Kathleen Carroll, the Executive Editor and Senior Vice President of the Associated Press, just can't seem to do the required legwork necessary to resolve the questions surrounding six immolations and four mosque burnings alleged in news reports by anonymous reporters working for her organization. She does, however, try her best to deflect criticism in her latest response to the emerging scandal this afternoon.

She begins:

In recent days, a handful of people have stridently criticized The Associated Press' coverage of a terrible attack on Iraqi citizens last month in Baghdad. Some of those critics question whether the incident happened at all and declare that they don't believe our reporting.

Indeed, a small number of them have whipped themselves into an indignant lather over the AP's reporting.

What concerns Carroll is that her "handful" includes Jules Crittenden of the Boston Herald, Mark Tapscott of the Washington Examiner, Tom Zeller of the New York Times, and Robert Batemen in the New York Post, and this handful is steadily getting larger by the day thanks to a diligent army of citizen-journalists.

Their assertions that the AP has been duped or worse are unfounded and just plain wrong.

No organization has done more to try to shed light on what happened Nov. 24 in the Hurriyah neighborhood of Baghdad than The Associated Press.

Well, thanks for clearing that up. I can sleep comfortably now that you've confirmed what is in your self-interest to reinforce.

We have sent journalists to the neighborhood three different times to talk with people there about what happened. And those residents have repeatedly told us, in some detail, that Shiite militiamen dragged six Sunni worshippers from a mosque, drenched them with kerosene and burned them alive.

And yet in all of those trips to this intimate Sunni enclave, there are a few things the largest news organization in the world hasn't been able to discover... for instance, how the militiamen "burned and blew up" four mosques in the initial report, only to see that number dwindle to one mosque partially burned, without a retraction being issued. For that matter, which mosque were these six men dragged out of? Basic reporting, Editor Carroll. Eighth-grade school-paper who-what-when-where-why.

While we're on the subject of basic journalism, it would seem simple to find names for the six victims in such a tight-knit community. So why, after AP journalists went to this neighborhood three different times to investigate a story under a cloud of suspicion, has the Associated Press been unwilling or unable to provide that basic information?

No one else has said they have actually gone to the neighborhood. Particularly not the individuals who have criticized our journalism with such barbed certitude.

This isn't exactly the truth, Editor Carroll, and if you read your own reporting, you are well aware of that fact. An Iraqi fire company was called into the neighborhood to extinguish the one (not four) minor mosque fire. There does not seem to be any reports from the fire company concerning something as noticeable as six humans combusting in the street.

In addition, we know from your own reporting that legitimate Iraqi police and interior ministry officers dispatched to Hurriyah were unable to verify any of the claims made by AP reporters. They were able to interview the one named source, Imad al-Hasimi, at which time al-Hasimi told a different story than the one reported by the Associated Press. From what little you've given us, it seems he has retracted his story entirely.

I'm sorry that those of us thousands of miles away from the situation are having to criticize AP reporting with such "barbed certitude," but when your senior reporters five miles away don't seek answers to obvious and pressing questions, those of us further away must.

The AP has been transparent and fair since the first day of our reporting on this issue.
We have not ignored the questions about our work raised by the U.S. military and later, by the Iraqi Interior Ministry. Indeed, we published those questions while also sending AP journalists back out to the scene to dig further into what happened and why others might be questioning the initial accounts.

The AP mission was to get at the facts, wherever those facts took us.

Transparent? The AP will not tell us who their reporters are (citing safety concerns, of course). We have no names for alleged witnesses for precisely the same reason. We don't know the name of the mosque from which these men were abducted. We don't seem to have the names of the dead, and contrary to initial AP reports, we don't seem to have any named employees of the Kazamiyah Hospital who will claim to have seen these bodies. Of the two named sources in the initial story, one now disavows the story originally attributed to him, and the other, primary witness seems all but certain of being a long-run, deeply embedded fraud.

And what about the things that Carroll would rather not address?

Such an example is the fact that the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars, which would rarely miss a chance to cite an example of Shia brutality, has been curiously silent about these alleged immolations. Al Jazeera, the preeminent Arab news outlet, also did not report on this atrocity, despite how easily they could sell this story to their primary media market. For that matter, neither Reuters, nor UPI, nor any other news organization has been able to confirm the Associated Press story. AP, it seems, has an exclusive that no one else can or will substantiate, even two weeks later. If AP has the facts, they are very stingy sharing them.

What we found were more witnesses who described the attack in particular detail as well as describing the fear that runs through the neighborhood. We ran a lengthy story on those additional findings, as well as the questions, on Nov. 28.

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.

And now, we get to what concerns Editor Carroll most of all.

Jamil Hussein isn't just a one-off source, but an on-going, continual source for the Associated Press over the past two years, being used as a named source no fewer than 61 times in the past year. If Captain Hussein is a legitimate Iraqi police officer as Carroll insists, then inviting him to meet with his own superiors and representatives of U.S Central Command in front of Associated Press cameras would not only be uneventful for Captain Hussein, who could clear charges that he is an insurgent operative, but it would vindicate the Associated Press completely. The Associated Press can end this controversy by merely producing Captain Jamil Hussein.

And yet, we know that if the Associated Press could produce Captain Hussein to vindicate it's reporters, it would have done so by now. The fact that the Executive Editor of the Associated Press has been reduced to spending the bulk of her response attacking the messengers tells you just how dire the situation of the Associated Press in Iraq truly is.

Jamil Hussein is one false source that immediately calls into question all 61 AP stories in which he was a source. Jamil Hussein is just one of at least 14 sources that the Associated Press has claimed as Iraqi policemen, that have provided "proof" in perhaps dozens to hundreds of stories, that the Iraqi police simply have no record of.

The Associated Press is standing behind their story, perhaps because at this point, acknowledging how deeply they've been compromised is far too difficult to contemplate.

We don't need anymore bluster, accusations, or denials, Kathleen Carroll.

Simple facts will suffice.

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