Decision ‘08

Advantage: Old Media

There has been a long-running saga between the Associated Press and a number of conservative bloggers regarding a tough-to-locate source in Iraq named Jamil Hussein; among other things, the search to locate him was one of the reasons Michelle Malkin was on the verge of going to Iraq (looks like she’s still going). However, it appears the AP’s source has, as Mickey Kaus puts it, passed the first hurdle of credibility: he exists.

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

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

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

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

Khalaf offered no explanation Thursday for why the ministry had initially denied Hussein’s existence, other than to state that its first search of records failed to turn up his full name. He also declined to say how long the ministry had known of its error and why it had made no attempt in the past six weeks to correct the public record.

Lots of reaction of Memeorandum…

One Response to “Advantage: Old Media”

1 Amos Says:
January 4th, 2007 at 11:13 pm
Now we just have to find out if he’s a liar. Because if those mosques weren’t burned down and those people weren’t set on fire it doesn’t cast the 20 or so stories the AP has filed citing him as a source in a very credible light.