CENTCOM says AP’s "Iraqi police source" isn’t Iraqi police -- Part 26 -- Continued from this post.

LA Times revisits controversial Ramadi airstrike story
See-Dubya

Back in November, blogger Patterico spent a lot of time looking into an incident in Ramadi in which it was alleged in the L.A. Times that U.S. airstrikes killed several civilians. The incident in many ways set the stage for the ongoing questions about coverage of the Hurriya burning and the AP’s reliance on “Capt. Jamil Hussein”.

The U.S. military adamantly denied that any airstrikes had occurred in Ramadi on November 15th, and they still do. Patterico asked for a response from Solomon Moore, the Times reporter who wrote that story, but never received one.

Now Moore has responded. And, well, it looks pretty good for Patterico. The headline is “U.S. Says Ramadi Operations Didn’t Rely On Airstrikes”.

There may have been tragic collateral damage as a result of tank fire (or insurgent fire, come to think of it) that day. But Patterico’s point wasn’t that everything is perfect in Iraq. His point was that the U.S. side of this story wasn’t getting told in the LA Times.

Now it is. ...

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L.A. Times (Almost) Admits Ramadi Airstrike Didn’t Happen
Patterico

The L.A. Times has finally reported the military’s denial of an airstrike in Ramadi on November 13 or 14, in this story.

The paper doesn’t exactly admit that no airstrike occurred in central Ramadi on November 13 or 14. But new interviews done by the paper’s mysterious unnamed Ramadi stringer have Iraqis saying they “assumed” that it was an airstrike that caused the deaths:

Several residents said that they saw helicopters and a jet fighter during the confrontations and assumed that some of the explosions were caused by airstrikes. U.S. ground units are often accompanied by air support during military operations.

The editors also appear to be backing off of the article’s original claim of 15-20 “pulverized” houses:

“Six houses were leveled to the ground and 10 others were damaged to varying degrees,” said Ahmad Hummadi, 50, a laborer. “But all of the houses were abandoned because they were no longer suitable for habitation.”

The editors appear to be demanding immediate answers from the military again:

Marines did not immediately respond to inquiries about the total number of civilian dead . . .

Why would Marines need to “immediately respond” to inquiries in a December 28 update to a November 15 story??

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IBD Wants To Meet “Capt. Jamil Hussein”

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Part 26 of a series. Part 27.