Jammy Dodger round-up

Michelle Malkin did some digging on her recent visit to Baghdad. She was looking for confirmation of an AP story that was built on the testimony of an Iraqi policeman called Jamil Hussein. The story told of 4 mosques burnt down, 6 Sunnis set on fire and a total of 18 dead. Politically, the story had importance because of the timing; it occurred the day after Sunni insurgents killed 215 people in Baghdad's main Shiite district and the Western press were pushing the line of a city gone completely out of control. It was another note in the crescendo that would climax with Get out, get out!!!

Malkin checks on what can be checked on, and the AP story just doesn't check out. She has photos of all four of the 'destroyed' mosques, with shots of the damage that actually occurred and an explanation as to how it occurred.

Lt. Col. Steven Miska, commander of the Dagger Brigade at Forward Operating Base Justice, states the obvious:

Part of it is, if you're relying on Iraqi reporters, well, what are their biases? What clans are they from and tribes? Why are they telling me this? What's his underlying motivation? And if you quote a police chief, well, those guys have underlying motivations, too . . .

I've gone out and found police chiefs on the street and said, 'What happened here?' Something just blew up and he told me, 'Well, U.S. airplanes just bombed this building.'

I said, 'What are you talking about? It was freakin' insurgent rockets that just hit the building, I picked them up on radar.' But he just told the reporter on the street that U.S. warplanes bombed the building and killed 13 people.

So, rumors on the street Iraqis will take at face value. Trying to get them to do investigations is like pulling teeth out of their head.

Curt at Flopping Aces (who started the investigation) has plenty to say, and there'll be video at Hot Air tomorrow.

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.

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)