Here’s a blast from the past.

Remember Eason Jordan? Every conservative political blogger worth his/her salt knows and remembers who he is.

Former CNN head Eason Jordan is the disgraced journalist who admitted in a 2003 New York Times op-ed piece titled “The News We Kept to Ourselves” that he deliberately and intentionally whitewashed Saddam Hussein’s atrocities and regurgitated Hussein propaganda for a decade in exchange for access. Let me underscore that: In 2003, after the U.S.-led Coalition invasion of Iraq and the fall of Saddam Hussein, Jordan confessed that CNN 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.

Former CNN head Eason Jordan is the disgraced journalist who suggested our U.S. troops were wantonly targeting journalists for murder at the 2005 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Here’s a refresher on the scandal and a reminder that, as reported on this blog, none other than Democrat Rep. Barney Frank, liberal political commentator David Gergen, and former Democrat Sen. Chris Dodd all confirmed/condemned the slander. He resigned from CNN in February 2005 as a result of the blowback.

Former CNN head Eason Jordan is the disgraced journalist who showered gifts on North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il and heaped praise on Fidel Castro for inspiring the creation of CNN International.

You may also remember this strange little interlude I had with Jordan before my embed/fact-checking trip to Baghdad in 2007.

So, what’s Eason Jordan up to now?

Well, my jaw just about dropped when I read this announcement late Sunday night from conservative Newsmax trumpeting Eason Jordan’s starring role in the upcoming Donald Trump GOP debate:

“Former CNN Chief Heads Up Newsmax ION Debate.”

No, it’s not a parody [bolded for emphasis]:

A prestigious team of some of the top producers in network and cable television news — including the former head of CNN’s news division — has been assembled to produce The Newsmax ION Television 2012 Presidential Debate to be moderated by businessman Donald J. Trump.

Newsmax Media and ION Television announced the production team, which collectively has more than a century of experience in managing major network coverage of U.S. presidential debates and elections, on Sunday.

“ION, Newsmax and Mr. Trump are committed to host a serious presidential forum which will include some of the most reputable journalists and media people in the nation,” Brandon Burgess, CEO and Chairman of ION Television, said.

The ION Television network reaches more than 99 million U.S. homes. During prime time, ION typically has more viewers than any major cable news channel in the key demographic 25-54 group.

The debate will be also streamed at Newsmax.com. Newsmax is the nation’s leading conservative online media publisher reaching more than 10 million readers monthly.

“With Donald Trump and the top-notch media and production team led by Eason Jordan we have organized, we expect the The Newsmax ION 2012 Presidential Debate will have the largest audience of any Republican primary debate to date,” Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy said.

On Sunday, Newsmax and ION Television announced several key staff for their debate:

Eason Jordan, Executive Producer — Jordan worked for 23 years with CNN, where he served as chief news executive and president of news gathering and international networks. Jordan’s journalistic honors include Emmy Awards, Peabody Awards Edward R. Murrow Awards, Headliner Awards, ACE Awards, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, the Vanguard Award, and the Livingston Award. He is the founder and CEO of Poll Position, a news, polling, and social media company. He is also a member of the Council of Foreign Relations.

And a serial appeaser of dictators. And slanderer of the troops.

“Prestigious?” “Reputable?” “Top-notch?”

Saddam, Fidel, and Kim Jong Il approve!

I asked Newsmax tonight if they googled Jordan before hiring him for the debate spectacle and if they were aware of his background. No response yet.

Maybe, just maybe, someone will ask Trump himself. He’ll be ubiquitous on the airwaves and in the national media this week as his new book launches today.

It’s called… “Time to Get Tough.”

I’ll say.

***

Question: Haven’t we had enough GOP debates produced by hostile, whitewashing libs?

Question: Can this campaign season get any weirder?

Question: Did Newsmax read its own coverage of Eason Jordan’s scandals? Ed Driscoll did.

Fun fact: One of the pieces Newsmax published on Easongate in 2005 was from…me:

***

Related:

Donald Trump’s eminent-domain empire
Is Donald Trump a Conservative?

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!)

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The Iraq war — indeed, the larger GWOJ (global war against jihadism) — is as much a propaganda war, a war of ideas and “memes,” as it is a shooting war. Paul Josef Goebbels understood the power of propaganda; so too did Tojo, Walter Cronkite, and so does al-Qaeda, of course. Alas, it appears that both the Bush administration and the GOP are completely clueless in this respect.

The Democrats and the elite media, to the extent they are not the same entity, understand perfectly, however.

