CENTCOM says AP’s "Iraqi police source" isn’t Iraqi police -- Part 22 -- Continued from this post.

In which an assistant editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal  -- he's been working there since way back in '05! -- does not solve the Jamil Hussein mystery.

Tracing "Jamil Hussein's" footsteps and ignoring anti-blog hatred
Michelle Malkin

After receiving initial reports from a Civilian Police Advisory Training Team (CPATT) source two days ago and investigating further, here's what I can tell you:

According to two CPATT officials--one in the U.S, one in Iraq--there is no one named "Jamil Hussein" working now or ever at either at the Yarmouk or al Khadra police stations. That is what they have said along and nothing has changed.

The Baghdad-based CPATT officer says there is no "Sgt. Jamil Hussein" at Yarmouk, which contradicts what Marc Danziger's contacts found. I have another military source on the ground who works with the Iraqi Army (separate and apart from the CPATT sources) and is checking into whether anyone named "Jamil Hussein" has ever worked at Yarmouk.

There is only one police officer whose first name is "Jamil" currently working at the Khadra station, according to my CPATT sources.

His name is Jamil Ghdaab Gulaim (alternate spelling per CPATT is "Ghulaim.") Previously, Jamil Ghdaab Gulaim worked at a precinct in Yarmouk, according to the CPATT sources. Curt at Flopping Aces has received the same info.

Now, go back and look at the full name and location information the Associated Press cited in its statement on the matter:

[T]hat captain has long been know to the AP reporters and has had a record of reliability and truthfulness. 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.

Let's review: AP's source, supposedly named "Jamil Gholaiem Hussein," used to work at Yarmouk but now works at al Khadra. CPATT says the one person named "Jamil" now at al Khadra -- Jamil Ghdaab Gulaim -- also used to work at Yarmouk. His rank is the same as that of AP's alleged source. His last name is almost identical to the middle name of AP's alleged source. (FYI: In Arabic, the middle name is one's father's name; the last name is one's grandfather's.)

According to the CPATT officers, Captain Jamil Ghdaab Gulaim "denies ever speaking to the AP or any other media." I retracted information to the contrary two days ago based on a single CPATT source who said he had erroneously stated that Gulaim had admitted being the source.

To repeat: Both CPATT sources in the U.S. and Iraq have confirmed that Jamil Ghdaab Gulaim denies speaking to the AP.

That leaves a couple of unanswered questions:

1. Is Jamil Ghdaab Gulaim the real name of AP's oft-cited source?

2. ...

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Two Imams Denied The Hurriya Immolation Ever Happened 
SeeDubya

No one disputes that there was violence in Hurriya on Nov. 24th. But the sensational man-burning thing which originated with Captain Jamil Hussein, and made it into the Times of London as well as the AP wires, was discredited as "rumor" in the Washington Post the next day (this link goes to the Boston Globe version of their story):

Throughout the day, rumors of new atrocities committed against Sunnis floated across Baghdad, including one in which six Sunnis were said to have been doused with kerosene and torched to death in Hurriyah. But two local imams denied such an attack took place.

Mad blog rabble, huh? They're talking about you, Washington Post Iraq Bureau.

Now to be fair, the WaPo does credit the "torched mosques" angle of the story, which is interesting because both CENTCOM and Armed Liberal's investigators in Iraq confirmed there wasn't such a thing, and the AP itself implicitly reduced the number of torched mosques . But the WaPo ups the number to five:

There was no shortage of confirmed incidents. In the mixed Hurriyah neighborhood, Shi'ite militiamen torched at least five Sunni mosques on Islam's holiest prayer day, police and residents reported. Other mosques were attacked by gunmen firing bullets from the rooftops of nearby houses, witnesses said. ... 

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Hey AP! Where's The Stinking Proof You Reported... 3 Weeks Ago?

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More here and here. Got something I need to do but I'll try to come back with excerpts later.

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Jamilgate: Michelle’s sources can’t find Capt. Hussein
Allahpundit

Actually, I think they have found him but he’s probably not willing to come clean about being the source for fear of disciplinary action. Pseudonyms are a no-no according to the AP’s own internal procedures, but it may be that he gave them a false name without them knowing or being able to check.

Eric Boehlert revisited this subject yesterday in yet another episode of What Warbloggers Believe. What warbloggers believe, says Eric, is that Iraq is a magical fairyland of sunshine and candy canes where Baghdad police didn’t find 76 bodies in the streets this morning. Or, alternately, that Iraq really is in dire straits but it’s entirely the media’s fault. He’s not clear which he thinks it is, but who cares? Light your torch; it’s strawman time.

Warbloggers, all boosters of the doomed U.S. invasion, have been poring over the AP’s dispatches, feverishly dissecting paragraphs in search of proof for their all-consuming conspiracy theory that biased American journalists, too cowardly to go get the bloody news in Iraq themselves, are relying on local news stringers who have obvious sympathies for insurgents and who actively “spread terrorist propaganda,” according to right-wing blog Little Green Footballs. The result of the AP hoax? Gullible, or “average,” Americans have been duped into believing there is a “civil war” raging in Baghdad today.…

See, it’s really the AP’s fault we’re losing the war. (Plus, it’s ignoring all the “good news” from Iraq.)

I don’t believe any of that, but fine. We’re still warming up. Here’s the good stuff.

