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It's hilarious that the blog brigade is still trying (and failing) to pick apart the minutae of one report in some odd attempt to prove everything is going great in Iraq.
Once again the Fighting 101st Keyboarders get it wrong, and once again they refuse to take responsibility. But cheer up Yoni, at least a leaker is getting punished.Shocking Twist: Iraqi At Center of Dispute Over AP Source Does Exist -- And Faces Arrest for Talking to Media
By E&P Staff
Published: January 04, 2007 5:20 PM ET updated 8:00 PM ET
NEW YORK The Associated Press has just sent E&P the following dispatch from Baghdad, as it was about to be distributed on its wire. The existence of Jamil Hussein had been hotly disputed by conservative bloggers, some Iraqi officials and the U.S. military in recent weeks.
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BAGHDAD (AP) -- 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 iden y in order to disseminate false news about the war.
Khalaf offered no explanation Thursday for why the ministry had initially denied Hussein's existence, other than to state that its first search of records failed to turn up his full name. He also declined to say how long the ministry had known of its error and why it had made no attempt in the past six weeks to correct the public record.
Hussein was not the original source of the disputed report of the attack; the account was first told on Al-Arabiya satellite television by a Sunni elder, Imad al-Hashimi, who retracted it after members of the Defense Ministry paid him a visit. Several neighborhood residents subsequently gave the AP independent accounts of the Shiite militia attack on a mosque in which six people were set on fire and killed.
Khalaf told the AP that an arrest warrant had been issued for the captain for having contacts with the media in violation of the ministry's regulations.
Hussein told the AP on Wednesday that he learned the arrest warrant would be issued when he returned to work on Thursday after the Eid al-Adha holiday. His phone was turned off Thursday and he could not be reached for further comment.
Hussein appears to have fallen afoul of a new Iraqi push, encouraged by some U.S. advisers, to more closely monitor the flow of information about the country's violence, and strictly enforce regulations that bar all but authorized spokesmen from talking to media.
During Saddam Hussein's rule, information in Iraq had been fiercely controlled by the Information Ministry, but after the arrival of U.S. troops in 2003 and during the transition to an elected government in 2004, many police such as Hussein felt freer to talk to journalists and give information as it occurred.
As a consequence, most news organizations working in Iraq have maintained Iraqi police contacts routinely in recent years. Some officers who speak with reporters withhold their names or attempt to disguise their names using different variants of one or two middle names or last names for reasons of security. Hussein, however, spoke for the record, using his authentic first and last name, on numerous occasions.
His first contacts with the AP were in 2004, when the current Interior Ministry and its press apparatus was still being formed out of the chaotic remains of the Saddam-era ministry.
The information he provided about various police incidents was never called into question until he became embroiled in the attempt to discredit the AP story about the Hurriyah mosque attack.
Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said Thursday that the military had asked the Interior Ministry on Nov. 26 if it had a policeman by the name of Jamil Hussein. Two days later, U.S. Navy Lt. Michael B. Dean, a public affairs officer with the U.S. Navy Multi-National Corps-Iraq Joint Operations Center, sent an e-mail to AP in Baghdad saying that the military had checked with the Iraqi Interior Ministry and was told that no one by the name of Jamil Hussein worked for the ministry or was a Baghdad police officer.
Dean also demanded that the mosque attack story be retracted.
The text of the Dean letter appeared quickly on several Internet blogs, prompting heated debate about the story and criticism of the AP.
At the weekly Interior Ministry briefing on Nov. 30, Khalaf cited the AP story as an example of why the ministry had decided to form a special unit to monitor news coverage and vowed to take legal action against journalists who failed to correct stories the ministry deemed to be incorrect. (Freedom and Democracy in action!)
At the time Khalaf said the ministry had no one on its staff by the name of Jamil Hussein.
"Maybe he wore an MOI (Ministry of Interior) uniform and gave a different name to the reporter for money," Khalaf said then. The AP has not paid Jamil Hussein and does not pay any news sources for information for its stories.
On Thursday, Khalaf told AP that the ministry at first had searched its files for Jamil Hussein and found no one. He said a later search turned up Capt. Jamil Gholaiem Hussein, assigned to the Khadra police station.
But the AP had already identified the captain by all three names in a story on Nov. 28-- two days before the Interior Ministry publicly denied his existence on the police rolls.
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.
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E&P note: As recently as yesterday, Mic e Malkin, the best-known blog critic of Hussein's existence, stated flatly "the fact that there is no police captain named 'Jamil Hussein' working now or ever in either Yarmouk or al Khadra, according to on-the-ground sources in Baghdad. Late this afternoon, she posted part of the AP dispatch above with the comment, "Checking it out. Moving forward...."
She later sent a note to the blog of another Hussein doubter, Allahpundit, stating, "Just to clarify, I’m not apologizing for anything."
