IRAQ: So Just Who Is Capt. Jamil Hussein?

They cycle of violence reached new levels in Iraq last week and into the weekend, but the military is complaining that one Associated Press report — and its source — was dodgy. (Photo: Karim Kadim/Associated Press)

Against the backdrop of the civil war, occupation, Baathist insurgency, sectarian conflict, and struggle against terrorists in Iraq, to borrow a few descriptors, in addition to the historic meeting between President Bush and Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki today, another battle is brewing. This one pits conservative bloggers and the military’s communications machine against the Associated Press — and the media at large.

At the center of things is one police Capt. Jamil Hussein. Mr. Hussein was the primary source in an Associated Press wire-dispatch last Friday reporting that Shiite militiamen had “grabbed six Sunnis as they left Friday worship services, doused them with kerosene and burned them alive near Iraqi soldiers who did not intervene.”

The report was picked up and widely repeated at various news outlets throughout the weekend.

It was a harrowing detail in a day of wider chaos in which several reports of Mosque burnings were circulating, and it seemed to tip the scales in establishing a sense of overall pandemonium in Iraq.

(For its part, The New York Times took note of the incident on Saturday, in a larger story about the mosque burnings, this way: “In the evening, a resident named Imad al-Hashemi said in a telephone interview on Al Jazeera, the Arab news network, that gunmen had doused some people with gasoline and set them on fire. Other residents contacted by telephone denied this.”)

On Saturday, the press arm of the U.S.-led multi-national force in Iraq, began crying foul, issuing a press release saying it had issues with the number of mosques that the media were reporting had been burned and, in the last paragraph, this:

The patrol was also unable to confirm media reports that six Sunni civilians were allegedly dragged out of Friday prayers and burned to death. Neither Baghdad police nor Coalition forces have reports of any such incident.

Flopping Aces The Flopping Aces blog has followed the Capt. Jamil Hussein story closely.

Conservative bloggers — principally Flopping Aces — had already been questioning the AP’s story, and Mr. Hussein in particular, and with this, it was off to the races.

By Monday, Navy Lt. Michael B. Dean, a military spokesman for the joint operations in Iraq, had sent an e-mail to the Associated Press (which somehow made it onto the conservative blog circuit in a flash), essentially saying Mr. Hussein was neither a police officer nor an employee of the Iraq interior ministry (MOI), and therefore, not an approved source:

We can tell you definitively that the primary source of this story, police Capt. Jamil Hussein, is not a Baghdad police officer or an MOI employee. We verified this fact with the MOI through the Coalition Police Assistance Training Team. …

Unless you have a credible source to corroborate the story of the people being burned alive, we respectfully request that AP issue a retraction, or a correction at a minimum, acknowledging that the source named in the story is not who he claimed he was.

The On Deadline blog at USA Today went to the AP with the concerns, and got this response from AP’s international editor, John Daniszewski, on Tuesday:

The attempt to question the existence of the known police officer who spoke to the AP is frankly ludicrous and hints at a certain level of desperation to dispute or suppress the facts of the incident in question.

Yesterday, the wire service moved a lengthy story in which they went back to the Hurriyah neighborhood in Baghdad where the immolation incident reportedly took place, and interviewed other witnesses, who corroborated the story.

(The piece also took a swipe at the military’s continuing dealings with message-massaging firms like the Lincoln Group.)

And so things stand today.

The one thing that remains unclear, though, is this: The Associated Press said in its story yesterday that Mr. Hussein “has been a regular source of police information for two years and had been visited by the AP reporter in his office at the police station on several occasions.” The military, meanwhile, seems to suggest that Mr. Hussein is not a police officer, nor a civil servant in the employ of any Iraqi agency.

So who IS Mr. Hussein?

This article can be found at:
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/11/30/so-just-who-is-capt-jamil-hussein/