Diego Fernando Murillo acknowledged he had conspired with military, political and “anti-communist” forces to smuggle tonnes of cocaine into the US.

Murillo, also known as Don Berna, now faces between 27 and 33 years in jail.

You’ll notice that the BBC is careful to identify them as “right wing” and “anti-communist” several times there.

So I was wondering: are they more Russell Kirk types, or Straussians? Maybe they’re more Hayekian Road-to-Serfdom thinkers. Or…maybe they’re theo-cons? Don’t a lot of the AUC’s libraries subscribe to World magazine?

Hmmm….Libertarians, maybe? Guns, drugs, hate legitimate authority and display a complete lack of conscience. Closest yet, but not quite right.

Seriously, the AUC isn’t a movement with an ideology other than killing FARC and selling drugs. Mostly just selling drugs. But the media thinks that since FARC gets called a left-wing terror group because they stand for a Castroesque revolution in Colombia (and selling drugs), therefore their opposition, the AUC, must be “right-wing”.

So let’s hear it for Plan Colombia, and the Bush administration’s prosecution of right wing terror!

The AP’s story about Murillo includes a couple of interesting details–including how the case that resulted in his extradition was started by an ordinary NYPD detective doing good police work, as well as Murillo’s Keyser Soze-like legend:

As a younger man, he was the target of an assassination attempt that left his body riddled with gunshot wounds. The attack cost him part of one leg and paralyzed muscles in his face, but somehow, he survived.

“The local legend,” Barry said, “is that he reappeared on the streets of Medellin with a crutch under one arm and a machine gun under the other.”

Oopsie, did I just quote the AP? Well, I must owe them some money, then. They can send Captain Jamil Hussein by my house to pick it up from me.

He knows where I live. He knows everything…

_________________

{Post by See-Dubya}

“AP Threatens Blogger for Unauthorized Reproduction of Photos . . . Then Reproduces Photos Without Authorization.”

But of course, this self-exempting journalism is par for the course for the AP.

The Associated Press puts its advocacy spin and institutional arrogance on naked display in a story hot off the wires. You know those four mosques that AP reporter Qais Al Bashir and AP source Capt. Jamil Hussein claimed had been “destroyed” and “torched” and “burned and blew up“? The ones we showed were attacked, but not destroyed, in our Hot Air video report and NY Post column 10 days ago?

Well, newsflash: The AP has just acknowledged that the “destroyed” mosques are still standing. The headline: “Sunni Mosques Still Show Damage in Iraq.” Here’s the lead paragraph, which mischaracterizes the AP’s initial reporting and description of the mosques:

Four Sunni mosques attacked in late November in the embattled Hurriyah neighborhood of Baghdad still bear scars from the attacks and all are now either under Shiite Muslim control or closed.

Immediately after the Nov. 24 incidents, an Associated Press story quoted an Iraqi police captain saying the four mosques had been attacked and six men doused with fuel and burned alive at one of them. In some early versions of the AP story, which was updated several times as more information became available, the police officer referred to the mosques being burned or blown up.

Nowhere does the AP acknowledge that it reported that the mosques were destroyed. (Note to AP: Check Lexis/Nexis like Patterico did if there’s something wrong with your internal databases.)

The AP continues to spin by mischaracterizing the military’s reaction to its initial reporting:

The report was challenged a day later, when a U.S. military spokesman said it could only confirm an attack on one mosque.

Here’s the full text of the military’s response on Nov. 25, which challenges NOT the allegation that the mosques were attacked, but that all four were burned:

Contrary to recent media reporting that four mosques were burned in Hurriya, an Iraqi Army patrol investigating the area found only one mosque had been burned in the neighborhood.

Soldiers from the 6th Iraqi Army Division conducted a patrol in Hurriya Friday afternoon in response to media reports that four mosques were being burned as retaliation for the VBIED attacks in Sadr City on Thursday.

The Soldiers set up a checkpoint near the Al Muhaimen mosque at approximately 2 p.m. and found the mosque intact with no evidence of any fire at the location.

While investigating the Al Meshaheda mosque, the patrol received small arms fire from unknown insurgents. The patrol returned fire, and the insurgents broke contact and fled the area. A subsequent check of the mosque found the mosque intact with no evidence of a fire.

At approximately 3:50 p.m., a local civilian reported to the patrol that armed insurgents had set the Al-Nidaa mosque on fire by throwing a gas container into the mosque. The patrol pursued the insurgents but lost contact with them.

The Soldiers called the fire department and set up a cordon around the mosque. Local fire trucks responded to the scene and extinguished the fire at approximately 4:00 p.m. The mosque sustained smoke and fire damage in the entry way but was not destroyed.

An alleged attack on a fourth mosque remains unconfirmed. The patrol was also unable to confirm media reports that six Sunni civilians were allegedly dragged out of Friday prayers and burned to death. Neither Baghdad police nor Coalition forces have reports of any such incident.

Contiuning with the AP’s CYA report:

Since then, the AP has confirmed damage at three of the four mosques, including burn damage at two and slight damage at a third…

…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…

A far cry from the AP’s report that all four mosques were “destroyed,” “torched,” “burned and blew up.” You can re-read the full story of what happened to the Hurriya mosques, with photos, here, and video plus on-the-record comments from FOB Justice officers here. Thanks for the confirmation, AP.

Here is the AP’s corrections policy:

CORRECTIONS/CORRECTIVES:

Staffers must notify supervisory editors as soon as possible of errors or potential errors, whether in their work or that of a colleague. Every effort should be made to contact the staffer and his or her supervisor before a correction is moved.

When we’re wrong, we must say so as soon as possible. When we make a correction in the current cycle, we point out the error and its fix in the editor’s note. A correction must always be labeled a correction in the editor’s note. We do not use euphemisms such as “recasts,” “fixes,” “clarifies” or “changes” when correcting a factual error.

A corrective corrects a mistake from a previous cycle. The AP asks papers or broadcasters that used the erroneous information to use the corrective, too.

Well?

***

Bryan weighs in. The AP press office sends this link, which skirts any accountability for failing to make a corrective–and instead changes the subject to AP journalists killed in Iraq.

Excerpt:

WELL, the Iraqi Ministry of Interior says disputed Associated Press source Jamil Hussein does exist. But at least one story he told the AP just doesn’t check out: The Sunni mosques that as Hussein claimed and AP reported as “destroyed,” “torched” and “burned and [blown] up” are all still standing. So the credibility of every AP story relying on Jamil Hussein remains dubious.

Let’s take it from the beginning.

When the AP ran its head- line-grabbing and horrifying account of alleged atrocities in Baghdad last Thanksgiving, its main source was an Iraqi police captain, one Jamil Hussein.

Bloggers led by Curt of Flopping Aces (floppingaces.net) raised questions about the veracity and existence of Hussein and the information he supplied to the AP. U.S. military officials and the Iraqi government initially disputed that Hussein was employed as a legitimate police officer.

After several weeks of stonewalling by its news executives, the AP published a report quoting an Iraqi Interior Ministry spokesman who reversed course and verified Hussein’s existence and employment. Left-wing blogs and mainstream-media outlets crowed – eagerly proclaiming the death of the conservative blogosphere’s credibility and declaring the matter settled.

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. [Mary Katharine Ham traced the evolution of the "destroyed-to-burned-to-torched" mosques/six burning Sunnis story here.] 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 (see below) 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.”

One of the mosques identified by the AP, the Nidaa Alah mosque, had been abandoned and vacant at the time it was hit with small-arms fire, say Iraqi and U.S. Army officials. Two of its inside rooms were burned out by a lobbed firebomb, according to an Army report.