The warbloggers’ strawman is built around the claim that if the AP hadn’t reported the Burned Alive story, which was no more than a few sentences within a larger here’s-the-carnage-from-Baghdad-today article [Wrong. When the story first hit Drudge, the burning six were the only element in it. — ed.], then Americans would still gladly support the war in Iraq…

The “single story” canard is a neat example of Boehlert’s disingenuousness. He’s written two columns about Jamilgate now; there are enough links embedded in both to show he’s done his homework. Which means he knows very well this wasn’t the only story the AP’s used Jamil Hussein for. The actual number, as Michelle notes, exceeds 60. He also knows that the AP originally claimed four mosques were burned and that that claim has since disappeared into the ether without so much as a clarification. Just like he also knows, courtesy of Robert Bateman, that it’s unlikely in the extreme based on Hussein’s location that he’d be a credible witness for the wide variety of attacks sourced to him by the AP. All of which make this story highly dubious, yet none of which Boehlert sees fit to mention anywhere in his piece. Why?

Because he doesn’t care if the story’s bogus or not. He’ll say en passant that he does because he knows, as a journalist and media critic, that he has to. But it’s strictly pro forma. His position seems to be that the story’s true in the Larger Sense, as a microcosm of the brutality in Iraq, even if it’s not, you know, technically true (”as if an AP retraction would change a thing on the ground in Baghdad, where electricity remains scarce, but sectarian death squads roam freely”). In other words, “fake but accurate.” That’s his bottom line here and that’s why it’s dishonest of him and his pals to even pretend to care whether the report’s accurate. As far as they’re concerned, if Jamil Hussein turns out to be real, the story’s true; if he turns out not to be real, the story’s True. They can’t go wrong. Meanwhile the AP, if it’s guilty of bad facts to whatever greater or lesser degree, gets an almost completely free pass.

At the risk of suggesting that I know What Warbloggers Believe better than Eric Boehlert does, let me assure you that we’re not using this story as a fig leaf for the war. ...

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Media Matters Cranky-Pants Dowdifies Me
SeeDubya

Eric Boehlert thinks we miss the big picture. He singles out several "warbloggers" for scorn over the Jamil Hussein inquiry, including yours truly:

With no facts to back up their allegations, warbloggers instead lean heavily on name-calling in their never-ending attempt to libel and smear journalists. "The Western press is negligently or carelessly (I'm not ready to believe knowingly) passing along terrorist propaganda disguised as news," announced warblogger SeeDubya at The Junkyard Blog. Talk about hubris -- stateside warbloggers claim they have a better handle on what's happening in Iraq than reporters who are actually there.

Wow. Did I say that?

No I did not. Dumbass Boehlert just Dowdified me:

As with Patterico's story, there is a range of possibilities here. In both stories, the worst scenario is that the Western press is negligently or carelessly (I'm not ready to believe knowingly) passing along terrorist propaganda disguised as news. But even the best case scenario in each one involves some notable journalistic malfeasance.

Note that Boehlert represented a fragment of a sentence as a complete sentence to make it look like I said something I didn't say. I guess it's fair that he's not concerned about the AP's accuracy, since getting the facts straight for his own writing doesn't trouble him very much.

But what really does bother Boehlert--the thing he hangs his whole preachy little screed on--is the deafening silence from the warbloggers about the murder by insurgents of AP cameraman Aswan Ahmed Lutfallah, because it just didn't fit our narrative.

Well, here's what one "warblogger" said about that: ...

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Media Matters Isikoffs See Dubya
Patterico

Media Matters’s Eric Boehlert has “Isikoffed” blogger See Dubya.

Surely you remember that term. I invented it back in September, when I noted how Michael Isikoff had altered a quote from an Alberto Gonzales memo without noting the alteration in any way. I therefore proposed that

when a quote is altered without any hint that it has been changed, the quote should be described as having been “Isikoffed.”

This is a variant of Dowdification, which is the practice of distorting the meaning of a quote by using an ellipsis. That’s bad enough — but at least the ellipsis gives the reader an indication that something has been left out. When you “Isikoff” someone, you don’t even let the reader know that the sentence (and its meaning) have been radically altered.

Here is Boehlert:

With no facts to back up their allegations, warbloggers instead lean heavily on name-calling in their never-ending attempt to libel and smear journalists. “The Western press is negligently or carelessly (I’m not ready to believe knowingly) passing along terrorist propaganda disguised as news,” announced warblogger SeeDubya at The Junkyard Blog. Talk about hubris — stateside warbloggers claim they have a better handle on what’s happening in Iraq than reporters who are actually there.

Now here’s what See Dubya actually said, with my emphasis:

As with Patterico’s story, there is a range of possibilities here. In both stories, the worst scenario is that the Western press is negligently or carelessly (I’m not ready to believe knowingly) passing along terrorist propaganda disguised as news. But even the best case scenario in each one involves some notable journalistic malfeasance. ...

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Mail from Curt while I was working on the above:

I decided to do up some google maps of the Baghdad area to better represent the distances of the attacks SeeDubya showed on his map.  You can check them out here.

I clicked the link to check out the maps and found out they were only a small part of a much larger post I hadn't realized was there.  It's too long and too detailed for any reasonable excerpt to be representative. Read it all.

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Part 22 of a series. Part 23