When CNN broadcast the al-Qaeda propaganda video showing an American soldier being killed by a terrorist sniper, terrorists gloated that our sensationalist media was always willing to help them out by showing their recruiting videos on the nightly news. The media, for reasons of their own which appear more compelling to them than national security, long ago decided to work with America’s enemies; the most charitable conclusion is that they’re so deathly afraid of American military might becoming American imperialism, that they would rather see an America defeated, humbled, and on its knees than triumphant, dominant, and ascendent.

To think that the internationalists in the elite media are cheerleaders for success in Iraq, let alone the larger GWOJ, is naïve; to imagine that the tilt is so subtle that ordinary readers don’t realize it — is downright insulting.

Yet that is exactly what columnist Eric Boehlert, from Media Matters for America, does in “Michelle Malkin fiddles while Baghdad burns.” Boehlert, and many others like him in the drive-by media, criticize sites such as Michelle Malkin, Flopping Aces, and Confederate Yankee (from the best of intentions!) They call us — he didn’t mention Big Lizards, but I feel some solidarity with the ones he did — they call us “warbloggers,” who are “chronically incorrect” and uninterested in the truth… unlike the perennially truth-seeking mainstream media. (Hat tip, who else? Michelle Malkin.)

In fact, while I wouldn’t say Boehlert has it exactly backwards — there are many bloggers (even “warbloggers”) who are just as biased (or corrupt) as Mary Mapes and Eason Jordan — the mere fact that there is so much more big political money in the professional media than in the blogosphere itself argues in favor of more honesty within the latter.

For Boehlert is an honourable man; so are they all, all honourable men

In fact, Boehlert himself gives us a perfect example of the deep, underlying, and contemptuous atitude of the elites in the professional media towards the upstarts “who have virtually no serious journalism experience among them.” In his lengthy harangue on his Media Matters blog, he attempts to discredit Michelle Malkin — the bête noire he seems to fear more than the rest of the blogosphere combined — with an off-topic and puzzling slap:

It should be noted that Malkin’s breathless excitement over the AP story nearly matches the enthusiasm she used to spread online smears about the press in the spring of 2005 during the Terri Schiavo right-to-die controversy. That’s when Malkin backed the novel conspiracy theory that press reports about how congressional Republicans had drafted a talking-points memo in order to properly spin the Schiavo story were all wrong. In fact, according to Malkin’s fact-free analysis, an unknown Democratic operative had concocted the phony GOP talking-points memo and duped the media in order to make Republicans look bad.

This was a big story, in which the honest and honorable media reported not only that a Republican wrote it — true, Brian Darling, legal counsel to Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL) — but also that the Republicans distributed it to the party faithful on Capitol Hill — which turned out to be completely false: Martinez gave it to Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), and it was then leaked to the media. By charging Malkin with having “backed the novel conspiracy theory” that Democrats wrote the memo, he paints her as a delusional loon who can simply be dismissed.

But wait… did she really push that “conspiracy theory?”

As proof she did, Boehlert links to another post on Media Matters — attributed to “J.W.,” though there is nobody listed on the masthead of Media Matters with those initials; not only does J.W. not back up Boehlert’s accusation, he says precisely nothing about Malkin’s position:

[Josh] Claybourn [of In the Agora] posted a March 26 blog entry claiming that four anonymous GOP Senate staffers had accused a Reid aide of distributing “distributing forged ‘talking points’ to members of the media and claiming Republican authorship. Though this information has since been excised from the post [J.W. must mean excised from the Claybourn post], conservative syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin, who has been actively following this subplot on her blog, stated in an April 7 post that In the Agora originally identified them as staff members of Martinez and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA).

So all that J.W. is saying is that Malkin correctly reported that a Josh Claybourn post identified staffers for Sen. Martinez and then-Sen. Santorum as the culprits behind the false charge that the Schiavo memo was written by a Democrat. J.W. says nothing remotely like Boehlert’s claim that Malkin said “an unknown Democratic operative had concocted the phony GOP talking-points memo.” Eric Boehlert simply made that charge up.

But of course, Eric Boehlert is an honorable man.

In fact, it’s even worse: Michelle Malkin was skeptical of Claybourn’s informants’ information from the beginning. On March 26th — nearly two weeks before the J.W. post above — Malkin published a post titled Eyewitnesses?, question mark included. In it, she quoted from the Claybourn post, then added this:

I don’t buy it. Here’s why:

[We skip her five reasons for rejecting the In the Agora accusation.]

Unless someone is prepared to stand up and publicly point the finger at a specific individual and explain the decision to delay disclosing the true source of the memo, I can only conclude that ITA’s sources are probably lying.