Three other mosques in the area – the al Muhaymin, al Mushahiba and Ahbab Mustafa mosques – sustained small-arms fire damage to their exteriors; the Mustafa mosque also had two rooms burned out by a firebomb. [The Mustafa mosque is the location where the alleged kerosene immolation incident occurred.]

Contrary to Hussein and the AP’s account, military reports note that Iraqi Army battalion members were on the scene – pursuing attackers, securing the area, calling the fire department, providing support and an outer cordon.

Neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post was able to confirm AP’s story.

The AP quoted one corroborating witness, Imad al-Hasimi, a Sunni elder in Hurriya, who “confirmed Hussein’s account” of the immolated Sunnis on Al-Arabiya television. When Al-Hasimi later recanted, AP implied that it was due to pressure from Iraqi government officials. The other possibility: He recanted because it wasn’t true.

Make no mistake. Hurriya is a Shiite militia-infested neighborhood where Sunnis have suffered horrible treatment. We accompanied a civil affairs patrol to a neighborhood meeting where US Mahdi Army apologists falsely accused Army Rangers of damaging their mosque and refused to provide any information on a kidnapping incident involving two Sunnis rescued by the Iraqi Army. But as the troops who work closely with that Iraqi Army battalion told us, the incident that made front page covers and worldwide headlines last Thanksgiving didn’t happen the way the AP and Jamil Hussein said it did:

Capt. Aaron Kaufman of Task Force Justice, which works closely with the Iraqi Army battalion that was on the scene and monitored events as they happened, told us: “It was blown way out of proportion, there was nobody lit on fire.”

Capt. Stacy Bare, the civil-affairs officer who took us on patrol in Hurriya, concurred: “There were no six Sunnis burned.”

Murders do happen regularly in their area, the soldiers emphasized. And no one sugarcoated the brutality of the Shiite militia. But the soldiers say this particular story doesn’t stand up…

It’s worth noting that several of the leaders of the Dagger Brigade we talked to are quite familiar with mosque violence. They were serving in Samarra during the Golden Dome attack.

While Bryan and I were in Iraq, Curt of Flopping Aces and Bob Owens pressed forward on the Jamil Hussein angle. Whether the AP used a pseudonym for Hussein or not, and whatever the fickle Interior Ministry is now saying, Hussein’s information clearly cannot be trusted. As bloggers have emphasized, Hussein was a single source for dozens of other AP stories about atrocities across a wide swath of Baghdad. And as AP executive Kathleen Carroll herself underscores:

“AP runs hundreds of stories a day, and has run thousands of stories about things that have happened in Iraq.”

Or rather, things that their questionable sources and local stringers have told them have happened in Iraq.

***

Photos from the U.S. Army Dagger Brigade/Iraqi Army unit that responded to Hurriya attacks:

Worshipers pray a day after the attack that supposedly “destroyed” the Muhaymin mosque.

Members of the 1/1/6 unit of the Iraqi Army at the Muhaymin mosque.

Another room of the “destroyed” Muhaymin mosque.

RPG damage to the exterior of the Muhaymin mosque. People were wounded at the Muhaymin mosque, according to an Army report. The 1/1/6 Iraqi Army battalion brought medical assets to treat them.

Small arms fire damage at the Nidaa Alah mosque, which had been abandoned at the time of attack, according to U.S. Army and Iraqi Army officials. The other side of the dome was partially blown out.

Small arms fire damage to the Mustafa mosque.

Serious fire damage to the Imam room and library at the Mustafa mosque.

Anti-Sunni graffiti on the Mustafa mosque.

Minor damage to a Mustafa mosque sign.

***

Update: Some AP apologists are denying that the news organization ever reported that the mosques were destroyed. As I noted above, Mary Katharine Ham saved the timestamped and dated wire copy and tracked the evolution of the story:

11/24/06 10:10:28

Sunnis claim mosques and houses burned by Shiite militia, police watch
By QAIS AL-BASHIR
Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – Sunni residents in a volatile northwest Baghdad neighborhood claimed Friday that revenge-seeking Shiite militiamen had destroyed four Sunni mosques, burned homes and killed many people, while the Shiite-dominated police force stood by and did nothing.

The reports were the most serious allegations of retribution in Baghdad the day after Sunni insurgents killed 215 people and wounded 257 with five car bombs and mortar fire in the capital’s Sadr City Shiite slum.

Patterico has screenshots of the same wire story archived on Lexis/Nexis via its a la carte service. Follow-up stories referred to four mosques as “torched” and “burned” and blown up.

***
MNC-I reports that a Shia mosque was leveled in an explosion northwest of the Iraqi capital two days ago.

~^~

Patterico says he “just doesn’t get it,” referring to AP’s ever taller tale of Jamil Hussein Ghdaab Gulaim Ghdaab Redacted.

Specifically, he objects to the conclusion that AP knew “Jamil Hussein” was a pseudonym:

UPDATE: Let me make clear what I’m confused about. Everyone is running around screeching that the AP knowingly used a pseudonym.

What is the proof?

The problem is that Patterico — being a first-rate trial lawyer (prosecutor) — tends to think like a lawyer… which is extremely useful in his chosen profession (and is probably one reason why he chose that profession in the first place), but which can lead to unnecessary demands. Specifically, I believe Patterico is waiting for actual evidence — some AP reporter testifying that they knew it was a nom de guerre — that will never materialize, for obvious reasons. In this case, we can get farther by just being logical about the question.

What are the possible cases?

1. There really is a Police Captain Jamil Hussein — under that name — working at the Khadra police station in Iraq, and he was AP’s source, just as they claimed;
2. There is a human working at the Khadra station who was AP’s source, but his name is not Jamil Hussein, and he may or may not be a police captain;
3. Or else AP had no source at all at Khadra, and who cares whether someone named Jamil incidentally works at there?

I think that even if Eric Boehlert himself read this post, carefully sounding each word out, he would have to agree this covers all bases: either AP has a source at Khadra or not; and if they did, either he was named Jamil Hussein or not. So let’s go through them. Under which of these circumstances is AP acting honorably?

Let’s take the easiest cases first:

Case 1: Jamil Hussein (under that name) works at Khadra and was AP’s source

This would be the best-case scenario for AP (and for Eric Boehlert and others of his ilk). Alas for them, it seems very unlikely at this point: so far, the only news agency which has reported that Interior Ministry spokesman Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf said that “Police Captain Jamil Hussein” worked at Khadra police station — thus ever so slightly vindicating AP — was (drum roll) AP itself!

This is like shooting craps in the street: the dice roll down the gutter-drain; so you climb down to check, and you announce from the sewer than you made your point and won all the money.

Even if true, as Patterico himself has pointed out a number of times, this still would not be evidence either for AP’s “burning Sunnis” claim or its “burning mosques” claim. But so far, AP cannot even surmount the “existence” hurdle… other than by shouting up from the sewer that they made their point.

Case 3: The AP simply had no source at all at Khadra

We already covered this possibility (puckishly) over at Big Lizards, in our post Solvalogging: Jamil Hussein… Baghdad’s Own Lieutenant Kijé. Visit, read, return (wash, rinse, repeat).

For the elite media to make up sources out of whole cloth is not common, but it’s not unheard of either.

