For weeks and weeks a pack of howling rightwing bloggers, led by Michelle Malkin, has been slamming the Associated Press over a story the news org ran some months back about six Sunnis burned alive by Shiite attackers. The righty bloggers have struggled mightly to prove that the story was bogus, arguing that this “made up” story showed that the AP was treasonously devoted to spreading false news about how bad the war had gotten. They made this case mainly by pushing the idea that one source for the story, police captain Hussein, didn’t exist, even though the AP stood fast by its story and even re-reported it by finding new witnesses to the atrocity.
One of the key pieces of evidence the wingers cited to make the case that Hussein didn’t exist was the fact that Iraqi officials were claiming he didn’t. Well, guess what? It looks as if Iraqi officials are now acknowledging that Hussein does exist after all. Here’s what the AP is now runnning:
BAGHDAD, Iraq – 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.
I remember in the days leading up to the war, news agencies were trying to determine the identity of an anonymous Iraqi blogger and the righties were infuriated — didn’t the media realize they were putting this man’s life at risk? Now, in their bumbling quest to discredit the AP, they’ve done exactly the same thing. Did it ever occur to them that Iraq is, you know, a dangerous place? Actually it probably didn’t, since the whole point of this little exercise was to prop up the fantasy of a successful war.
Maybe no one was acknowledging the man’s existence because, in talking to Western journalists, he pissed off the wrong people, or in some other way brought the wrong sort of attention to himself, and had to lay low. Maybe he was just trying to avoid a bullet to the head. There’s a lot of that going around over there, I hear.
These people are wrong about everything, and have been from the start.
… Greenwald has a typically comprehensive rundown and analysis:
The right-wing blogosphere is driven by Jayson Blairs. They are exposed as frauds and gossip-mongerers on an almost weekly basis. The only thing that can compete with the consistency of their errors is the viciousness of their accusations and their pompous self-regard as “citizen journalists.”
Congratulations to the AP for standing up for itself on this one. Other media organizations need to pay attention.
(Related cartoon here.)