Note not only Boehlert’s peculiar relationship with the truth of the matter — saying that Malkin had championed the idea that the Shiavo memo was written by Democrats, when in fact she immediately rejected it — but also the fact that he is so dismissive of those of us who didn’t go to J-school, that he thinks we won’t even bestir ourselves to follow his link and see what Malkin actually said. He believes he is safe, because “warbloggers” are either too stupid or too lazy to do the least bit of research.

Eric Boehlert believes his own arrogant fantasy of pajama-clad losers warblogging from their mothers’ basements. But Boehlert is an honorable man; so are they all, all honorable men.

The blogosphere — threat or menace?

Boehlert’s main subject, however, is the recently discredited and partially retracted Associated Press story about four mosques being “burned” and six Iraqi Sunnis being doused with kerosine and burnt alive; he latches hold of this story and tries to demonstrate how paranoid are the “warbloggers” he despises.

(Before reading further, please first read Patterico’s excellent summary of what we know (as of today) AP got wrong about that story.)

In his post, Boehlert shows utter contempt towards any blogger who dares question elite media reporting (rather than simply receiving it like tablets from Mount Sinai). He mocks the very notion that the MSM could be willing accomplices (or useful idiots), out to make us lose the war in Iraq… just as Walter Cronkite helped us lose Vietnam by falsely (and deliberately) reporting the Tet Offensive — a Viet Cong attack that failed catastrophically, resulting in the destruction of the Viet Cong as a serious military force — as a tremendous enemy victory that meant America had already lost the war.

Boehlert equates “warbloggers” like Michelle Malkin and Confederate Yankee with lunatic conspiracy theorists, disdaining as “illogical obsession” our suspicions about the accuracy, and even the veracity, of Iraqi and Afghan stringers and informers. He crows that we only question the MSM because we cannot face the reality that we lost the war (which certainly would be news to the American military personnel fighting in Iraq; and to the Iraqis; and for that matter, to al-Qaeda or Muqtada Sadr or whomever we’re supposed to have lost the war to).

Boehlert’s central j’accuse is that we “warbloggers” ignore the carnage of sectarian violence, clinging instead to irrelevant minor discrepancies (such as non-existent mosque burnings and burnt Sunnis who cannot be found) like “a ray of hope.”

And he also tries to slip another one across. Unable to seriously damage the credibility of “warbloggers” by actually finding errors or maladroit reasoning in their war-related posts, Boehlert embarks upon a campaign of drive-by discrediting: he finds some post somewhere, typically unrelated or only tangentially related to the war, where the warblogger in his crosshairs wrote something to which Boehlert objects. He then trots this out as more evidence of the “warblogger” being “unhinged,” “obsessed,” “demented,” or harboring “unbridled hatred of Arabs and Muslims” and wanting to see journalists “get killed”:

Warning: Confederate Yankee is the same warblogger who recently posted a Reuters photo of an elderly Iraqi woman wrapped in a headscarf and crying beside a coffin. Confederate Yankee sensed foul play and claimed the picture had been mischievously doctored by the wire service because the Iraqi woman’s face was actually George Bush’s mug superimposed onto the picture. I kid you not.

Actually, “kid you” he does… because following the link to Confederate Yankee makes it perfectly clear that Bob Owens was simply joking, for heaven’s sake. (Strangely, Boehlert never links directly to a blog; instead, he always links to a Media Matters redirect to the link target. I don’t know why he does this; perhaps it’s a pompous Media Matters house rule. But it’s annoying, since I actually must click through to every source to get the URL, rather than right-clicking and selecting “Copy link location”.)

Here is what Confederate Yankee writes:

Apparently, even nominal quantities of over-the-counter cold medications can cause you to see the most interesting things.

I know this, because this Reuters picture has all the earmarks of a crudely-edited PhotoShop, from the rather odd smudges and apparent artifacts around the heads of the two women on the left when the photo is enlarged, to the rather uncanny resemblance that one person in the picture has to someone I feel I should know.

After Adnan Hajj, Reuters wouldn’t fall for this sort of stuff again, would they?

It’s a good thing I can chalk this up to cough syrup. If not, I might have to start questioning the media’s accuracy.

If Boehlert cannot figure out that this is a joke, then he shares his sense of humor with John Kerry. The alternative is that Boehlert knew it was a joke, but he decided to pretend it was serious, in order to discredit Owens. But I cannot imagine he would do such a thing, for Boehlert is an honorable man.

Warning: Having now seen two examples of Eric Boehlert confabulating false charges against the “warbloggers,” who seem to haunt his dreams at night, I will follow the links on each and every such accusation that he makes from now on. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me 217 times in the same post, and I’ll resign from the blogosphere in disgrace.