Now we get to the more interesting case…

Finally, case 2: AP has a source at Khadra, but his name is not Jamil Hussein

This is the case that Patterico implicitly assumes to be the only plausible alternative to case 1 (though I still haven’t entirely given up on the “Lieutenant Kijé” scenario!) There are two possible “subcases” here, which is the llama on whose horns Patterico sticks:

1. Steven Hurst and his editors at AP were aware that their source’s name was not Jamil Hussein

If this is the case, then AP was complicit in passing along a false name to the Ministry of the Interior, causing them to erroneously (in this scenario) report that the source did not work at the Khadra police station. At the very least, this is devious practice.

Did AP just forget that “Jamil Hussein” was actually “Mohammed Achmed al-Fruitbat?” Was the purpose to make the MOI look foolish, forcing them to make a statement then correct it later? Or did they not give the real name because there is a problem with the source, and they didn’t want anyone looking too carefully?

If the reason for the pseudonym was entirely honorable — Hurst worried about death threats against the man — then why not simply say “said a souce who would only speak on condition that we not name him, due to fear of reprisals”? That would have been honest. Thus, I think we can rule out this honorable reason; and all remaining reasons are disreputable and dishonorable.

2. Steven Hurst and his editors at AP were completely unaware that their source had given them a nom de guerre

If anything, this is even worse for AP than sub-scenario (a) above. If Hurst and his editors were blissfully unaware that their source was giving them a false name — then that can only mean they did not even make a minimalist check on his veracity… not even so much as verifying his identity!

What does this mean? Basically, that anyone can call up an AP reporter in Iraq, claim to be a police captain with a story to tell… and that story — propaganda — will wind up in an AP war dispatch without the slightest checking. Rumor central — and a lovely example of the big-box media’s “multiple layers of editing” in action.

And of course, if they couldn’t even bother to verify “Jamil Hussein’s” name, why trouble to verify any other piece of the 62 stories he told them? The source could have said that Dick Cheney personally few to Baghdad and shot some kids, just for fun… and AP would have run with it that evening.

Bottom line

Thus, of all the possibilities, the only one that means AP acted honorably, responsibly, and professionally is case 1, where there really, really is a police captain, stationed at Khadra and actually named Jamil Hussein, and that this fellow was actually a source for the Associated Press.

Under any other scenario — a source for AP at Khadra but who isn’t named Jamil Hussein, or even no source whatsoever — AP has acted despicably, dishonorably, and has forfeited whatever shreds of trust remained in news consumers after 87,339 Iraq horror stories that turned out to be complete fabrications… and it doesn’t make a lick of difference whether they knew he wasn’t named Jamil Hussein but taunted us with the name anyway, or whether they were so incompetent (or venal) that they deliberately did not even inquire into the matter.

So far, AP has been completely unable to demonstrate that case 1 is true; the closest they have come is to assert, themselves, that the MOI verified it — only to see that assertion itself disputed.

What’s not to understand?

Comments on this post here.

~^~

According to Curt at Flopping Aces, one reason that the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior (MOI) — boss of the National Police — and Multinational Force Iraq (MNFI) were unable to locate Police Captain Jamil Hussein at the Khadra police station may have been… that there is no Police Captain Jamil Hussein at the Khadra police station.

Curt has a source (Bill Costlow) at the Civilian Police Assistance Training Team (CPATT, Americans working in Iraq to train Iraqis in basic police procedures) who says that it turns out that the so-called (literally) “Jamil Hussein” touted by AP as their source, the source whose full name AP now claims to be Jamil Gholaiem Hussein — is in fact actually named Jamil Ghdaab Gulaim. No “Hussein” in his name anywhere.

But guess what Bill just confirmed? 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.

Bear in mind, this is by way of a heads-up; there is no independent confirmation of what Costlow told Curt. But on the other hand, as I noted over on Big Lizards, we also have not seen anybody but AP claim that Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, spokesman for the MOI, had admitted that “Jamil Hussein” worked at that station after all:

Since we now know that at least one Jamil exists in a disclosed location, it should be child’s play for Reuters, the Times, the Times, the Post, CNN, or some other newspaper or television network to hound the guy into an interview with them: have they? For that matter, has anybody — other than AP — even interviewed Brigadier Khalaf and asked him about Jamil Hussein?

So we have the unsupported word of AP (which did not publish a transcript of the alleged admission) vs. the unsupported word of a blogger quoting a member of CPATT. Were I a betting man (oh wait, I am), I’d have to give the odds to Flopping Aces in this one. Especially insofar as, to this date, I don’t believe AP has even acknowledged that their original story (four mosques “burned,” 24 Sunnis slain) was completely wrong. They simply changed it quietly, in the dead of night, without noting the changes… which does not inspire confidence in their confident assertions today.

If true (if!), it would be a pretty darned good explanation of why MOI and MNFI were unable to find Jamil Hussein: because AP lied about his name, giving him a pseudonym then daring anyone to find him.

Here, it’s just about like this: “Our source is Fester Bestertester, who works at the K-Mart on Maple St.”

“There is no Fester Bestertester at the K-Mart on Maple Street.”

“Aha, the regional manager of K-Mart just admitted that he has a Fester Karbunkle Bestertester working at the K-Mart on Maple! Don’t you feel like an idiot now? Were you lying when you said Fester Bestertester doesn’t exist, or were you just stupid and incompetent?”

“Actually, the regional manager of K-Mart said that we have a Fester Aloysius Karbunkle working there, and that was only after you added the name Karbunkle. He doesn’t have the name Bestertester. Nobody named Fester Bestertester works there.”

“See? We told you all along our source was Fester Bestertester working at K-Mart on Maple Street!”

If this is confirmed — and so far, it’s just according to Curt’s CPATT source — but if it’s confirmed that “Police Captain Jamil Hussein” does not, in fact, exist, and that AP was using a false name without bothering to mention it… then regardless of the propriety of that maneuver (I have no idea what journalistic “ethics” permit), one has to wonder about all the AP crowing in this story:

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 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.

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.

I can think of one.

(Comments on this post over here.)

This is the last part of the triptych; you are now free to move about the cabin.

~^~

This post is by the lizards (mostly Sachi), not by our dearest Michelle; third time’s the charm: I finally understood, after MM switched to a real cell phone instead of two Dixie cups and a string, that she was going to visit the “old rake.” This can mean only one thing: she’s off on a jaunt to the environs of Hugh Hewitt… who is, as all know, the oldest rake in the toolshed! Now that we’ve got that sorted out…

The great mosaic

Boehlert wags his finger, pointing out that in the same week this “six burnt alive” story came out, hundreds more were killed:

Keep in mind that in the seven days surrounding the Burned Alive story, hundreds and hundreds of Iraqis were killed in sectarian violence.

To date, warbloggers have not raised serious questions about any of those slayings or the reporting surrounding them. Yet viewing Iraq through the soda straw that is the Burned Alive story, they insist the press, thanks to its pro-terrorist sympathies, is creating the illusion of “chaos” in Iraq.

This is simple misdirection. “Warbloggers” rightly focus on the particular source for this story, “Police Capt.Jamil Hussein,” who has figured prominently in more than 60 AP articles in the last two years. It is not unfair to say that Jamil Hussein, who we have labeled Baghdad’s own Lieutenant Kije, is AP’s “go-to guy” whenever they need a story about innocent Sunni victims being brutalized and butchered by Shiite death squads, under the complacent eyes, if not direct orders, of the Iraqi government. That is, whenever AP needs to spread the meme that the new Iraqi government is just as bad — nay, far worse! — than the Baathist hell it replaces.

If he is not a reliable source — or worse, if he does not actually exist (and despite AP’s claim to have verified his existence, we still don’t know for sure from independent reporters not employed by AP) — then what are we to make of these 62 stories we have read during the last two years? Those stories are the only evidence we have of systematic, widespread slaughter of Sunnis by death squads.

