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Breaking: "Jamil Hussein" identified? (Updated and bumped)
CENTCOM says AP’s "Iraqi police source" isn’t Iraqi police -- Part 20 -- Continued from this post.
Not real sure what's happening here, folks. Michelle posted this at 10:30 (EST?): Breaking: "Jamil Hussein" identified?
Developing...
Well, this is a strange turn. After getting in touch with Marc Danziger who reported this weekend that there appeared to be a Jamil Hussein at the Yarmouk police station in Baghdad, I went back to the US military.
Here is the info I just received from a contact with the Civilian Police Advisory Training Team (CPATT): ...his real name is CPT Jamil Ghdaab. He is a police officer and he's admitted to being the AP contact.
According to my contact, he's being questioned about the alleged six burning Sunnis incident now.
Bloggers stateside have plenty of questions to ask.
Bruce Kesler has tons: ...
... then turned around and took it off her site and posted this at 11:04: Retraction: "Jamil Hussein"
A few minutes ago, I posted an update to the Jamil Hussein story. My source just informed me that he had incorrect information. I'm removing the post. ...
Hmmm. "Watch the skies."
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Some clarification may be in order here. I don't believe in "Memory Holes." I've made it plain to my guest bloggers at Old War Dogs that once something goes on the site it stays on the site. "Add a retraction or clarification if you must, but start erasing your tracks and your outa here." I obviously don't have that sort of control over Michelle's site but I feel strongly that erasing her original post was wrong. I've excerpted more of her original post above than I would have if she hadn't removed it from her site.
*** Update and bump. Original timestamp 11:37 These Are Not The Droids You Are Looking For...
Marc "Armed Liberal" Danziger
OK, folks, this is what open source is about - you put things out there and the rest of the world improves on them - so here it goes. I think we discovered something, but it turns out probably not to have been useful. Sorry about that, but as they say, there are no failed experiments.
After talking about this on Friday, I used some old contacts to call friends in Baghdad on Saturday. We (friends and I) have contacts there through major local Iraqi news orgs there - specifically Al Sabah. They have the ability/credentials to move around, ask questions where others don't.
So, after some calls, IMs, and e-mail we get a call back by Sat night (California time)/Sunday morning (Baghdad time); there is no Capt. Jamil Hussein at Yarmouk, but there is a Sergeant by that name, with a somewhat dubious reputation (worked directly under Uday, Baathist remnant, etc.). So, we checked further, because, after all, I want to be certain before I start throwing too many things around, and it takes a different type and level of checking to have anything like confidence there than it does here to have something close to certainty - and be sure that we'll be talking about that a bit later.
Reporters from Al Sabah agreed to go interview the superior officer at the police station. They were on the phone at 4:30 am PST today, and they had gone to Karrada and established there is no Jamail Hussein there (would have been unlikely since Karrada is mostly Shiite, and in fact is mostly the power zone of SCIRI, Hakeem has his HQ there - and the Sgt at Yarmouk was obviously Sunni). Information then came in that there is a Colonel Jamail Hussein working at Abu Gharib. (Via sources at the Interior Ministry.)
Now, what we know is that there is no Captain by this name, so we presumed that it is likely that it was an alias. The question was whether it someone who'd dissembled about his name or about his rank? And why didn't anyone else turn up these guys? ...
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Fell a little behind on this story due to that shoulder problem I mentioned earlier, then lost some more time to a blown circuit breaker. (Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results may or may not be "insanity", but it is definitely not the height of genius.) I'm trying to make my Jamilgate series a fairly complete history of the matter as it develops, with at least links to most of the important posts as they come out. In this case I'm going to have to make up some lost time by linking without excerpting. Go read these:
*** Fedayeen AP?
Confederate Yankee
To answer Ace's question, a particularly interesting part of Marc Danziger's post is the apparent discovery of Uday Hussein associate and possible Baathist dead-ender Sgt. Jamil Hussein at the police station in Yarmouk.
If it turns out that this Hussein is the man claiming to be Captain Hussein, and his tied to Uday and the Baathists can be substantiated, then we've got something juicy brewing.
The association of Muslim Scholars is widely viewed as a terrorist-friendly Sunni group with ties to the insurgency and al Qaeda, and the AP uncritically and unquestioningly cited them in this story without an apparent second thought.
If it can be substantiated that the Sgt. Hussein uncovered by Danziger's work is AP's "Captail Jamil Hussein" source, and that it can be substantiated that he has ties to Uday, or more specifically has ties with the Fedayeen Saddam, then we will have reason to wonder how much of AP's reporting has been infiltrated in such a way as to promote a pro-Sunni insurgency agenda.
Update: ...
*** Jamilgate: Many Jamil Husseins, not so many Capt. Jamil Husseins
Allahpundit
Armed Liberal did yeoman’s work but the results, alas, didn’t match the hype. Here’s what we now know, or what we think we know:
1. There’s a Sgt. Jamil Hussein at Yarmouk police station who’s rumored to be an ex-Baathist and former employee of Uday Hussein.
2. There’s a Col. Jamil Hussein at Abu Ghraib.
3. There’s a Capt. Jamil Ghdaab who might or might not be the real source of the AP story.
Maybe tomorrow there’ll be more. AL did find out something important, though: In the meantime two different sources in Hurriyah confirm that at least two of the mosques in question are just fine, are standing strong, a couple of bullet marks on them, but that’s nothing out of the ordinary. We also hear that they are closed for worship from fear of retaliatory attacks. There are two other mosques there that were claimed to have been attacked (the claim was later reduced to one) and we’ll see if we can get some pictures of them all, at which point we’ll have some facts to report. I’m also hoping to get more of a local response to the core story - about the six who were allegedly burned to death.
That’s the first independent confirmation I’m aware of that the original AP story was wrong in a key respect. Remember? November 24th: ...
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Another one I missed earlier: Weird Morning on the Jamil Hussein Snipe Hunt
*** Walking a Beat With "Capt. Jamil Hussein"
SeeDubya
If Michelle Malkin is still planning on a trip to Iraq to track down the infamous "Captain Jamil Hussein", she'd better pack her hiking shoes. Because he walks a pretty hard beat.
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 Huriyah 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 track down where Capt. Hussein reports from, I used Lexis-Nexis to check the AP Newswire for "Jamil Hussein". Sifting through 269 hits (most of which were simply updates of the same stories) going back to April 24th, I found AP had reported 51 separate incidents of violence sourced solely to Jamil Hussein (as opposed to, e.g., "police"). All but one of these incidents included the neighborhood where the incident occurred or at least a general geographic designation (e.g. "Southwest Baghdad"). Rather than list them, I collaborated with blogger geoff from Uncommon Misconceptions--himself an early skeptic of Capt. Hussein's geographical contortions--to plot them on a map of Baghdad.
[map]
Captain Jamil Hussein: he's everywhere!
Or, he's nowhere.
So how does he know what he knows about things all over the city, and so quickly?...
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Part 20 of a series. Part 21
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