It took six weeks to confirm that Jamil Hussein even existed. Why did it take that long? The AP refused to produce him for interview, and his existence only came about because others took action up to and including the threat of jail for talking to reporters when he was barred from doing so.
What remains is still a mystery despite the handwringing from the Lefties who are all atwitter (see memeorandum for what I'm talking about). Can the reports based on Jamil Hussein be corroborated by the facts? In the initial story discovered by Curt at Flopping Aces, the AP has already retreated from the original claims. Reports of four mosques torched were reduced to one. The other aspects of the story, especially the claims that six people were immolated after being set afire, have not been confirmed by anyone. Indeed, no one else has been able to identify those victims, where the events occurred, or other aspects of the story.
This review of the situation by Karl at Protein Wisdom sums up where we've been, and some likely directions on where this is headed.
None of the usual suspects can provide answers to the following, and this especially includes the AP:
* Witnesses who will go on the record;Considering that Kathleen Carroll has been completely unreceptive to any kind of criticism whatsoever and engage in the possibility that her company could have been misled by her reporters in Baghdad, she chooses to ignore the alternative.
* Names of the victims;
* An explanation on why AP first reported four mosques burnt and then changed it, without public corrections, to one mosque;
* An explanation on how they confirmed the deaths via hospital and morgue workers but then reported they went directly to the grave;
* Why the AP refused to provide corroborating details that confirmed the initial stories and instead chose to stand by the stories without actually providing factual assertions to back them up (we had to go on their word alone to determine whether the incidents actually happened even as the AP was modifying their original reporting quietly;
* An explanation on how a local police officer in one part of Baghdad was able to report on events citywide with apparent first hand information
JunkYard Blog takes the Ministry of Interior to task for their incompetence in tracking down Hussein's name. He's got a very good point (putting aside the whole matter of how they handled the execution of Saddam Hussein). You know that everyone is apparently looking for this guy, and no one bothered to check his name against payroll and try alternative spellings to boot? He goes on to pose the following issues remaining outstanding (and mirrors some of mine above:
Conflicting contemporary accounts:
The New York Times said that residents denied the man-burning story. The Washington Post's Iraq Bureau called it a rumor. And before Capt. Jamil Hussein came on the scene, "Police officials in the region told Associated Press reporters that nothing had happened in the Hurriyah district..."
AP changes its story and its sourcing:
Mary Katharine Ham caught the AP fibbing about who first told them the story--they claimed it was Captain Hussein and Imad al-Hashimi, who later retracted his account. Actually Hashmi was added to the AP wire reports eight hours after the story broke. And Captain Jamil Hussein was added thirty minutes after the first AP wire report, which sourced the story to "Sunni residents".
The immolated bodies were taken directly to the Kazamiyah morgue--or they were snuck out of the city after the battle and buried? The AP changes its story about the disposal of the bodies without noting any inconsistency.
Perhaps most damning, the AP implicitly backed off its assertion--originating with Captain Jamil Hussein--that four mosques were burned, and speaks of only one. Just like CENTCOM said.
The AP insists Jamil Hussein has never been wrong:
This claim was repeated in yesterday's AP story about his discovery. It's still not right. An AP reporter says so
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