Did they really happen? Did they happen the way Lt. Kije claimed? Did he make them all up? Even “warbloggers, who have virtually no serious journalism experience among” are allowed to wonder whether we can take seriously a source who gets wrong as many fundamental facts as Hussein did. At what point are we entitled, even duty bound, to say we will no longer believe a fellow who is extraordinarily reckless with the truth (or extraordinarily reckless with lies, take your pick).

But it’s not just Lt. Kije; Boehlert also neglects to mention that another Iraqi “official,” Lt. Abdel-Razzaq, who has been featured in 23 AP articles, was held for questioning by the Iraqi government for unauthorized press contacts. (Hat tip Flopping Aces)

Now, Boehlert certainly has a point in one respect:

The AP also didn’t think much of CENTCOM’s suggestion that reporters only quote people found on the government’s approved list of sources.

This is self-evident; reporters should never agree to accept only official sources, official stories, or get the approval of officials before publishing. But Boehlert seems oddly unconversant with the shameful (and admitted) history of “reporting” by his beloved mainstream media in Iraq. In 2003, after the Coalition invasion of Iraq and the fall of Saddam Hussein, Eason Jordan admitted in a New York Times editorial that CNN (and all other journalists) had deliberately reported Baathist propaganda during the Saddam era… because it was more urgent to keep their Baghdad bureaus than to tell the truth about that brutal regime.

Even by Boehlert’s own standards, this should be even worse than chastising low-ranking police officers because they anointed themselves media sources, a task normally falling to higher-ranking official spokesmen. So… can we at least agree that Eason Jordan and Capt. Hussein and Lt. Abdel-Razzaq were perhaps not all honorable men?

As Boehlert never tires of reminding us (as if we should scuff our feet in shame), we are not professional journalists. We don’t work on newspapers. Heck, we didn’t even graduate from the Columbia School of Journalism (though Bill O’Reilly did; what does Eric Boehlert think of him?)

We cannot look into every story coming out of Iraq; we must, of necessity, pick and choose: We can spot check. The method is used all the time in a manufacturing; if the failure rate of sampling is too great, the entire batch is considered a failure.

It may seem like we are picking on a small stone of a big mosaic. But what the heck does Boehlert think makes up the big mosaic in the first place but the same small stones we’re spot-checking? If too many stones turn out not to be true, then what can we conclude about the entire mosaic?

The bloodthirsty warbloggers

Eric Boehlert concludes that we have a secret motive for demanding on-the-ground reporting by American reporters, rather than simply taking the word of stringers, who could as easily be terrorist sympathizers as honest native journalists. Boehlert does not consider any of us to be honorable men. He believes that deep down, we’re hoping to see journalists slain (yet Boehlert echoes the charge leveled earlier by Eason Jordan, and I thought we already agreed Jordan might not be an honorable man… oh, let it slide):

To watch warbloggers taunt journalists for being cowards is also unsettling. Curt at Flopping Aces wrote: “If the reporters would leave their comfy hotel rooms and actually go out and survey the scenes themselves then I am sure we would get a completely different picture.” Honestly, is there any irony sharper than members of the 101st Fighting Keyboardists, blogging comfortably from their air-conditioned stateside offices while obsessively googling AP dispatches in search of phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that don’t meet the right-wing standard of excellence, lecturing on-the-ground news reporters about the need to witness the Iraq conflict up close?… [Curt, the "fighting keyboardist," spent five years in the United States Marine Corps, followed by six years as a police officer. Just FYI.]

The notion is demented, but given their wild online rants, I don’t think it’s out of bounds to suggest that warbloggers want journalists to venture into exceedingly dangerous sections of Iraq because warbloggers want journalists to get killed. That’s how deep their hatred for the press runs… Also, by publicly demanding the AP “produce” Capt. Hussein — for him to hold some sort of a press conference and announce his presence at a time when Iraqi police officers are being targeted daily for assassination [Sunni police officers?] — indicates that warbloggers don’t much care whether Hussein lives or dies either, as long as they can peddle their anti-media rants.

Whew! Perhaps one of the multiple layers of mainstream-media editing at Media Matters could speak to Boehlert about the length of his paragraphs.

Putting aside his curt dismissal of Curt as a member of the “101st Fighting Keyboardists” (another unkindness from this honorable man?), Boehlert appears ignorant of such embedded bloggers such as Bill Roggio, Michael Yon, and Michael Fumento, who have each embedded with the military many times, traveling outside the Green Zone and into danger. Not to mention all the mil-bloggers who have actually fought in Iraq and currently fighting. (And also not to mention the upcoming embedding, if that’s exactly the word I mean, of Michelle Malkin herself in Iraq.)

Where does Boehlert blog from, one wonders? As an honorable man, I am certain he spends quite a bit of time in the Iraq or Afghanistan war zone. If he has any military background, he certainly doesn’t mention it in his presumably self-written bio over at the Huffington Post, where he also blogs (some posts may simply be crossposted with Media Matters, including this one).

The conspiracy of shared vision

There is indeed an elite “conspiracy” of a very particular sort, the kind enunciated in Thomas Sowell’s seminal work the Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation As a Basis for Social Policy… the conspiracy of shared vision.

Those who hold this shared vision (the “anointed”) need not meet and decide in advance what they will write, what narrative will permeate their stories; they simply all believe the same things, a shared quasi-religious gestalt that bursts forth like Athena from Zeus’s brow, full-formed and insistent. The gestalt colors everything the reporter says or writes, all he believes, every story he pursues.

Yesterday, the gestalt was that Iraq was a “quagmire” that would send “20,000″ American soldiers home in “body bags.” Today, the gestalt is that we only win in Iraq if it becomes violence free, a paradise on Earth; and since that is impossible, we can only prepare ourselves for the inevitable “emerging defeat.” When enough agencies report the same message over and over again, the meme becomes ‘the truth” in some grotesque, McLuhanesque sense.

“Warbloggers” are painfully aware of this dynamic. The Goliath media are much stronger than any number of blogging Davids. Their access to the people dwarfs ours. So what could cause Eric Boehlert, probably speaking for far more of the elites than he is willing to claim, to become annoyed enough (or scared enough) to post such a personalized attack against a handful of people?

Perhaps because Boehlert is aware that a meme need not be shouted from the rooftops (via the big-box media) in order to grow, thrive, and ultimately replace the standard media gestalt itself: it only needs to be more powerful than the memes it feeds upon… which, in the case of the vision of the anointed, is not particularly difficult: the standard media gestalt requires you to believe six impossible things before breakfast (such as that only white Europeans can handle democracy, that Shia and Sunni kill each other in Iraq because of Israel, that the more terrorists we kill the more there are, that Iraq was calm and peaceful under Saddam Hussein, and so forth).

Hence this frantic attempt to stamp it out, like a campfire spreading to the surrounding weeds. But I doubt it will work; “warbloggers” are unlikely to be cowed by Eric Boehlert. This is the only true sense in which “information wants to be free”: not that books and CDs anthropomorphically “want” to be distributed for free to pimply faced teenagers who expect something for nothing — but that truth will ultimately prevail; it cannot be suppressed forever.

Thus, this honorable men — all these honorable men — trying so hard to save us from ourselves, to use the vision-vaccine to innoculate us against free inquiry, are on a fool’s errand; they’re tilting at winos. The future looms; they know that every year, more of the population rejects them as the final arbiters of reality and seeks alternatives.

The Boehlerts know, deep down, that their hegemony won’t last much longer. They just want a few more quiet years to publish their books (Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush, by Eric Boehlert) and write their gestalt-stories… then get out while the getting’s good.

