As the quest to unravel the mystery surrounding Captain Jamil Hussein as a source for approximately 61 AP stories originating from Iraq continues, several critics from the left have weighed in to denounce the effort – most by using the curious logic that it doesn’t really matter, that things are so bad in Iraq what’s the difference if a couple of stories turn out to be created out of whole cloth by the enemy?

Things are bad in Iraq as every blogger who has taken an interest in this story has been constrained to point out. And in the grand scheme of things, whether or not the AP has been a tool for enemy propaganda – willing or unwilling – is not the point either. For myself, I assume that the AP is in the same boat as other western news outlets when it comes to reporting from Iraq, albeit given their extensive contacts and experience in the region, probably not as beholden to “stringers” for getting the facts for a story as others.

What is at issue here and why the stakes are so high is so simple that one would think that both left and right could agree on the vital importance of getting to the bottom of the Captain Hussein mystery; to discover the facts of the matter.

Will this discovery alter the outcome of the war? Of course not. Will it ruin AP if it is discovered that Hussein is either an insurgent plant or a non-existent source, a Jayson Blaired construct without flesh and bones, existing as a convenient catch-all pseudonymous source for particularly ghastly rumored attacks on innocents? Probably not, although it might cause the AP to become a little more careful in the sourcing.

Why then?

Eric Boehlert thinks he has the answer:

The warbloggers’ strawman is built around the claim that if the AP hadn’t reported the Burned Alive story, which was no more than a few sentences within a larger here’s-the-carnage-from-Baghdad-today article, then Americans would still gladly support the war in Iraq. That it was somehow the contested Burned Alive story that swung public opinion on Iraq, not the three years’ worth of bad news.

Chasing the Burned Alive story down a rabbit’s hole, giddy warbloggers deliberately ignore the hundreds of Iraqi civilians who are killed each week, the thousands who are injured, and the tens of thousands who try to flee the disintegrating country. None of that matters. Only Burned Alive matters, as if an AP retraction would change a thing on the ground in Baghdad, where electricity remains scarce, but sectarian death squads roam freely.

Boehlert might want to rethink that first sentence. In fact, the burning Sunnis was the lead story in hundreds of newspapers around the world. It was headline news in dozens of prominent dailies here in the United States (including the Suburban Daily Herald in my neck of the woods). His contention that it was “no more than a few sentences” is absurd on its face and bespeaks either an extraordinary ignorance of the facts or a deliberate attempt to downplay how the story was disseminated.

But why the superficial, shallow, needlessly partisan, and, in the end, stupid charge that bloggers who are covering this story wish to discredit the AP in order to reverse the slide in public support for the war? What bloggers are after here is the same thing that bloggers wanted from CBS following the Dan Rather TANG documents scandal; an acknowledgement of error. The AP has relied on Captain Hussein as either an eyewitness source or as a knowledgeable spokesman for violent incidents in Iraq going back at least to April. Trying to get to the bottom of who or what Hussein is would seem to be a job tailor made for blogs – right or left.

The larger issues at play in this story should be of concern to every blogger, indeed every American who is a consumer of news. And at the top of the list of questions is does the AP really care if they get it right? It appears to me that their double checking on the accuracy of the story in question was cursory and designed to confirm what had been written rather than approach the story afresh in order to see if their sources were correct. We know now, for instance, that at least two of the mosques that were supposedly burned in the original AP story are still standing and still open – the only damage being some bullet holes in the facade.

And their interviewing of “new” witnesses to the atrocity was revealing; the AP swears that their stories were all consistent with the facts that were reported. I daresay that this should have set off a bunch of red flags to begin with; a first year journalism student knows that eyewitness testimony tends to vary wildly from person to person. And in this case – interviewing witnesses 4 days after the story broke and was featured on al-Jazeera as well as other Arab media – one wonders how much these eyewitnesses actually “witnessed” and how much they gleaned from broadcast media about the story. No word from the AP whether they even tried to determine if their “witnesses” were cross contaminated in this way.

But this is not central to either Boehlert’s argument nor my criticism of his ridiculously flawed and over-generalized piece. For instance, Boehlert links to this Bob Owen piece about the incident where the blogger asks a legitimate question:

This presents us with the unsettling possibility that the Associated Press has no idea how much of the news it has reported out of Iraq since the 2003 invasion is in fact real, and how much they reported was propaganda. they failure of accountability here is potentially of epic proportions.

When producer Mary Mapes and anchor Dan Rather ran faked Texas Air National Guard records on 60 Minutes, it was undoubtedly the largest news media scandal of 2004, and yet, it was an isolated scandal, identified within hours, affecting one network and one show in particular.

This developing Associated Press implosion may go back as far as two years, affecting as many as 60 stories from just this one allegedly fake policeman alone. And Jamil Hussein is just one of more than a dozen potentially fake Iraqi policemen used in news reports the AP disseminates around the world. This does not begin to attempt to account for non-offical sources which the AP will have an even harder time substantiating. Quite literally, almost all AP reporting from Iraq not verified from reporters of other news organizations is now suspect, and with good reason.

Why does Boehlert fail to mention that Captain Hussein is a featured source in more than 60 AP stories? Because it ruins his thesis that it is this one story pursued by conservative bloggers is just a question of “holding the AP accountable for questionable sourcing in an isolated incident…” Is Boehlert really this stupid or, like many in the media, is he simply lazy and won’t address the massive implications involved in generating fake news from a war zone?