Baghdad mosques are burning down, burning down, burning down

Here is Boehlert in full cry, expounding his thesis like Marc Antony bestriding Caesar’s dagger-riven body (so Boehlert’s head does not explode, I confess that all emphasis is added for clarity):

By inflating the disputed incident into a monumentally important press story, warbloggers, who have excitedly pounded the story for weeks, convinced themselves that blame for the United States’ emerging defeat in Iraq lay squarely at the feet of the press. Specifically, warbloggers claim that American journalists, too cowardly to go get the news themselves, are relying on local Iraqi news stringers who have obvious sympathies for terrorists and who purposefully push propaganda into the news stream — the way Hussein did with the Burned Alive story — to create the illusion of turmoil. Warbloggers, who have virtually no serious journalism experience among them, announced that what’s coming out of Iraq today is not news at all, but simply terrorist press releases — “a pack of lies” — regurgitated by reporters (or “traitors“) who want to see the insurgents succeed….

But warbloggers aren’t interested in an honest, factual debate about a single instance of journalistic accountability. And they’re not really interested in the specifics of the Burned Alive story. They’re interested in wide-ranging conspiracy theories and silencing skeptical voices.

Shakespeare weeps with envy.

But Boehlert is no fool; he knows that the MSM, like everyone else (including Boehlert himself), has an agenda. Boehlert is unhinged because the media elite, which he is part of, no longer dominates the news cycle, as they used to do before first talk radio, then the blogosphere threatened their monopoly. “Warbloggers” (many of whom are former soldiers) ask too many inconvenient questions; and it is Boehlert, not Malkin or Owens or the fellows at Power Line, who is rather desperate to “silence skeptical voices.”

But Boehlert is an honorable man; so are they all, all honorable men.

Continued next Lizard post…

Comment on this post here.

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.

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.

Eason Jordan reports on his new website, Iraqslogger, that his team is in Baghdad looking for Jamil Hussein. They have not found him yet–which is newsworthy in itself–and get this: He has offered to pay for me to join the search in Iraq and accompany me:

Who is Jamil Hussein? Michelle Malkin is leading the charge for an answer, and she put that question to me in her blog. The AP is in the midst of a public firestorm regarding whether supposed Iraqi police captain Jamil Hussein actually exists and, if so, whether he was a legitimate news source for a disputed November 24 AP-reported story saying Shia thugs in Baghdad “grabbed six Sunnis as they left Friday worship services, doused them with kerosene and burned them alive near Iraqi soldiers who did not intervene.” The U.S. military, the Iraqi government, and many others insisted the AP story was false and that Jamil Hussein either was fictitious or was not an Iraqi police officer, as asserted in the AP’s report. The AP has issued two strong statements defending its initial report and produced fresh statements from witnesses of the alleged crime, but the AP has not produced Jamil Hussein himself.

So the search for Jamil Hussein is on, and rightly so. IraqSlogger’s team in Baghdad is working to track him down. If we find him, we’ll get back to you with details. If we can’t find him, we’ll report that, too. If Michelle Malkin wants to join the search in Baghdad, IraqSlogger will pay for her trip, and I’d even be willing to accompany her. Stay tuned.

I e-mailed my acceptance of Jordan’s invitation this morning. No way should we just take the word of the guy who admitted covering up for Saddam Hussein and who resigned from CNN after baselessly slandering the U.S. military (maybe we’ll find the Davos tape while we’re on the search). Plus, it’ll be an incredible opportunity to see Iraq and our troops firsthand. I have many friends, heroes, and contacts there I’d like to meet in person.

I also e-mailed to ask Mr. Jordan whether he would pay for Curt from Flopping Aces, the blogger who first broke open the story and is leading the charge for an answer (see, Jordan got his facts wrong already), to come on the search as well if he is able to do so.

So, indeed, stay tuned.

The search for Jamil Hussein continues…

***

1036am Eastern update: Jordan says he will pay for Curt’s trip.

Jamilgate isn’t just about Jamil Hussein, I hope Mr. Jordan understands. Hussein is just one piece of the six burning Sunnis puzzle. Allah raises questions about the hospital morgue the AP identified as the one where the bodies were taken and the unidentified workers who appeared and disappeared from AP’s accounts. Maybe we’ll learn more about this, too.

Meanwhile, Bob Owens notes a couple of interesting AP promotions and introduces AP to a useful piece of technology. Stephen Spruiell weighs in. The definitive rejoinder to AP’s chickenhawk arguments is here, in case you missed it.