And that’s the last word.

Comment on this post here (same comment thread post as the last one; see, I told you how lazy I was!)

Whoops, wrong blog.

This here’s See-Dubya, and I’ll be helping to keep things buzzing while Michelle is sightseeing in an undisclosed location that begins with an “I” and ends with a “Vietnam-like capitulation to terrorists”, at least if Pelosi gets her way. You might have caught me mouthing off at Junkyardblog, or recently, at Hot Air. However, I am far more qualified than your average blogger to pronounce loftily on world affairs; after all, I eschew the standard pajamas in favor of:

The gold smoking jacket. Nothing else shrieks “credibility” quite so shrilly.

Speaking of smoking, it’s time for a PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT:

Due to the risk of fire, it is time to take your Christmas decorations down.

This is especially true if you live in the town of Richmond, California, near Berkeley (of course!), where violent criminals armed with gallon jugs of gasoline will take them down for you, even right on your church’s altar, during choir practice:

RICHMOND – A man walked down the center aisle of the city’s largest Catholic church Friday night with a backpack, a container of fluid and a calmly spoken offer to the small choir that was rehearsing.

“He said, ‘Do you want to leave or stay? I’m going to burn this (expletive) down’” said choir member Veronica Monroy, 32, of Albany.

“First I thought he was playing. I couldn’t believe it.”

With that, the man — who police identified as 40-year-old Robert Mills of San Pablo, doused the altar of St. Cornelius Church.

He then spoke a few bitter words to God, said choir member Adan Covarrubias, lit a napkin and set off a fire that ignited the nativity scene behind the altar and filled the cavernous church with acrid, damaging smoke.

Captain Jamil Hussein was not available for comment.

On Saturday night, a colleague emailed me and told me to bring my camera, as Senator Kerry was scheduled to give a press conference here in the Palace. At 2100, he entered a conference room wearing his leather flight jacket. Unfortunately, there was no media there, except for the enlisted soldiers from AFTN (Armed Forces Television Network) who had to be there. His aide looked around, saw that this just wasn’t happening, and quickly escorted Kerry out before I could take a picture.

Finally, the next morning, Senator Kerry ate chow at the Dining Facility. Normally when a Senator/Representative visits, he is joined by a contingent of soldiers/Marines/airmen from his home state. Despite the fact that the MP unit responsible for Green Zone security is an Army Reserve unit from Massachusetts, not a single soldier went to sit with him. (By contrast, Bill O’Reilly, host of that terrible shoutfest on Fox, had over 400 soldiers waiting in line to meet him on Saturday).

After TPM Muckraker wrongly accused milbloggers and conservative bloggers of faking the photo, TPM Cafe’s Greg Sargent published a heavy-breathing investigative report on the context of the photo:

…it turns out that Kerry was at that table to conduct an off-the-record breakfast discussion with two reporters, so there would have been no reason whatsover for troops to be sitting with them. In fact, Kerry and the reporters even sought out empty seats, I’m told.

The two reporters who met with Kerry that morning are Marc Santora of The New York Times and Mark Danner of The New York Review, The New Yorker and other publications. Both Santora and Danner confimed to me that they met with Kerry — on the morning of Dec. 17, according to Kerry’s office and to Danner. (The person who posted the photo also confirmed that it was taken that morning.)

Danner confirmed to me that he’s the guy with his back to the camera, saying his jacket and the back of his head looked the same as in the photo. He added that his position in relation to Kerry was the same as the photo showed. And here’s what Danner had to say to me about the empty seats: “If there were empty seats it’s because we sought them out. We wanted an empty table so we could talk. It’s that simple.”

In this particular instance, it appears, Kerry was not spurned by the troops. I stand corrected and apologize for the error.

I do not apologize, however, for linking to milblogger Ben’s first-hand account of Kerry’s visit or for printing letters I received offering other accounts of Kerry’s visit like this one:

My brother is an Air Force Col. serving on Gen. Casey’s staff in Baghdad. I emailed him yesterday to ask if he had seen the picture of “Mr. Lonely.” He had seen the pix and the following is what he wrote back: “The picture on the website of the Senator is from the same chow hall I use. We call it the DEFAC (Dining facility). The night prior I was in the chow hall with the Senator, he came in just behind me and sat a few tables over. Everybody avoided him like the plague.”

These accounts from the unedukated troops in Irak may explain why Kerry was huddling in a safe, off-the-record cocoon with New York journalists in a Baghdad mess hall in the first place.

Dan Riehl reacts to the TPM Cafe report:

The Distinguished Gentleman from Massachusetts traveled halfway around the world on tax dollars, allegedly to support the troops he ticked off with a poorly crafted joke – and rather than spend just a little bit more time with them, he opted to have breakfast with reporters from the New York Times and The New York Review, instead.

Bryan Preston responds. Ed Morrissey responds.

Scott Johnson responds:

Our emailer comments that Senator Kerry’s off-the-record breakfast meeting on December 17 may have taken place “because no one showed up at [Senator Kerry's] press conference the night before.” I add only that, despite his being a serial defamer of the American military in the course of a long public career, Senator Kerry is actually admired, popular and sought-out by the troops, just like Bill O’Reilly!

Little Green Footballs corrects:

Consider this a correction, and a note that it now appears the original report was inaccurate; if Sargent is correct, Kerry was talking to some reporters and deliberately sought out an empty spot. We’ll just agree to forget about the numerous weird theories thrown out by the left-wing blogs on the way to this proof.

Now, if only TPM and the fevered left-wing blogosphere would hold, say, the New York Times–has anyone seen a correction yet for the Carmen Climaco debacle?–as accountable for its errors as the rest of us.

***

I relayed information from multiple sources–CPATT, Centcom, and two other military sources on the ground in Iraq– that the Associated Press’s disputed source, Jamil Hussein, could not be found. As I noted on the 4th, the AP reported that the Ministry of Interior in Iraq has now said a Captain Jamil Hussein does work in the al Khadra police station. I regret the error. But no blogger should apologize for raising legitimate questions about AP’s transparency, its reliance on local foreign stringers of dubious origins, and information that sources such as Hussein have provided the AP. I will continue to pursue some of the unresolved issues related to this.

Just received this from Linda Wagner of the Associated Press:

The following news story about your recent inquiry has just moved on the AP wire.

BC-Iraq-Jamil Hussein,1116<
Iraq threatens arrest of police captain who spoke to media<
By STEVEN R. HURST=
Associated Press Writer=

BAGHDAD, Iraq (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 identity 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.

Checking it out. Moving forward…

Reader Daniel:

And you’re just about to head over there?

What timing!

Full story here.

More:

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.

More:

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.

I am awaiting reaction/response from my sources. Bob Owens received this from MNF-PAO:

Mr Owens,

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

Allah’s take is here.

Don Surber:

So 6 weeks after people asked AP to produce him, AP produced him.

Now to verify his claim that 6 Sunnis were burned alive.

Mickey Kaus:

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

Dan Riehl:

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. The ultimate question is what happened in Hurriya the day six Sunnis were claimed to have been burned alive?

Did it happen? Is Shi’ite domination of one or more ministries trying to cover up violence by Shi’ite factions? Or is Hussein unreliable as a source?

If the story ends up being an expose’ on a troubling Shi’ite dominated Iraqi regime, as opposed to the AP being light on sourcing, so be it. Like most bloggers following this story, all I have ever wanted is the truth.

Commenter Dwilkers at Patterico’s:

So why has it taken all this time to produce him then?

And where are the bodies of the folks that were burned alive? And what about the mosques that weren’t destroyed?