At the risk of being redundant (something I feel constrained to do given the short attention span and limited reading skills of most of the lefties who visit this site), I will say again the unraveling of this mystery – even if it implicates the AP in years of selling the American public fake news – does not change anything on the ground in Iraq now and would not have changed the attitudes of the American public regarding the war. The people of the United States are a lot smarter than your average lefty and don’t need either enemy propaganda coming from the AP or liberals glorifying our mistakes and blunders in Iraq to know that we are failing there.

But Owens has hit the nail on the head; the only asset that the Associated Press has is its credibility. If it can be shown that Jamil Hussein is a fake or doesn’t exist, where does that leave AP’s coverage of the war over the last three years? How do you separate the facts from what might be propaganda? It’s a question Boehlert doesn’t even bother to address because his mission is to slime “warbloggers” as he calls them by over generalizing and ascribing non-existent motives to their efforts.

And in the process of pooh-poohing the efforts of those who are attempting to get the facts on Hussein, Boehlert also misses a story that would reveal the inner workings of the media and answer some fairly basic questions that absolutely no one connected with any major media outlet has deemed it important enough to answer. That is, the use of local “stringers” to gather the news that western reporters, due to the extraordinary danger of the war zone, cannot gather for themselves.

Boehlert rightly points out that we don’t give enough credit to the dangers faced by western reporters in Iraq. He highlights the death of an Associated Press Television News cameraman Aswan Ahmed Lutfallah, who was killed in Mosul while filming a gun battle between police and insurgents. Boehlert informs us that Mr. Lutfallah’s death brings the total of journalists and others associated with the media killed in Iraq to 129. Even for the locals, it is an incredibly dangerous place to work.

And, as I’ve written before during the Jill Carroll hostage story and in numerous other posts, the process of gathering facts, writing a story, vetting sources, and meeting a deadline is so hazardous that the media’s reliance on stringers is an absolute necessity. Otherwise, the only news we’d be getting would be from press releases by CENTCOM and the Iraqi government. No one wants that – despite Mr. Boehlert’s hysterically off-base arguments to the contrary.

But as citizens interested in the news, we have a right and, indeed, an obligation, to demand that media outlets using stringers answer a few basic questions about them. We can certainly understand why their real names can’t be used or why they would be withheld. But we can ask about their credentials, their experience, the vetting of sources by both the reporter on the scene and the editor back home, and a dozen other noteworthy issues that bloggers have raised about them.

Boehlert is so busy trashing conservative bloggers and trying to demonize their motives that he’s missing a great story that Captain Hussein is only a part. And writing for a publication that ostensibly deals with issues relating to the media, it is unbelievable that he dismisses the questions raised in the course of reporting on this story. They go to the heart of media credibility and believability and have nothing whatsoever to do with trying to place blame for the American public’s attitudes toward the war on the shoulders of the men and women trying to do an impossible job under the most trying of circumstances.

The incuriousness of Boehlert and the rest of the left regarding how news is collected and disseminated from the war zone is telling. Perhaps they are afraid that if they scratch too deep, some of their own cherished notions about the media and maybe even the war itself will have to change.

UPDATE

Michelle Malkin has the latest on who is Jamil Hussein.

The Baghdad-based CPATT officer says there is no “Sgt. Jamil Hussein” at Yarmouk, which contradicts what Marc Danziger’s contacts found. I have another military source on the ground who works with the Iraqi Army (separate and apart from the CPATT sources) and is checking into whether anyone named “Jamil Hussein” has ever worked at Yarmouk.

According to the CPATT officers, Captain Jamil Ghdaab Gulaim “denies ever speaking to the AP or any other media.” I retracted information to the contrary two days ago based on a single CPATT source who said he had erroneously stated that Gulaim had admitted being the source.

If I might venture a little informed speculation…

It is an extremely hazardous business, this transliteration of turning Arabic names into English. As a frequent reader of English language Arabic media sites including The Daily Star, Naharnet, Ya Libnan, al-Jazeera, and Palestine Times, it is amazing the different spellings one comes across for the same proper names and names of organizations.

One example is “Hizbullah.” This is the way that the Daily Star spells the name of the terrorist group. But look at the alternate spellings I’ve come across both in western and Arab media:

Hizbollah
Hezbollah
Hizballah
Hezballah
Hezb’allah
Hizb’allah

The same issues arises with the spelling of the Lebanese Prime Minister’s name:

Siniora
Seniora
Saniora

Is this entire issue a translation problem? I think Malkin has almost totally knocked that issue down although I think we should wait to see if AP has any response whatsoever to what Michelle has discovered. But I find it tantalizing that the spelling of the two names could be so close, even if the individual denies talking to the AP. There are numerous reasons why he might make such a denial, including the fact that he might be in hot water if he did speak to the press without authorization. But then why use his name in the stories?

The AP, of course, could solve this mystery by simply producing Captain/Mister/Sergeant Hussein. Since they haven’t so far, either they are unable to do so or won’t because doing so would place the man in danger (Again, then why publish his name in the first place?). Or, they’re just being stubborn and don’;t want to give in to a bunch of pajama clad bloggers.

UPDATE II

Allah roasts Boehlert slowly on a spit over a hot fire.

One would think that a “Media Critic” would want to, you know, criticize the media once and a while rather than attack his ideological opponents using so many strawmen that one would think the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz had gotten a hold of a Star Trek replicator and populated the countryside with copies of himself.