More reactions to Jordan’s entry into Internet journalism:

Jules Crittenden – Truth Good.
LGF - “You have got to be kidding me.”
Good Lt

Ed Morrissey corrects Editor and Publisher’s faulty account of Easongate and observes:

You have to read the Editor & Publisher column by Greg Mitchell to believe it. He makes one mention of Jordan’s departure from CNN in February 2005: “He exited CNN in the wake of the uproar over his off-the-record comments (which he insisted were misinterpreted) at a Davos meeting concerning U.S. military involvement in the accidental deaths of several journalists in Iraq.” That’s not what Jordan said, and Mitchell knows it. Jordan accused the US military of deliberately assassinating journalists in Iraq…

It’s interesting that Jordan chose Iraq as the subject for his return. After all, Jordan admitted to selling out CNN to Saddam Hussein to keep its Baghdad bureau open. He had his reporters read talking points written by Saddam’s henchmen as independent news stories. [E&P writer Greg] Mitchell doesn’t bother to ask about this, even though it goes straight to the question of Jordan’s credibility on any reporting he does on Iraq.

Jordan’s return proves that anyone shameless enough can push his way back into the national spotlight after destroying his credibility.

Update: My friend, photojournalist/milblogger extraordinaire Michael Yon, is scheduled to be in Baghdad on the 19th. He may get answers before we even get off the ground.

Bill Ardolino is also getting ready to embed in Iraq before the end of the month. Bill Roggio is there now.

More questions from Jim Hoft.

***
Previous:

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?

Well, this should be interesting. I’m sure bloggers will be checking in to see what defamatory statements and rumors former CNN head Eason Jordan will be posting on his new website, Iraqslogger:

For the past four years there has been no shortage of news and views on Iraq and the long-running war there. What’s been missing: a one-stop-shopping clearinghouse for nonpartisan information, including material coming out of Iraq itself from natives of that country, not from foreign correspondents.

Now that need is finally being addressed in the form of IraqSlogger, in Beta at www.iraqslogger.com, but due to be officially launched next week. Its director is the former CNN news division chief, Eason Jordan, who quit that post suddenly in 2005 after 23 years with the company. The name of his new venture, he says, was inspired by a Donald Rumsfeld reference to this war being a “long, hard slog.”

The concept, Jordan tells E&P, “grew out of the feeling that I think many people shared that there was no one place to go. Individual news organizations do terrific work but you can spend the better part of a day going from one site to another and one TV outlet to another,” searching for a full picture.

“Iraq is the story of our time,” he declares. His goal for the site is for it to become nothing less than “the world’s premier Iraq-focused information source” — and with no “political slant.”

But of course.

Here’s a question for you, Eason:

Who is Jamil Hussein?

***

Lorie Byrd is not amused.

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Previous:

Easongate: A retrospective
Eason Jordan archives
The Easongate website

The New School gave the nation’s preeminent moonbat academic a rousing reception. He returned the favor by trashing the college’s president, former Senator and Vietnam War veteran Bob Kerrey as a “mass murder and serial killer.” Via the NYSun:

An ethnic studies professor from the University of Colorado, Ward Churchill, received a standing ovation last night from a crowd of more than 200 New School students after blaming the 2001 World Trade Center attacks on America’s support of Israel and its sanctions against Iraq in 1996.

In a two-hour speech at the New School titled “Sterilizing History: The Fabrication of Innocent Americans,” delivered without notes, Mr. Churchill traced what he called a pattern of mass murder as American foreign policy from the time of the country’s inception to the events of September 11, 2001, which he said the country was essentially asking for.

Fabrication? Churchill knows plenty about that.

More:

Mr. Churchill also called the president of the New School, Robert Kerrey, a former senator of Nebraska, a “mass murder and serial killer to boot” for having served in Thanh Phong, Vietnam. Mr. Churchill also served in Vietnam, an act for which he said he has spent the rest of his life apologizing.

Mr. Churchill received cheers from the audience for comparing Mr. Kerrey to the serial killer Charles Manson. “That’s who you’ve got moral equivalency in the president’s chair at this institution,” Mr. Churchill said. “How about a cage rather than a president’s suite?”

No one rushed the stage. No one threw pies. No one pulled fire alarms.

Conservative students don’t do those things. That’s the domain of Ward Churchill’s ilk. Which makes the picture above of Churchill and his “security contingent” all the more laughable.

By the way: There have still been no consequences for Churchill’s academic and research misconduct.

Pirate Ballerina continues to keep watch.

Reader Randy:

So let me get this straight, Churchill thinks Iraq had to do with 9/11, something we never say yet the left constantly screams that we did, and he is calling the liberal Democrat Robert Kerrey a murderer? Despite the love shown for Ward Churchill by the usual Kos Kid type suspects, somehow I doubt they’ll highlight this story.

Reader JN had the same reaction:

So Churchill says that the sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1996 were a partial cause for 9/11. But I thought Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Can these moonbats keep their talking points straight?