I’m making the same point as Patterico of course – the underlying story was the original problem. The failure to produce this guy was just the marker that let you KNOW it was BS.

So they produced him. Now produce the people set on fire and destroyed buildings claimed in the story. Otherwise its nonsense.

I also question the timing, since Malkin was OTW over and the attention level was about to increase. I seriously doubt we’ve heard all there is to know about this.

Bill Faith:

Color this old dog very, very skeptical. So, the Iraqi Police may or may not arrest some dude and claim he’s Jamil, then they may or may not put him in a line-up where the AP people can claim “Yes we see him but we aren’t going to identify him; must protect our sources, y’know,” and we’re all supposed to just forget about all those sole-sourced stories that still don’t check out? And our source for all this new-found knowledge is … the AP?

Curt at Flopping Aces weighs in: “As many of us have said from the beginning, finding Jamil Hussein will not make this story go away…”

I repeat what I said yesterday about our upcoming trip to Iraq:

The “Jamil Hussein” story is one important item on our agenda, but not the only one. As Curt and other bloggers on this story have noted from the beginning, Jamilgate isn’t just about “Jamil Hussein.” Bryan and I plan to do as much on-the-ground reporting as we can to nail down unresolved questions–not only about Jamil Hussein and the Hurriya six burning Sunnis allegations, but also about the AP four burning mosque story discrepancies and the many other AP sources that our military has publicly challenged–including “Lt. Maitham Abdul Razzaq” and more than a dozen police officers listed by U.S. military spokesman Navy Lt. Michael Dean. There’s also the issue of detained AP photographer Bilal Hussein. And we are looking forward to reporting first-hand on the security situation in Iraq outside the so-called “Green Zone” (International Zone) and talking to as many American and Iraqi Army troops with insights on these and other broader matters.

Dave Price:

Predictably, the AP is already declaring themselves vindicated, but the reality is they have already admitted they botched this story by changing their initial report from four mosques to one, and it still seems extremely unlikely anyone was actually set on fire, as the only “evidence” is second-hand rumors. Given their high-handed attitude thus far, I’m sure the AP will now claim victory and totally ignore the remaining problems with the actual story itself; this is called “arguing the strongest point of a weak case” and is a fine debating tactic but lousy journalism. I very much doubt the actual facts of the case will ever get cleared up.

Stay tuned.

Ed Morrissey:

Whether Jamil Hussein actually exists is really a secondary issue. The fact that the AP used a single source for dozens of inflammatory stories about atrocities in Iraq that still have yet to find any confirmation is almost as disturbing as making the source up.

Jules Crittenden:

My big question: If we were supposed to believe the AP when the AP said the MOI’s Khalaf didn’t know what he was talking about, why are we supposed to believe Khalaf now that the AP says he does know what he’s talking about? Especially when the AP, which has stalwartly stood by Jamil Hussein’s existence as a source, has backed off what Hussein told them about four mosques burning?

Just asking. Has this thing morphed from false but true to true but false?

The existence of cops with several variations of the name Jamil Hussein of varying ranks in several police stations around Baghdad was reported by bloggers several weeks ago. None quite matched. I’d suggest the jury is still out on this guy. The reliability of the AP’s Baghdad bureau and its stable of local stringers remain in question.

A relevant observation from Christopher Hitchens, who wrote a dispatch for Slate.com from Baghdad, Iraq on Dec. 27:

I flew to Baghdad from the northern city of Erbil, by the ordinary means of buying a local Iraqi Airlines ticket, boarding a plane that made a stop in Sulaymaniyah, and landing at the former Saddam Hussein International Airport. The whole exercise was almost weirdly normal. The plane was full of ordinary citizens carrying plastic hold-alls, with cheerful, unveiled hostesses handing out snacks and drinks. The terminal was quiet, and the airport road (which used to be known as “Route Irish” and was the scene of incessant mayhem) is these days considered fairly safe and has been stabilized by the Iraqi army. I stopped to be photographed with a unit of this force, a group of cheerful and professional young men. But as I waved goodbye to them, my Kurdish driver said, “Army pretty good. Police no good at all.” And, indeed, the sight of a police uniform is one of the least reassuring in the whole of Iraq. It is often no more than the disguise for religious fascism or organized crime or (as was revealed yet again in Basra last week) for both.

Paging Kathleen Carroll

My blogging has been lighter than usual the past few weeks due to family time, Fox News duties, holiday chaos, holiday illness–and, yes, planning for a trip to Iraq. As you know, ex-CNN newsman Eason Jordan extended an invitation to me three weeks ago to go to Iraq to investigate the Associated Press/”Jamil Hussein” story. He offered to pay for a trip. As you’ll recall, I asked if he would offer to cover travel and security costs for Curt from Flopping Aces–who broke open the story of AP’s dubious sources on Thanksgiving weekend and continues to lead the blogospheric search for the truth. Jordan agreed.

I spoke with Jordan by phone before Christmas to learn more details of his offer, which I’m not going to get into for privacy and security reasons. (He asked that his discussion be off the record.) I let him know that I had received invitations to embed with the military and planned to follow up on some of these offers concurrently with the investigation of the AP’s reporting. Since our conversation, things have moved at a fast pace on the embed side. Over the holidays, my Hot Air colleague Bryan Preston and I received word that our embed applications had been approved. We have been busy preparing our families and ourselves for the journey. Our overarching goals are two-fold:

1) to report on how the troops perceive mainstream media coverage of the war (with a particular focus on the wire services relying on local stringers); and

2) to report on progress and interaction between U.S. troops and Iraqi Army trainees.

The “Jamil Hussein” story is one important item on our agenda, but not the only one. As Curt and other bloggers on this story have noted from the beginning, Jamilgate isn’t just about “Jamil Hussein.” Bryan and I plan to do as much on-the-ground reporting as we can to nail down unresolved questions–not only about Jamil Hussein and the Hurriya six burning Sunnis allegations, but also about the AP four burning mosque story discrepancies and the many other AP sources that our military has publicly challenged–including “Lt. Maitham Abdul Razzaq” and more than a dozen police officers listed by U.S. military spokesman Navy Lt. Michael Dean. There’s also the issue of detained AP photographer Bilal Hussein. And we are looking forward to reporting first-hand on the security situation in Iraq outside the so-called “Green Zone” (International Zone) and talking to as many American and Iraqi Army troops with insights on these and other broader matters.

I am very heartened by Eason Jordan’s post yesterday challenging the Associated Press’s credibility, but am puzzled that his own crew in Baghdad still has nothing new to report more than a month after bloggers first started raising questions. I hope Jordan follows up on the most recent investigative developments in the blogosphere. As of Dec. 21, the AP refuses to answer these simple questions:

1. Is Jamil Ghdaab Gulaim the real name of your oft-cited source, “Captain Jamil Hussein” aka ” Jamil Gholaiem Hussein?”

2. If not, where is “Captain Jamil Hussein” currently working? If he is a Baghdad police officer, as AP asserts, why hasn’t anyone — not CPATT, not MOI, not Marc Danzinger’s sources [nor Eason Jordan's] — been able to locate him?

3. What is your response to the CPATT officers’ report that Jamil Ghdaab Gulaim denies being AP’s source?

The reply from Linda Wagner, AP media relations officer, you’ll recall, was this:

Michelle-

I have no additional information for you at this time.

Linda

The reply from AP exec editor Kathleen Carroll…well, there was none.

Jordan has called on the AP to “to appoint an independent panel to determine the facts about the disputed report, to determine whether Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein exists, and to share the panel’s full findings and recommendations with the public.”

