The Jammy Dodger dodges again

The AP/Jamil Hussein affair gets weirder by the day. AP said that the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior had found him, but now it seems that they've found the man who called himself Jamil Hussein, but who is actually Jamil Gulaim "XX". Where XX stands for his real second middle name and his real surname, neither of which is Hussein. So, did AP know he was using a pseudonym, and if so, why didn't they say so?

Lots on this from the blogger players in this game of dodgems: Flopping Aces and Confederate Yankee.

AP in poo again?

Strategy Page reports that AP has been found out again.

January 5, 2007: The Associated Press has again put out an Iraq story detailing events that did not happen. This time, it involves an airstrike that, "killed a family of four during a firefight." However, according to the press desk of Multi-National Forces-Iraq, no air strike happened during that firefight, and MNF-I also reported that which six insurgents were killed by American troops in Baghdad on January 1. This is the second time in roughly six weeks that the AP has been caught fabricating events.

I can't find the original article; only bloggers carrying the Strategy Page story. Best to wait?

Collaboration

The Confederate Yankee, Bob Owens, has been doing the work that AP have been unable to do. He been finding corroboration for the stories of Jamil Hussein. Or rather, he hasn't been finding corroboration for the stories of Jamil Hussein, but he has been looking.

In eight hours over three days last week, I tracked down online examples of the first 40 of 61 Associated Press stories citing Jamil Hussein, as replicated in news outlets and even official government press offices around the world...

Put bluntly, a search for other news agency accounts of the events described by Jamil Hussein seems to indicate that most of these events simply do not exist anywhere else except in AP reporting. I was completely unable to find a definitive corroborating account of any of Jamil Hussein's accounts, anywhere.

But the Blogoshere trumps us all.

(via PJM)

AP and fauxfacts

I've just come across this one. You will remember that after the November 23rd bombings in Sadr City, the Shi'ite reaction seemed to confirm that sectarian violence had become so implacable and widespread that 'civil war' seemed the only proper label. Two of the stories that built that picture were picked up by AP and spread across the world. According to one, four Sunni mosques had been burnt to the ground; the other told of 6 Sunnis handcuffed, tortured and burnt alive.

Curt at Flopping Aces looked a little deeper, his curiosity piqued by the source of both these sources, police Capt. Jamil Hussein. It turns out that Capt. Hussein has been a very fruitful source for AP at least since April reporting on nine incidents of violence, all, as it happens, involving violence by Shi'ites on Sunnis. It also turns out that not only was there no confirmation of this last incident from any other source (and it was contradicted by the US military), but that police Capt. Hussein's existence is ... problematical. As is another of AP's much quoted sources.

Go here for Curt's full investigation and here for Jules Crittenden's commentary. Pajamas Media's Blog Week in Review has Richard Fernandez and Glen Reynolds to comment on the AP Affair.

(via Instapundit)