***
Previous:
The Ward Churchill report
The seditious Ward Churchill
Ward Churchill and MEChA: perfect together
Ward Churchill: bullying claim
Ward Churchill update
Press conference on Ward Churchill
Ward Churchill: Caught on tape
One of Ward Churchill’s ex-wives speaks
Double standards at the University of Colorado
Liveblogging Ward Churchill and Bill Maher
The never-ending Ward Churchill sitcom
University of Colorado faculty members come to the defense of Ward Churchill
Another bizarre twist in the Ward Churchill saga (fake art)
Ward Churchill: Caught on tape advocating terrorism
Eason Jordan, meet Ward Churchill

CNN founder Ted Turner opened his mouth this week at the National Press Club, and promptly demonstrated why America needs Fox News Channel now more than ever.

Three years after the invasion of Iraq, Turner is still pouting about public displays of patriotism on American airwaves: “I mean, I just really wonder during the, during the last war, you know, what business did it have in the news sets to have the American flag flying in the background. Uh, I mean, it was like the news media covered the Iraq war, at least at the beginning of it, almost as like it was a football game with us versus them.”

Funny, I can’t recall Turner getting his undergarments in a bunch when CNN chose Saddam Hussein’s side and former CNN executive Eason Jordan admitted the global news network had withheld reporting on Baathist atrocities in exchange for inside access and protection of its Baghdad staff. Recall Jordan’s confession published in the New York Times after America toppled Saddam’s regime in April 2003:

“I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed. One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us.”

It’s fine and dandy for CNN to wave Saddam’s flag and carry his blood-stained water. But when Fox News sticks a two-postage-stamp-sized American flag on its screen? Only then will Ted Turner declare that journalism and reportorial objectivity have gone to hell.

Vid here. And more to come at Hot Air.

Tom Curley: Head of the A(wt)P

What do you do when you are a global news organization under fire for suppressing five-month-old news of the capture of one of your employees by American troops in a Ramadi apartment with an alleged al Qaeda leader and a weapons cache?

You run to a sympathetic news organization to help you whitewash the story and smear the U.S. military. Naturally.

On Saturday, the Washington Post op-ed page published a shameless CYA screed by Associated (with terrorists) Press president and chief executive Tom Curley on the Bilal Hussein case. The inanity begins with the very first paragraph of the piece titled “In Iraq, a Journalist in Limbo:”

Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi photographer who helped the Associated Press win a Pulitzer Prize last year, is now in his sixth month in a U.S. Army prison in Iraq. He doesn’t understand why he’s there, and neither do his AP colleagues.

Oh, sweet merciful crap.

Curley and his A(wt)P colleagues just can’t understand why the military would want to hold a security detainee who was discovered by American troops in a Ramadi apartment with an alleged al Qaeda leader and a weapons cache, and who tested positive for explosives. Not that it will get through their very thick skulls, but let’s repeat:

The military said Hussein was captured with two insurgents, including Hamid Hamad Motib, an alleged leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. “He has close relationships with persons known to be responsible for kidnappings, smuggling, improvised explosive device (IED) attacks and other attacks on coalition forces,” according to a May 7 e-mail from U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Jack Gardner, who oversees all coalition detainees in Iraq.

“The information available establishes that he has relationships with insurgents and is afforded access to insurgent activities outside the normal scope afforded to journalists conducting legitimate activities,” Gardner wrote to AP International Editor John Daniszewski…

…The military said bomb-making materials were found in the apartment where Hussein was captured but it never detailed what those materials were. The military said he tested positive for traces of explosives.

Of course, if you read only Curley’s piece and the AP brief reprinted in the Washington Post on Sept. 18, you would never know those details. Those details appeared in AP reporter Robert Tanner’s piece on Sept. 17, five months after this blog broke news of Bilal Hussein’s detention on April 12. But the Washington Post has never bothered to report those details in its print edition. Nor has it questioned why the AP sat on the news. Not on its op-ed pages. Not in its news pages.

Let’s move to Curley’s second and third paragraphs, which are even more dishonest and misleading than the first:

After more than five months of trying to bring Bilal’s case into the daylight, AP is now convinced the Army doesn’t care whether Bilal is or isn’t an insurgent. The Army doesn’t have to care. Bilal is off the street, and the military says it doesn’t consider itself accountable to any judicial authority that could question his guilt.

But Bilal’s incarceration delivers a further bonus. He is no longer free to circulate in his native Fallujah or in Ramadi, taking photographs that coalition commanders would prefer not to see published.

“After more than five months of trying to bring Bilal’s case into the daylight…”

Unadulterated bull. Trying to bring his case to daylight where exactly? AP ignored several of my requests for information on Bilal Hussein’s status over the past five months. Between April 12 and Sept. 17, AP reported on Hussein’s case zero times. Zero.

