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Jamail Hussein and Karen Toshima
CENTCOM says AP’s "Iraqi police source" isn’t Iraqi police -- Part 21 -- Continued from this post. Takeaway Points from Marc Danziger’s Post
Patterico
Marc Danziger’s post on Jam(a)il Hussein was pretty densely packed with information, and assumed a lot of familiarity with the story. I think a lot of people may have missed the takeaway points; I know I did. It took a phone call with Marc before it really sunk in what we do and do not have. Let me try to summarize.
If you have any faith in Marc’s sources — local Iraqi reporters working up the story — here is what they’ve found. There are three takeaway points. Let’s look at them one at a time.
First and foremost:
- Four mosques were not burned.
The AP would like you to forget it — YOU ARE GET-TING VERRRY SLEEEEPY! — but they did, in fact, make this claim: The savage revenge attack for Thursday’s slaughter of 215 people in the Shiite 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, [police Capt. Jamil] Hussein said.
Which four mosques were supposedly burned, according to the AP? 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 military checked it out, and said it wasn’t true: Contrary to recent media reporting that four mosques were burned in Hurriya, an Iraqi Army patrol investigating the area found only one mosque had been burned in the neighborhood.
Even this is confused, because the military press release appears to discuss a mosque not named in the AP story: Al Meshaheda. (h/t See Dubya.)
Even if the military were talking about the same four mosques, would our lefty friends believe the military anyway? Well, maybe our lefty friends at the AP would. You see, even the AP’s Kathleen Carroll seems to have backed off of the “four burned mosques” story. If you look at the AP response to critics, you’ll see a repeated insistence that the story was accurate — in part because they have evidence of one burned mosque.
Shorter Kathleen Carroll: We stand by our reporting that four mosques were burned. A mosque was, in fact, burned. What do you mean, four? Who said four? Did I say four?
Well, Marc’s sources say that “Capt. Jamil Hussein” was not right about these four mosques having been burned — and that photographic evidence may be on the way: ...
*** Jamail Hussein and Karen Toshima
Marc "Armed Liberal" Danziger
In the thread to my first Jamail Hussein post below, commenter Andrew Lazarus says: A.L., you seem to be seizing on this fire incident as an indication that the MSM coverage of Iraq is way off. But at the same time, neither you nor anyone else is suggesting that the counts of maimed corpses, or dead soldiers, or explosions is in any way exaggerated. The impression of Iraq as some sort of hell on earth really doesn't depend on this one gruesome story...any more than our perception of the Holocaust depends on the discredited story of Jews turned into soap.
I happen to think that this particular story - and the other stories - coming out of Iraq matter a lot because our policies on the war will be driven by our perceptions which are in turn driven by - the stories we read. My reply to Andrew started this way (with some amendations): The problem, Andrew, is [we don't know] whether [Iraq is] hell on earth or heck (or Beaumont, Texas); that's the point I keep trying to raise and that keeps getting slapped aside.
I spoke with Greg Sergeant today about all this, and we had a friendly chat in which I tried to explain why it is that one reported tragedy like this matters so much (and why the aggregation of small tragedies matters so much) and I asked if he'd ever heard of Karen Toshima.
He hadn't so let me explain here. ...
*** Absurdly Unethical: The Potential Ethics Case Against AP
Confederate Yankee
To quote the Bard, "What's in a name?"
The on-going Associated Press scandal known as Jamilgate began with this report from AP reporter Qais Al-Bashir. The initial report hinges exclusively on the word of Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein, a source that the Associated Press has cited a total of 61 times since April of this year, and a man the AP has claimed they have known for two years (Note that link was active as I wrote the original draft of this story, but has since disappeared).
In fact, when Hussein's credibilty was challenged, AP went further in supporting this identity, and even provided the full name of Jamil Gholaiem Hussein to bolster their case.
But what happens if it is determined that Jamil Gholaiem Hussein is not the name of AP's long-running source? What if it is a pseudonym?
I posed a generic ethical question based upon Jamilgate to quite a few people this morning. It read: Good morning.
Can I ask you three quick questions about source ethics in journalism?
If it is determined that a reporter has been using named source in an on-going series of stories, and that name turns out to be a pseudonym, under what circumstances would this be considered unethical behavior, and how serious a breach of ethics would this be?
Would it be compounded if the reporter insisted upon the veracity of the pseudonym?
What responsibility does the reporter bear in verifying the identity of his source?
Thanks for any help you can provide.
