Flopping Aces Catches Some More Dodgy Iraq Reporting [Updated 12/21]

[UPDATE 12/21/06: Welcome Media Matters readers, and thank you very much for taking the time to click through from Eric Boehlert's article. I hope you will also take the time to click here and read how Boehlert has altered a quote from this post to fit his own agenda, and similarly ignored my post commemorating Aswan Ahmed Lutfallah.]

In the wake of Patterico's hard look at the LA Times coverage of the Ramadi strike (newest post here), Curt of Flopping Aces digs in and chases down another story from Iraq (this time it's the AP) getting the Green-Zone treatment-- an awful story about several burning mosques and people being burned alive, and one that the U.S. says didn't happen that way at all.

As with Patterico's story, there is a range of possibilities here. In both stories, the worst scenario is that the Western press is negligently or carelessly (I'm not ready to believe knowingly) passing along terrorist propaganda disguised as news. But even the best case scenario in each one involves some notable journalistic malfeasance. With Patterico, the LA Times story quite clearly refused to include CENTCOM's denial that the Ramadi airstrike ever happened. At FA, an e-mail from a CENTCOM media guy explains that the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior has recently cracked down on unofficial spokesmen within the national police, and that no one below the rank of Chief may speak with the media.

Now a good reporter won't let that stop him; if he has an eyewitness who will give an account--especially an on-the-record one--of what went down, that's certainly preferable to some sanitized official version. And this AP reporter got his incorrect information from an Iraqi Captain named Jamil Hussein. Hmm...so maybe he was supposed to be an eyewitness to these (mythical) mosque-burnings in Hurriya? That's what one might infer from the article. At the very least one might think this was a policeman who was tasked to investigate this particular incident and thus would have some knowledge of what occurred. But the value of Curt's investigation here is that he sheds a little light on Jamil Hussein's background--this guy comments on Iraq stories all the time, usually reporting chaos and mayhem in Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods all over Baghdad--Sadr City, Dora, Mansour, and others.

In other words, it looks less like Capt. Hussein is an eyewitness to this event, and more like he's just an unofficial spokesman. But a spokesman for whom? At best, this is a policeman who is not authorized to speak for the Ministry of the Interior, being consulted for his version of events as if he were, and his version is being reported as if it were the official version because of...lazy journalism. That's a problem, because we don't know how it is he's supposed to know the things he says he knows. Or why he's always inserting himself into these stories like some kind of Iraqi Greg Packer.

Or maybe he's somebody else entirely. As you see in FA's last update,Centcom tells FA that they're investigating who the hell Jamil Hussein is...if there even is a Jamil Hussein. For all we know this could be Ayman Al-Zawahiri calling up the AP to give his version of events. After all, the Centcom guy points out that there was another "volunteer" spokesman in another police department unmasked quite recently, and there's a warrant out for him to be questioned. There are several more being verified now, most of them quoted in the AP.

Incidentally, I notice that that fake spokesman, Maitham Al-Razzaq, was quoted in May by the AP in the same story as Capt. Jamil Hussein...small world, huh?

P.S. That's two linkable stories at FA in as many days; Curt just got himself bookmarked for daily reading.