“…AP is now convinced the Army doesn’t care whether Bilal is or isn’t an insurgent. The Army doesn’t have to care…He is no longer free to circulate in his native Fallujah or in Ramadi, taking photographs that coalition commanders would prefer not to see published.”

Translation: Those heartless, dastardly jack-booted thugs have callously tossed Hussein in the klink for no reason because they don’t like his pictures.

Let me repeat: According to the US military, Hussein was captured by American troops in a Ramadi apartment with an alleged al Qaeda leader and a weapons cache, and tested positive for explosives.

More Curley if you can stand it:

U.S. journalists are severely limited in their ability to move safely, make themselves understood and develop sources in such areas. AP has learned to overcome those limitations, using techniques honed over decades of covering sectarian confrontation and bloodshed in the Middle East.

“Techniques” such as turning a blind eye to widespread concern about the use of local stringers overseas? Or perhaps finely honed news-suppression techniques like those perfected by CNN during the Saddam regime?

Speaking of Eason Jordan’s CNN, is Curley trying to pull an Eason in this incendiary paragraph:

Both official and unofficial parties on every side of a conflict try to discredit or silence news they don’t like. That is certainly the case in Iraq, where journalists are routinely harassed, defamed, beaten and kidnapped. At last count, 80 had been killed.

Yes, you read that right. He is absolutely suggesting that our troops are retaliating against journalists whose work they don’t like. Read the whole piece again and look at the context.

And his organization calls my reporting “incendiary?”

***

Will anyone at the Washington Post clue its readers into the real controversy over AP and Bilal Hussein? Anyone?

Christopher Fotos of Post Watch takes on Curley’s moral equivalence. Jules Crittenden of the Boston Herald weighs in here.

***
Previous:

AP stands for Advocacy Press
AP vs. the “so-called blogosphere”
Associated Press and the Bilal Hussein case
Where is Bilal Hussein?

Pirate Ballerina, the blog that was central to pushing the story forward, has analysis and points to the bottom line of the report:

While we are unanimous in finding that Professor Churchill’s research misconduct is serious and that we should express the degree of that seriousness through a recommendation about sanctions, our discussions have not led to unanimity about what particular sanctions are warranted. What follows, then, is the only portion of our report that presents multiple views.

* Two members of the Committee conclude and recommend that Professor Churchill should not be dismissed. They reach this conclusion because they do not think his conduct so serious as to satisfy the criteria for revocation of tenure and dismissal set forth in section 5.C.1 of the Law of the Regents, because they are troubled by the circumstances under which these allegations have been made, and because they believe that his dismissal would have an adverse effect on other scholars’ ability to conduct their research with due freedom. These two members agree and recommend that the most appropriate sanction, following any required additional procedures as specified by the University’s rules, is a suspension from University employment without pay for a term of two years.

* Three members of the Committee believe that Professor Churchill’s research misconduct is so serious that it satisfies the criteria for revocation of tenure and dismissal specified in section 5.C.1 of the Laws of the Regents, and hence that revocation of tenure and dismissal, after completion of all appropriate procedures, is not an improper sanction. One of these members believes and recommends that dismissal is the most appropriate sanction; the other two believe and recommend that the most appropriate sanction is suspension from University employment without pay for a term of five years.

Finally, the Committee had the following comments about its report: The Committee notes that the Laws of the Regents of the University of Colorado define “academic freedom” as “the freedom to inquire, discover, publish and teach truth as the faculty member sees it, subject to no control or authority save the control and authority of the rational methods by which truth is established.”

We understand and were careful to distinguish “misconduct in research,” which is addressed by the University of Colorado’s Administrative Policy Statement on Misconduct in Research and Authorship, from the issue of “truth” addressed by the Regents’ Laws’ definition of academic freedom. The Committee observes also that the allegations we were asked to investigate were initiated in the wake of the public outcry concerning some highly controversial essays by Professor Churchill dealing with, among other things, the 9/11 tragedy. While not endorsing either the tone or the contents of those essays, the Committee reaffirms, as the University has already acknowledged, that Professor Churchill’s right to publish his views was protected by both the First and Fourteenth Amendment guarantees of free speech. Although those essays played no part in our deliberations, the Committee expresses its concern regarding the timing and perhaps the motives for the University’s decision to forward charges made in that context. We point out finally that when Professor Churchill was hired as an Associate Professor with tenure in 1991 and promoted to (full) Professor in 1997, the University knew that he did not have a Ph.D. or law degree, as commonly expected for faculty at this institution, and was aware that he was a controversial public intellectual.