I support that call. But I have decided not to wait on the AP or depend on Eason Jordan for answers and accountability. Bryan and I will be heading out to Iraq very shortly as embeds to advance the story and get first-hand the side of the story the AP refuses to hear–the side of the troops on the ground. (It is an expensive trip. If you’d like to pitch in, we’d greatly appreciate any help. Donation info. below.) You’ll start hearing from us soon. Stay tuned here and at HotAir.com. I’ll also be filing dispatches for the New York Post, which provided us with media accreditation.

I have notified Jordan of our plans and encouraged him to move forward with his trip and his offer to bring Curt of Flopping Aces.

More importantly, I have asked Jordan to extend the travel funds and security coverage he would have spent on me to the AP’s Kathleen Carroll.

Ms. Carroll, you may remember, was the AP executive who derided bloggers for sitting at home instead of traveling abroad to do their own reporting during the fauxtography debacle last summer:

“It’s hard to imagine how someone sitting in an air-conditioned office or broadcast studio many thousands of miles from the scene can decide what occurred on the ground with any degree of accuracy,” said Kathleen Carroll, AP’s senior vice president and executive editor.

Yet, from her own comfortable office, Ms. Carroll has decided that bloggers, Jordan, the U.S. military, and Iraqi government officials are all wrong to question her news organization’s questionable news sources:

Kathleen Carroll, AP executive editor, told E&P today that she had not read Jordan’s latest item, posted Monday, and likely would not. But she stood by the news organization’s previous statements backing the existence of an Iraqi police captain, Jamail (sic) Hussein.

“I’ve been pretty public about what we have done to get to the crux of the criticism we have gotten about it,” she added. When asked about critics’ demands that AP produce Hussein to prove his existence, she said “that area [where he works] has pretty much been ethnically cleansed, it is a nasty place and continues to be.”

It is unfortunate that this neighborhood has been reportedly rife with sectarian violence, but that doesn’t change 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 (see here and here).

Ms. Carroll, why not leave your “air-conditioned office…thousands of miles from the scene” and find out for yourself if “Jamil Hussein” is who AP says he is? Or is it the “do as I say” standard for bloggers and “not as I do” for MSM news executives in their high-rise offices in Manhattan?

***

Donations to defray the costs of our trip to Iraq are gratefully accepted. Checks can be sent to Hot Air Network LLC, 554 N. Frederick Ave., #115, Gaithersburg, MD 20877. Credit card and PayPal payments can be made by clicking the donation button below:

***

Fresh commentary and reporting elsewhere in the ‘sphere:

Flopping Aces: “Eason Jordan Urging AP To Investigate”
Confederate Yankee: Gone in 60 Stories: The Grunt Work
Confederate Yankee: Gone in 60 Stories
Richard Miniter: Jamil Hussein and Confedeate Yankee
Ace of Spades: Cool Facts About Police Captain Jamil Hussein
Ace of Spades: “Katty Carroll To Critics: Drop Dead”
Patterico: Does the AP have a “scandal” on its hands?
Video at Hot Air: Brit Hume covers Jamilgate
Allah on Eason
Bruce Kesler: AP & Eason Jordan & MSM Self-Responsibility
Armed Liberal: It’s just a scratch

Related: Embedded blogger Bill Ardolino’s very interesting interview with a “Sunni Iraqi journalist” named “Quais Abdul Raazzaq.” Part two here. Ardolino files from Fallujah here, where he reports “morale seems high.”

Update:See Curt at Flopping Aces on Quais Abdul Raazaq, Qais al Bashir, and Maithem Abdul Raazaq.

Rusty Shackleford:

My first response to Curt’s post was kneejerk: breakout the tinfoil. But I suppose that most testable hypotheses start with speculation. And with AP stringers even the most far-fetched theories, that I would have never believed just a couple of years ago, have turned out to be true. And the names are a bit uncanny. Keep an eye on this one.

Satire: “Jamil Hussein’s” blog

Dan Riehl on Kathleen Carroll

Previous:

The AP (non-)responds and another search comes up empty
Tracing “Jamil Hussein’s” footsteps and ignoring anti-blog hatred
What’s so funny about going to Iraq? Plus: More questions for AP
Looking for Jamil Hussein: Accepting Eason Jordan’s invitation
Eason Jordan is back
AP: Still not off the hook; Plus: The Question
Free Jamil Hussein
Questioning a NYTimes reporter; challenging CBS News & ASNE
The alleged war atrocity that the NYTimes can’t substantiate
Rumors and reporting in Iraq
Burning Sunnis, burning mosques, burning questions
Burning Six update: The AP responds (to USA Today); update: and now, a new AP account
Real news vs. fake news in Iraq
The media fog of war
The Associated (with terrorists) Press strikes again
Bilal Hussein’s congresswoman
AP runs to the Washington Post
AP stands for Advocacy Press
AP vs. the “so-called blogosphere”
Associated Press and the Bilal Hussein case
Where is Bilal Hussein?

Yesterday, I contacted the AP about the “Jamil Hussein”/Jamil Ghdaab Gulaim/Ghulaim findings and asked these simple questions:

Ref. http://michellemalkin.com/archives/006579.htm

1. Is Jamil Ghdaab Gulaim the real name of your oft-cited source, “Captain Jamil Hussein” aka ” Jamil Gholaiem Hussein?”

2. If not, where is “Captain Jamil Hussein” currently working? If he is a Baghdad police officer, as AP asserts, why hasn’t anyone — not CPATT, not MOI, not Marc Danzinger’s sources [nor Eason Jordan's] — been able to locate him?

3. What is your response to the CPATT officers’ report that Jamil Ghdaab Gulaim denies being AP’s source?

Here is the response I received yesterday from AP media relations officer Linda Wagner:

Michelle-

I have no additional information for you at this time.

Linda

I also cc’ed my questions to AP exec editor Kathleen Carroll.

She did not respond.

In the meantime, I did hear back from my on-the-ground source in Baghdad who works with the Iraqi Army, including members who worked in the same police station where “Jamil Hussein” allegedly worked. As I mentioned yesterday, this source is not part of the Civilian Police Advisory Training Team (CPATT). He writes:

I have received back answers from both my RFI and from my IA S-2 [intelligence] and neither one has found a CPT Jamil Hussein working anywhere in Baghdad as an IP. My S-2 friend has talked with some of the officers in the Al-Yarmouk Police Station and they do not know him either.

That makes at least five people, organizations, or teams who thus far have been unable to confirm the existence of a Captain Jamil Hussein at Yarmouk. The other four are CPATT, the Iraqi Ministry of Interior (MOI), Marc Danzinger’s team, and Eason Jordan’s team.

Meanwhile, my CPATT sources informed me today that MOI officials have now questioned Captain Jamil Ghlaim at MOI headquarters. Ghlaim continues to deny speaking to AP or any other media outlet.

After receiving initial reports from a Civilian Police Advisory Training Team (CPATT) source two days ago and investigating further, here’s what I can tell you:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to the CPATT officers, Captain Jamil Ghdaab Gulaim “denies ever speaking to the AP or any other media.” I retracted information to the contrary two days ago based on a single CPATT source who said he had erroneously stated that Gulaim had admitted being the source.

To repeat: Both CPATT sources in the U.S. and Iraq have confirmed that Jamil Ghdaab Gulaim denies speaking to the AP.

That leaves a couple of unanswered questions:

1. Is Jamil Ghdaab Gulaim the real name of AP’s oft-cited source?

2. If not, where is “Captain Jamil Hussein” currently working?If he is a Baghdad police officer, as AP asserts, why hasn’t anyone–not CPATT, not MOI, not Marc Danzinger’s sources–been able to locate him?

