The Search for Jamil Gholaiem Hussein

As we have been reporting, the controversy over AP source Captain Jamil Hussein of the Iraqi police just keeps getting hotter. Now the Iraqi government, after denying there was such a man on their payroll, have declared that Jamil Hussein does exist and he will be arrested for talking to the press. The AP reports:

Ministry spokesman Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, who had previously denied there was any such police employee as Capt. Jamil Hussein, said in an interview that Hussein is an officer assigned to the Khadra police station, as had been reported by The Associated Press.

The captain, whose full name is Jamil Gholaiem Hussein, was one of the sources for an AP story in late November about the burning and shooting of six people during a sectarian attack at a Sunni mosque.

The U.S. military and the Iraqi Interior Ministry raised the doubts about Hussein in questioning the veracity of the AP’s initial reporting on the incident, and the Iraqi ministry suggested that many news organization were giving a distorted, exaggerated picture of the conflict in Iraq. Some Internet bloggers spread and amplified these doubts, accusing the AP of having made up Hussein’s identity in order to disseminate false news about the war.

Capt. Hussein has been a source for dozens of Western-penned stories, but he earned the ire of right-wing bloggers by confirming to the Associated Press that six Sunnis were burned alive by shiite militiamen after leaving a mosque.

Greg Sargent at TAPPED writes:

For weeks and weeks a pack of howling rightwing bloggers, led by Michelle Malkin, has been slamming the Associated Press over a story the news org ran some months back about six Sunnis burned alive by Shiite attackers. The righty bloggers have struggled mightly to prove that the story was bogus, arguing that this “made up” story showed that the AP was treasonously devoted to spreading false news about how bad the war had gotten. They made this case mainly by pushing the idea that one source for the story, police captain Hussein, didn’t exist, even though the AP stood fast by its story and even re-reported it by finding new witnesses to the atrocity.
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These bloggers actually managed to kick up enough dust around this story that some mainstream news orgs were suckered into paying attention to this attack on one of their own and granting it a semblance of legitimacy. The truth, however, is that with a few exceptions, the righty bloggers and columnists pursuing this attack were never serious about discovering whether or not that original burned-alive episode happened. Their real goal was to scapegoat an enemy within at a time when their cherished war was devolving into a disaster, to discredit the messenger, and to sow doubts about the validity of the war imagery being brought back by that messenger — imagery that was turning the American public against the conflict and causing their beloved leader and party to sink ever deeper in the polls.

But the bloggers who ridiculed the Associated Press retain their doubts about the Sunni attack itself, now that the source’s identity has been confirmed by the Iraqi government. Right-winger Curt at Flopping Aces writes:

As many of us have said from the beginning, finding Jamil Hussein will not make this story go away. Actually it makes it better since we can now question him on how he has been able to report on stories all across Baghdad. On why no other witnesses can be found other then three who will not go on record, everyone else says it didn’t happen. On why there is no record of any bodies going to a morgue or hospital as the AP reported. On why no family of the victims can be found nor can the vicims be identified.

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