I decided on a generic approach as something of a "control;" is isn't scientific by any stretch of the imagination, but by posing this as a hypothetical, I was hoping to avoid any biases that people may harbor towards this specific story. It is, I think, far better to investigate these questions based upon the underlying principles that should drive honest reporting.
The answers to my hypothetical questions have begun to trickle in, and paint quite a dark portrait of the AP's behavior in Jamilgate if, Jamil Gholaiem Hussein turns out to be a pseudonym for someone else.
So far, I have received four responses to these questions, from Jon Ham of the John Locke Foundation and a former managing editor of the Durham Herald-Sun, Larisa Alexandrovna of the liberal-leaning Raw Story, Jay Rosen of New York University's PressThink, and Committee of Concerned Journalists Founding Chairman, Bill Kovach. ...
*** AP Covering It's Tracks
He has been based at the police station at Yarmouk, and more recently at al-Khadra, another Baghdad district, and has been interviewed by the AP several times at his office and by telephone. His full name is Jamil Gholaiem Hussein.
Also they said in that response that they confirmed the burning via hospital and morgue workers: AP reporters who have been working in Iraq throughout the conflict learned of the mosque incident through witnesses and neighborhood residents and corroborated it with a named police spokesmen and also through hospital and morgue work
But guess what? The new cache version has this paragraph: AP reporters who have been working in Iraq throughout the conflict learned of the mosque incident through witnesses and later corroborated it with police.
The same paragraph minus the bit about the hospital and morgue workers. Here is a screenshot of the latest cache version. Excuse all the colors, I searched with a long phrase from the original response: ...
*** Jamilgate: Is the AP covering its tracks?
Allahpundit
Now here’s something interesting. Curt was reading over the AP’s press releases about Jamilgate on the AP website and noticed that something seemed to be missing from John Daniszewski’s statement on November 28th. So he cross-checked it against another statement from Daniszewski issued that same day and published on one of USA Today’s blogs.
Here’s the USA Today statement.
[image]
The key paragraph is this one: AP reporters who have been working in Iraq throughout the conflict learned of the mosque incident through witnesses and neighborhood residents and corroborated it with a named police spokesmen and also through hospital and morgue workers.
Okay. Now here’s the statement on the AP website. It’s not the same statement as the one above: it references the correspondence they received from Lt. Dean and a subsequent phone call placed to Jamil Hussein to double-check the story. But it’s similar to the USA Today version in most respects.
[image]
What’s missing from this paragraph? AP reporters who have been working in Iraq throughout the conflict learned of the mosque incident through witnesses and later corroborated it with police.
What happened to the neighborhood residents and the morgue and hospital workers? ...
*** Editing The Greg Mitchell Way
Confederate Yankee
In my last post, I mentioned an AP news release about Jamilgate that seemed to have disappeared. It's back and well, well, well.... What have we here? [...]
A little creative attempt to rewrite history by the AP, eh? Quite dishonest, trying to alter an already released story. Yet strangely familiar...
Put it on Kathleen Carroll's tab... and cue the flaming skull.
Update: Allahpundit makes a good argument that since the two versions vary slightly in the USA Today and AP.org versions of the Daniszewski statement, that the comment about the morgue and hospital workers many not have been omitted from the AP release today, because it might not have ever been there. I Googled every variation I could think of aobut the morgue and hospital workers statement, and all hits tracked back to the USA Today story, so I'm inclined to think he's right.
But AP isn't out of the woods by any stretch, as Allah also noted that they USA Today version of Daniszewski's statement came after the AP version. They still dropped the hospital and morgue workers, just not in the same release.
So far, the AP has dropped the hospital and morgue workers and reduced the number of burning mosques from 4 to one, and the number of dead from 24 to six, if my count is accurate. That is a lot of revisionism warranting a retraction, in my opinion.
*** Is Sgt. Jamail Hussein a “Third Way” Baathist Holdover?
Patterico
Commenter “Neville Chamberlain” (hey, he chose his own name!) says: One more takeaway point:
If Centcom knew there was a “Sergeant Jamail Hussein” at the Yarmouk station and failed to report this fact…they have less credibility than the AP…
Sure . . . but let me challenge the assumption, which is that they knew (or should have known). One of my takeaway points is that there are still questions to ask about Sgt. Jamil Hussein, apparent former Uday Hussein acolyte — and one of them is whether he was a Baathist holdover of the sort described in my “third way” post, i.e., someone who wouldn’t be on the MOI’s list of policemen.
I rather think he sounds like exactly such a holdover. We don’t know for sure, but if Marc’s sources are right about him, he fits the profile. ...
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Part 21 of a series. Part 22
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