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

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

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

01/31/07

AP STATEMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:46 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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When a CBS News reporter Lara Logan uses an al Qaeda propoganda film as part of her story, and refuses to identify it as such, do you begin to wonder just how credible and trustworthy of a journalist she is?

I do.

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

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:13 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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I'm presenting working on what will likely be my last post on the Jamil Hussein/Hurriyah mosque attacks debacle. I've got some emails out to several sources and the AP itself attempting to tie up loose ends, and I won't write a final draft until those addressed have a reasonable amount of time to respond.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further down in the same article:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So...

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:46 PM | Comments (46) | Add Comment
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In the wake of my January 25 26 letter to the Board of Directors of the Associated Press concerning the news organization's inaccurate reporting of the November 24 Hurriyah assault by Shia militias on Sunni mosques--a letter in which I provided to the Board of Directors the real name of AP source "Jamil Hussein"--the official Associated Press web site containing all of AP's official responses regarding Hurriyah has curiously withdrawn the January 4 article by AP reporter Steven R. Hurst claiming that Jamil Hussein is Jamil Hussein.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:59 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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And Captain Ed has the details:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update: Allah has CNN's debunking.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 04:22 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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As you well know by now, thanks to a n investigation launched by Curt of Flopping Aces and followed up on by Michelle Malkin and Bryan Preston's visit to the Hurriyah neighborhood of Baghdad as reported in the NY Post, Michelle's personal blog, and now via video at Hot Air, the Associated Press' reporting of massacres on November 24 were grossly exaggerated, and parts were apparently fabricated by a longtime Associated Press source they still call Jamil Hussein, even though we know otherwise.

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

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

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

The savage revenge attack for Thursday's slaughter of 215 people in the Shi'ite Sadr City slum occurred as members of the Mahdi Army militia burned four mosques and several homes while killing 12 other Sunni residents in the once-mixed Hurriyah neighborhood, Hussein said.

[snip]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[snip]

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

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

[snip]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[snip]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[snip]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:48 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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And finally, we get to the truth of the matter:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to AP:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Owens:

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

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

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

Vr,
LT Dean

He adds:

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

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

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

No definitive answers, and no corroborating accounts.

Stop me if you've heard this one before.

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

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 07:59 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Almost two months after the Associated Press ran the story that six Sunnis were pulled from a mosque in the Baghdad neighborhood of Hurriyah, doused in kerosene and set ablaze, the Associated Press continues to dodge a series of very simple questions surrounding their alleged deaths, and the deaths of 18 other Sunnis their reports claim were murdered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When following up on past reports that feature new information, news agencies do not repeat all of the details that were in their original breaking news reports. This does not mean that they are retracting what they had published previously unless a new report, correction or clarification states that explicitly.

A search of news reports in Nexis and Reuters shows that reporters for numerous news agencies, including The New York Times, Washington Post, and Reuters reported attacks on four or five Sunni mosques in Hurriyah (also spelled Hurriya) and additional sites elsewhere in Baghdad on Friday, November 24, 2006. As may happen in breaking news reports from active combat zones, the precise toll of death and injury can be difficult to establish.

Below are relevant passages from several news accounts of the incidents in Baghdad on that date. I have sent your questions to our International news desk. If any new information about this topic becomes available, I'll let you know.

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

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

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

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

Wagner's response only provided three answers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

These are not what I would consider encouraging answers.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:11 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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Right idea, wrong Jamil(s). Well, maybe not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's too bad, really.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:06 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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The Hot Air crew of Bryan Preston and Michelle Malkin are safely back from Iraq and their embed at Forward Operating Base Justice, and are rolling out reports pretty fast and furious.

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

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

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

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

Me neither.

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

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

She stated in part:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you very much for your time.

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

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

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

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:30 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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What's in a name?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:12 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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A wise and well-traveled journalist spoke with me via email yesterday regarding the stupidity of mistakes made by the large and the arrogant Goliaths of our world:

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

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

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

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

See Dubya noted:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How far outside of his jurisdiction?

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

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

This is the result.

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

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

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

...we insist on the highest standards of integrity and ethical behavior when we gather and deliver the news.

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

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

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

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

The questions that arise are thus:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course, their is a "third way."

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

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

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

But oh, will she try...

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:54 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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And so a major Associated Press claim in "Jamilgate" takes an apparently fatal hit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I await Kathleen Carroll's response.

Update: Broken link fixed.

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

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

I have bolded the relevant passages for ease of finding them in the text.

A fascinating response, for a couple of reasons.

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

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

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

Mr. Hurst,

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

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

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

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

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:33 AM | Comments (45) | Add Comment
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Or is this just being lost in translation? Curt, at Flopping Aces with the apparent bombshell:

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

So what do we have so far?

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

More as this develops...

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

Oh wait, where was I going with this?

...Ah yes, I remember now.

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

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

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

The AP claims four mosques in Hurriyah were destroyed:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jamil Hussein, and Jamil Hussein alone, stated:

Iraqi soldiers at a nearby army post failed to intervene in Friday's assault by suspected members of the Shiite Mahdi Army militia or subsequent attacks that killed at least 19 other Sunnis, including women and children.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In another version of this story, the Associated Press claims specifically that the Ahbab al-Mustafa, Nidaa Allah, al-Muhaimin and al-Qaqaqa mosques were attacked "with rocket-propelled grenades, heavy machine guns and automatic rifles," before being burned. There is zero evidence that any of the mosques were assaulted in such a manner, and only the Nidaa Allah suffered minor fire damage from a molotov cocktail easily extinguished by an Iraqi fire company.

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

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

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

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

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Well now, aren't things just getting lively?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr Owens,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update: Allah encapsulates things nicely:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 07:05 PM | Comments (57) | Add Comment
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As I've stated previously, I'm not real thrilled with those who have decided to prostitute the Saddam Hussein execution video, and now that Allah tells me what the executioners were shouting, I'm even more disgusted.

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

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

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

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

[snip]

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

[snip]

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

The photographic evidence seems to bear Dafydd out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Defense Ministry controls Iraq's military.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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