this account.

For those of you keeping score at home, this is the second individual ID specific enough to allow me to forward these questions to the PAO at MultiNational Corps-Iraq in Baghdad, who in turn will pass these along to CPATT, which is working directly with the Iraqi Interior Ministry. The Ministry will hopefully have records of Captain Kamil in Yarmouk, gunned down on June 20, 2006, as claimed by Jamil Hussein. As of Tuesday, January 2, 2007, I'm still awaiting verification.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 31 Skipped: 2

Four days later:

June 24, 2006

HEADLINE: Roadside bomb strikes police patrol in northern Baghdad, killing two policemen and wounding three others

[No byline]

A roadside bomb in western Baghdad hit an Iraqi army patrol, injuring two Iraqi soldiers and damaging one vehicle, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

Pakistan's Dawn one again has the AP wire report, and once more, no other agency can verify the account.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 32 Skipped: 2

Four days later:

June 28, 2006

HEADLINE: Iraqis announce capture of a Tunisian al-Qaida member wanted in Samarra shrine bombing

BYLINE: By BASSEM MROUE, Associated Press Writer

A roadside bomb targeting a U.S. convoy exploded in western Baghdad, killing an Iraqi civilian and wounding another, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

Oddly enough, while I could find a sendmail link about this story in Kuwait Times (and less than flattering posts about Mr. Mroue), I could not find non-AP verification of this account. Are you shocked?

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 33 Skipped: 2

Next:

June 29, 2006

HEADLINE: String of bombings and shootings kill a dozen people in Iraq

BYLINE: By QAIS AL-BASHIR, Associated Press Writer

The trash collector, a Shiite, was gunned down in a drive-by shooting early Thursday in western Baghdad, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

Google has a cached version of a Townhall.com release of this AP story, as does the Saudi Press Agency. Other actual news agencies in Iraq however, once again fell short.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 34 Skipped: 2

And now into July:

July 8, 2006

HEADLINE: Three U.S. soldiers killed in Anbar province, more sectarian violence in Baghdad

BYLINE: By SAMEER N. YACOUB, Associated Press Writer

Gunmen in two speeding cars opened fire on a Sunni mosque in west Baghdad's Ghazaliya neighborhood. Mosque guards returned fire and the attackers fled, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

While the byline in this version goes to Bushra Judi, the Houston Chronicle has the AP account citing Jamil Hussein once more, as does ABC News. Once more, Google refuses to offer up a corroborating account from any other news sources.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 35 Skipped: 2

Next up, our good friend Qais al-Bashir:

July 10, 2006 HEADLINE: Car bombs strike Shiite area of Baghdad, killing 8 and wounding 41

BYLINE: By QAIS AL-BASHIR, Associated Press Writer

Gunmen also ambushed a bus in the predominantly Sunni neighborhood of Amariyah in western Baghdad, killing six passengers, including a woman, and the driver, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

USA Today is all over this as Jamil seems to jump in importance, being cited just below the lede for the first time that I can recall. In general, Jamil Hussein's accounts most often occur near the end of stories. Once again, the bus attack seems only to occur in Associated Press reporting sourced to Jamil Hussein.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 36 Skipped: 2

Now from Qassim Abdul-Zahra:

July 11, 2006

HEADLINE: Sunni Arabs announce end of legislative boycott in Iraq; at least 47 killed in attacks
BYLINE: By QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA, Associated Press Writer

Gunmen in three cars attacked a Saudi Arabian import/export company in the upscale Mansour neighborhood in western Baghdad, killing five Iraqi employees before fleeing, Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

al Jazeera provides the link for this one. Once again, Google and Google News provide the big nada when it comes to providing some sort of corroboration from other news services.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 37 Skipped: 2

Last try:

July 12, 2006 HEADLINE: Gunmen in Iraq kidnap some two dozen Shiites from bus station, then kill them BYLINE: By SAMEER N. YACOUB, Associated Press Writer

A suicide car bomber also struck an Iraqi army checkpoint in the western Baghdad neighborhood of Amariyah, killing one soldier and wounding two others, Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

This story could not be found, and was therefore skipped.

Running Tally: Verified: 0 Unverified: 37 Skipped: 3

At this point, I've attempted to find independent verification by outside news agencies for specific events claimed in a total of 40 AP news stories, roughly two-thirds of the Flopping Aces-produced total of 61, where Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein was cited as a source. I'm convinced I've done enough to establish questionable reporting and sourcing, and see no need to finish out the remaining Hussein-attributed accounts, though if someone would like to tackle the remaining third, I'd be interested to see their results.

I've used the Google search engine to hunt down examples of the original articles as they've run unquestioningly in newspapers and even in official government press releases around the world. I've then chosen keywords and dates from these claims made by the incorporeal Captain, and searched for them, in the hopes that Reuters, or the Washington Post, or AFP, or the New York Times could provide independent verification of these same claims.

In 40 attempts, I have not been able to verify a single AP story, though I think I may be able to eventually provide evidence supporting the assassinations of up to four stories involving the assassination of two Iraqi government employees, courtesy of the same MNF-I PAO and CPATT officials that the Associated Press has gone out of their way to disparage.

My conclusions from this exercise are published here.

01/04/07 Update: A source has provided me with a translation of this Arabic account, one of several verifying the death of MOD PAO Mohammed Musaab Talal al-Amari, killed on May 10. Why did you click the link? You don't speak Arabic any better than I do.

Viewing Decebalus

If my memory serves me correctly, we react with fury when terrorists and their allies release propaganda videos of our soldiers being shot, blown up by IEDs, or on the rare occasions where our soldiers have been captured, tortured, executed, and mutilated.

And so I find it rather disgusting that so many seem to prostitute the gritty cell phone video of Saddam Hussein's execution by hanging early Saturday morning.

I have no problem with the fact Saddam was executed. Hussein was a monster who spawned and raised two sons to be even more monsterous than he, and the world is a far better place without him. But I do worry when people seem to revel in this final small measure of justice for his litany of crimes. We are, after all, sending our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines into combat day after day in hope of creating a culture where democracy under the law is respected and normal, where brutality and revenge can be usurped, and eventually fade from being part of the normal course of events to being a noteworthy oddity.

Knowledge of his death should be enough. Saddam's execution video is being prostituted (yes, that word seems most accurate) across the Internet like Decebalus' head on the steps of Rome, and in many cases, with the same triumphant flippancy among the denizens.

We should be better than that.