Another prime Jamil Hussein doubter, Jules Crittenden of the Boston Herald, wrote on his blog on Tuesday, "If Jamil Hussein's apparent failure to exist is ever acknowledged, it will be buried. The AP's clients, by and large, don't care. Nor to the 'ethics' gatekeepers in the business."
Dan Riehl, another blogger certain Hussein did not exist, responded today, "Fascinating. But let me be the first to say to the Left, before they lose themselves in glee, I don't see that bloggers have anything to apologize for, nor do I see this story being at an end."
Confederate Yankee allowed, "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."
Eason Jordan, at his new IraqSlogger site, just two days ago had declared that AP was now in a major "scandal." He had earlier offered to fly Malkin and another blogger to Baghdad, on his own dime, to search for Hussein.
E&P Staff ([email protected])
Last edited by PixelPusher; 01-05-2007 at 12:41 AM.
It's hilarious that the blog brigade is still trying (and failing) to pick apart the minutae of one report in some odd attempt to prove everything is going great in Iraq.
Update.
AP's Editor Criticizes Those Who Questioned Iraq Source
By Joe Strupp
Published: January 05, 2007 11:30 AM ET
NEW YORK Associated Press Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll on Friday criticized those who questioned the existence of an AP Iraq source, who was proven this week to be real, saying the scrutiny has now endangered the man's life.
"I never quite understood why people chose to disbelieve us about this particular man on this particular story," Carroll told E&P, referring to Jamil Hussein, an Iraq police captain. "AP runs hundreds of stories a day, and has run thousands of stories about things that have happened in Iraq."
Carroll pointed out that critics should be more concerned with the fact that Hussein could face imprisonment for being a source to journalists than how AP handled the situation. "A man who is a legitimate police official who has talked to journalists is threatened with arrest for doing so," she said. "Doesn't that bother anybody other than me? Officials being threatened with arrest for talking to reporters ought to be of concern." (Nah! They HATE leakers...unless they're sancitoned by the executive branch)
Underscoring the dangers there, news emerged Friday that an AP staffer missing six days had been found dead, the fourth AP employee to die in Iraq.(Yeah, well that'll happen when you go outside military bases to find out for yourself what's going on in Iraq. If they were smart they would've stuck to the Hannity/O'Reilly Green Zone Celebrity Tour circuit)
Carroll also questioned the reluctance of Iraq and U.S. authorities to confirm Hussein's existence after questions about him surfaced following a November AP report on the shooting of six people during an attack on a Sunni mosque. The Iraq Interior Ministry finally confirmed Hussein's existence on Thursday.
"I never understood why Iraqi authorities and the U.S. military questioned his existence," she said. "We took the criticism seriously and we kept reporting on it and asking questions about the incident."
She also said attention should be paid more to the war than to AP's use of one source. "I think a little perspective is warranted here," she said. "While this has been going on, hundreds if not thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed and hundreds of serviceman have died."(Sorry, but the fightin' 101st Keyboarders aren't gonna let "overall perspective" get in the way of a good non-story)
But while Iraqi officials -- who had denied the man's existence -- eventually aided AP by confirming Hussein's existence, they also added a new danger to the source, threatening him with arrest for speaking to journalists. According to Iraqi officials, they may seek AP's help in identifying Hussein as a source in order to prosecute him. Carroll said the news organization had not decided what it would do if asked to participate in such an identification.
"Should that happen, we'll cross that bridge when it comes to us," Carroll said. "When we found out he was the subject of an arrest warrant, we talked to him. But his phone has been turned off and we don't know where he is. We are unaware if he has been arrested."
Dozens of conservative bloggers have been harshly critical of AP in recent weeks for failing to prove Hussein's existence. Former CNN president Eason Jordan claimed today that Hussein should have stepped forward sooner and asked why AP did not produce him.
"The man is now under the threat of arrest and imprisonment," Carroll said in response to Jordan's comments. "I guess people who ask that are among those who don't believe the AP, and that is certainly their prerogative."
When asked what she though of bloggers who criticize other media in light of this incident, Carroll would not condemn all of them. "I wouldn't say bloggers are this unanimous group, there are smart and responsible blogs that help you and there are those who are water cooler blogs," she said. "They are not any more monochromatic than the more conventional news media."
ITs funny how your defending the AP using only one source for 41 consecutive AP stories.
So everything's going great in Iraq?
No, according to Jamil Hussein.
I'm asking you.
Why are you afraid to answer a simple question?
it's not going great. jamil hussein says so.
What do you say? You're implying that the AP is lying about everything going on in Iraq.
Just say things are going great according to you.
Don't you see Chumper? Take away those 41 stories in which a local cop named Jamil Hussein contributed as an unpaid source, and Iraq is safer than downtown Miami or D.C.!
Yeah, we're sending in 15-20,000 more troops on the word of Jamil Hussein. They won't have anything to do once they get there.
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