I’ll be sending these questions to AP executive editor Kathleen Carroll.

She might also want to take a look at Bob Owens’ thorough post exploring the ethics of using undisclosed pseudonyms for sources. He surveyed journalists and media mavens from all parts of the ideological spectrum with these three questions:

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

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

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

Ms. Carroll might want to think about her answers.

See-Dubya saves her the trouble and cites AP policy:

Nothing in our news report – words, photos, graphics, sound or video – may be fabricated. We don’t use pseudonyms, composite characters or fictional names, ages, places or dates.

AP’s defenders are flummoxed about why this “one story” matters so much in the larger context of violence in Iraq.

See-Dubya at Junkyard Blog has compiled a very valuable map of the wide variety of Baghdad locations from which “Captain Jamil Hussein” had reported incidents of violence to the AP. I asked him to add a few other significant markers and he sent a revised map along:

This is not just one story. It is at least 61. And all of these. And this big one. It is not about conservative bloggers ignoring the bona fide, grim realities on the ground. It is about the credibility, veracity, trustworthiness, and accountability of the world’s “essential global news network”–more important than ever in a time of war.

***

Eason Jordan is still looking, but has nothing new to report:

Several IraqSlogger colleagues in Baghdad are tracking leads in an effort to locate Jamil Hussein.

IraqSlogger’s two biggest concerns: determining the ground truth and not losing lives in the process.

The Baghdad neighborhood where the disputed episode occurred, Hurriya, is a dangerous Shia area, while the neighborhoods where Captain Jamil Hussein is supposedly based (Yarmouk and/or Khadraa) are volatile Sunni-dominated Sunni-Shia mixed areas.

Iraqi police are themselves the frequent target of terrorist and insurgent attacks — thousands have been killed — and police stations are difficult-to-approach fortresses. Iraqi police have understandable anxieties and suspicions when outsiders start poking around in an effort to track down a certain police officer. Also worrisome: Some Iraqi police are alleged to be members of sectarian death squads. Bottom line: This effort to find Jamil Hussein is dangerous for all involved on the ground.

Nevertheless, since “Jamil Hussein” has been quoted in dozens of AP stories, he’d seemingly not be impossible to track down in person.

We’ll get back to you with ground truth when we determine it.

How about you, Tom Zeller? Brian Montopoli? Anything new to report?

***

Blog-bashers on both sides will snidely look down their noses at these questions as “second-order distractions” by a “mob” of “imbeciles”. Their thin-skinned defensiveness speaks for itself. And for those of you surprised by the vehemence of the anti-blog attitude of the Wall Street Journal, don’t be. With the exception of Peggy Noonan, blog hatred seems to be a company virus (see here and here).

***

Update: Two must-reads–Allah and See-Dubya eviscerate Eric Boehlert’s warped narrative.

Update: Marc Danziger reports the results of his investigation.

Eason Jordan has further comment on his invitation and my acceptance:

Some of you have asked what’s up with IraqSlogger’s invitation to send Michelle Malkin to Iraq. It was a serious invitation, she accepted it, she asked if I’d also pay for her to take along Curt of the Flopping Aces blog, I said yes, and now we’re working to arrange the trip. This is an enormously complicated journey to arrange, with safety and security being paramount concerns. This is serious stuff, and I’m taking the conversation with Michelle offline until we have a meaningful advance in the story to share with you.

There are people on both sides of the blogosphere who think this is some kind of joke. Others are using it as yet another opportunity to hurl slime, hate, and stupidity. You want to see me shot in the face or dead. Ha, ha, ha.

I know that neither Curt nor my co-workers nor I–nor our families–is taking this lightly. There’s nothing funny about this undertaking. When I have more I can tell you, I’ll let you know.

In the meantime, you’ll recall that two days ago, I noted Eric Boehlert’s blogger-bashing screed about the AP six burning Sunnis/Jamil Hussein controversy, which was posted on left-wing Media Matters.

Yesterday, there was a very compelling post on Media Matters taking Boehlert to task. (Hat tip: See-dubya) The author is Robert Bateman, the war historian whose op-ed on his experience with the AP attack machine I linked last week. Here’s what he has to say (excerpt is lengthy, but must-read):

Eric B is wrong, in my opinion, because the controversy involved in this story of AP reporting is not, after all, a story about the political “Right” (and Military) versus “Left”, but in reality a simple one of sourcing. In the original AP story, remember, FOUR mosques were attacked, and firebombed and/or blown up, and six, or perhaps twelve, Sunni worshippers burned to death.

Then some right-wing bloggers noted that the main source, the often-quoted “Captain Jamil Hussein,” was only quoted when Sunnis were killed. Folks, that just doesn’t make sense. It was at that point that the AP went on the attack. They re-reported, and in their follow-on story, only one mosque was burned, but then the AP rebuts with, “… allegations were checked with the AP reporter, who had been in routine contact for more than two years with Hussein, in some cases sitting in his office in the Yarmouk police station in west Baghdad. Hussein wore a police uniform during the face-to-face meetings.” They also said they had new (unnamed) sources, and provided specifics like the “fact” that it was a 1.3 gallon container of kerosene used to immolate the six men.

Now, setting aside the fact that 1.3 gallons would only give about two pints per man. Setting aside also the fact that the AP changed the story from the first version to the second, (where there were four mosques burned and/or blown up in the first version, in the second it is only one, where as many as twelve were killed by burning in the first version, in the second it is only six). Ignore the fact that the Sunnis themselves do not seem to be focusing on this story. And finally, skip over the fact that in the past some American journalism outlets, and particularly their overseas bureaus in a war zone, have in fact harbored real, live, spies for the enemy. (That happened to Time in Vietnam, when they hired a North Vietnamese intelligence officer as a stringer in Saigon.) Forget all of that for a second, and still some facts of geography threw me off as being inaccurate.

The AP, I should note, in their counterattack against those who questioned their story and sources, said, “It’s awfully easy to take pot shots from the safety of a computer keyboard thousands of miles from the chaos of Baghdad.” The AP executive who said that did so from New York City, but ya know what? Unlike that AP editor, I know something about Baghdad. Having lived in Iraq for a year (returning this past February, if you all recall), and knowing Baghdad well, one additional thing that has blown my mind about this, and the silence from the majority of the media (except E&P, which is covering the story well), is a simple element of geography.

The AP cites their source as being an officer in the Yarmouk district of Baghdad. Fine. Most people in the U.S. and the world don’t know Baghdad’s geography. But the question that hit me is “why is somebody in Yarmouk the main quoted source (originally) for a story about events in Hurriyah?”

Yarmouk is a neighborhood on the north side of what many people know as “Route Irish.” Between Yarmouk and Hurriyah neighborhood are the districts of Al Andalous and Al Mansoor (parallel w/ each other), above that is Al Mutanabbi, and above that is Al Urubah … before you get to Hurriyah. It’s more than 3 miles away. Now for country folk like me, 3 miles isn’t but spitting distance. But in a city of 7 million, like NYC or Baghdad, 3 miles is a huge distance.

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?)

Read the whole thing.

If some of Bateman’s questions sound familiar, it’s because you read them first at Flopping Aces (via Uncommon Misconceptions)–back on November 29th.

Dan Riehl is also pulling up maps and raises more questions about the hospital morgue.

It is encouraging to see the AP matter being taken seriously by a few on the Left. It’s ridiculous the AP has let it fester. It’s even more ridiculous that the rest of their MSM colleagues have let them skate this long.