Press conference scheduled for 230pm.
AP summary:

An investigation of a professor who likened some Sept. 11 victims to a Nazi found serious cases of misconduct in his academic research, a University of Colorado spokesman said Tuesday.

One member of the five-person investigative committee recommended that ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill be fired, and four recommended he be suspended, university spokesman Barrie Hartman said.

Churchill has denied doing anything wrong. He said earlier Tuesday that he had yet to see the report.

University officials had earlier determined Churchill could not be fired for his comments about the terrorist attacks, but they launched an inquiry into allegations about his research, which included accusations of plagiarism and fabrication.

More from Jim Paine at Pirate Ballerina on a possible new fake art controversy involving Churchill.

***

Related: Churchill’s wife resigns post.

***

Previous:

The seditious Ward Churchill
Ward Churchill and MEChA: perfect together
Ward Churchill: bullying claim
Ward Churchill update
Press conference on Ward Churchill
Ward Churchill: Caught on tape
One of Ward Churchill’s ex-wives speaks
Double standards at the University of Colorado
Liveblogging Ward Churchill and Bill Maher
The never-ending Ward Churchill sitcom
University of Colorado faculty members come to the defense of Ward Churchill
Another bizarre twist in the Ward Churchill saga (fake art)
Ward Churchill: Caught on tape advocating terrorism
Eason Jordan, meet Ward Churchill

But the most popular attraction was America’s biggest bloviator, William Jefferson Clinton, who charmed the audience with a same-sex marriage joke involving John McCain. More on that in a moment.

Clinton refrained from any Eason Jordan-esque musings, but kindled the fires of the Euro-pointy heads with lots of gooey “global society” talk–including ranking “climate change” and global inequality ahead of terrorism as the world’s most serious threats and making insipid pronouncements about how “people basically want to know that we’re on their side, that we wish them well, that we want the best for them, that we’re pulling for them.”

Still clueless after all these years.

AP gushed:

Many skipped lunch to attend Clinton’s more than one-hour discussion with the forum’s founded, Klaus Schwab. “It’s as inspiring as always, it’s brilliant,” [corporate titan Richard] Branson said. Sheikh Fawzi El Zafzaf, president of the Permanent Committee for Dialogue among Monotheistic Religions at Alazhar Al-Sharif in Egypt, said he admired Clinton “very much.”

“The world needs this message because he calls for all people to work together for a better humanity, regardless of their differences,” he said.

“He lights up the room,” said Kendall Powell, executive vice-president and chief operating officer of General Mills Inc., the Minneapolis, Minn.-based food and beverage company.

…Clinton was supposed to leave right after the session but he stood around, mobbed by Davos participants. Outside the hall, the photographers and forum staff waited patiently for a glimpse.

An International Herald Tribune reporter blogged:

He may be long out of office but the Masters of the Universe gathered here still got starry-eyed when Bill Clinton was interviewed in an auditorium packed to capacity. Looking haggard, with bags under his eyes, and wearing a multicolored African-style bracelet, Clinton nevertheless ranged eloquently on subjects from global warming to the future of Iraq, the election of Hamas and how to tame Iran…

…Many in the audience contrasted Clinton’s oratory prowess to his successor’s, and some waxed nostalgic for the days when he occupied the Oval Office. “He is just brilliant,’ said a British spectator. “Monica Lewinsky or not, when he was President, you just wanted to plant a flag on the White House lawn saying ‘ a real person lives here.”

Newsday reported:

Former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans was listening. “He’s a great performer and then he’s got the greatest convening power of anyone now in the world, I think, and the greatest capacity to articulate things that matter,” said Evans, who now heads the International Crisis Group, a think tank.

At the end of the discussion, Klaus Schwab, the forum’s founder and organizer, asked Clinton what advice he would give the next U.S. president, noting that the next president might either be married to Clinton or listening in the audience–an apparent reference to Sen. John McCain, seated in the first row along with Microsoft’s Bill Gates and other invitees.

“In this world full of culturally charged issues I think we should make it clear that Senator McCain and I are not married,” Clinton joked. The audience burst into laughter. The cameras cut away to a chuckling Michael Douglas. As the global elite roared, Clinton guffawed: “Oooh, we’ll be on the news with that tonight!”

Download and watch the video (.wmv file).

John McCain reveled in the attention of his good buddy, reported Newsday:

The comment earned Clinton a slap on the back from the Arizona Republican, who fought a crowd to get to the former president after the event.

“Interesting talk,” said the beaming possible 2008 presidential contender. “You got us both in trouble!”

Ick.

And with that, the global elite retired after an exhausting week of saving the world by generating more hot air than any of the industrial sources they’re fighting so hard to curtail.