Is Sgt. Jamail Hussein a “Third Way” Baathist Holdover?
Commenter “Neville Chamberlain” (hey, he chose his own name!) says:
One more takeaway point:
If Centcom knew there was a “Sergeant Jamail Hussein” at the Yarmouk station and failed to report this fact…they have less credibility than the AP…
Sure . . . but let me challenge the assumption, which is that they knew (or should have known). One of my takeaway points is that there are still questions to ask about Sgt. Jamil Hussein, apparent former Uday Hussein acolyte — and one of them is whether he was a Baathist holdover of the sort described in my “third way” post, i.e., someone who wouldn’t be on the MOI’s list of policemen.
I rather think he sounds like exactly such a holdover. We don’t know for sure, but if Marc’s sources are right about him, he fits the profile.
What that means to the story, I’m not sure . . . but I’m always interested in more facts.
But let’s not assume CENTCOM knew about this fellow, or should have. Let’s wait and see.
Wait? I think this just shows the need for fact-finding trips!
actus (10527e) — 12/19/2006 @ 6:53 pmAnd if Michelle Malkin goes on one, how abject will your groveling be?
I know, I know! You’ll snit your way out of it somehow, and never admit that you were wrong to assume she wouldn’t go!
Me, I make no assumptions. Maybe she’ll go, and maybe she won’t. If I had to bet, I’d say yes.
Patterico (de0616) — 12/19/2006 @ 7:19 pmI don’t assume she wont go. I hope she goes! I’ll be glad if she goes.
actus (10527e) — 12/19/2006 @ 7:27 pmJamail Hussein and Karen Toshima…
CENTCOM says AP’s Iraqi police source isn’t Iraqi police — Part 21 — Continued from this post. Takeaway Points from Marc Danziger’s Post Patterico Marc Danziger’s post on Jam(a)il Hussein was pretty densely packed with information, and assume…
Bill's Bites (72c8fd) — 12/19/2006 @ 7:49 pmThe pictures of Michelle in Bagdhad are fakes! She never left Kuwait! The earth is flat and why was that flag flapping when there’s no air on the moon?!
Bill Faith (3cc7e8) — 12/19/2006 @ 7:51 pmOh, and W blew up the towers.
Bill Faith (3cc7e8) — 12/19/2006 @ 7:52 pmOh, so Jamail Hussein is now a Uday Hussein “flack”, “bully”, “less than honorable son-of-a-bitch!” Not only that, he’s been demoted from captain to seargent!
To bad the flacks and apologists for AP haven’t figured out the real story (i.e., AP just plain ole lied). Maybe they should ask why AP is going to such extents as to changing key details of their less than believable story.
Mescalero (d62b73) — 12/19/2006 @ 8:25 pmWait…(snort)… okay, let me get this straight…(snort-chuckle)…Neville Chamberlain is commenting on someone’s credibility?
BWHAHAHAHAHAHA!
JD (044292) — 12/19/2006 @ 9:38 pmThe Iraq Study Group’s report states, “There is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq” by the U.S. military. “The standard for recording attacks acts a filter to keep events out of reports and databases,” the report said.
The basis for challenging AP was a U.S. military press release which states the only mosque fire an Iraqi Army patrol found was set AFTER they started canvassing to check media reports of mosque fires. The media accounts in question alleged gross derelection by Iraqi Army units during the uprising. Were these same soldiers there during the initial assault? How come the U.S. military decries AP reporting utilizing a coalition force under exigent suspicion? Hurriyah should not be a ‘no-go’ area for Americans challenging American media – not to mention a Times of London story relating nearly identical events with different eyewitness quotes..
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2470830,00.html
I do believe the mosque fires were mostly incidental and the AP should have followed up and not left the image of destroyed buildings and smoking ruins in readers’ minds. They embroidered. It doesn’t follow that the immolations were fictional.
steve (3df64c) — 12/19/2006 @ 10:59 pmShorter steve:
Patterico (de0616) — 12/19/2006 @ 11:03 pmOld Neville wasn’t really such a bad chap, JD.
After all, Britain never fell to the Nazis…
If there really is a Sgt. Hussein, then CENTCOM looks bad either way in this.
If they knew and didn’t tell, then they are guilty of “truthiness.”
If they didn’t know…well, the Iraqi Police are completely their creature and they would seem to have very little control of it now…
Guess we may never know the truth in this matter.
Neville Chamberlain (80a4fa) — 12/19/2006 @ 11:46 pmWell, Mr Chamberlain, hadn’t the Associated Press listed their source as Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein, an official police spokesman?
At that point, CENTCOM should be looking through the lists of official police spokesmen, and Iraqi police captains. That they might not have found a police sargeant with a similar, but not identical, name, in a police unit different from the one identified by the Associated Press does not strike me as making CENTCOM look bad; it strikes me as making the AP look bad!
Reputable journalists may, on occasion, use unidentified sources, if proper verification procedures have been established and followed. But reputable journalists never use misidentified sources.
Dana (3e4784) — 12/20/2006 @ 6:09 amIf they knew and didn’t tell, then they are guilty of “truthiness.”
If they didn’t know…well, the Iraqi Police are completely their creature and they would seem to have very little control of it now…
What about the “third way” which is the point of the entire post? Did you read that post?
Patterico (de0616) — 12/20/2006 @ 6:10 amAre we assuming nobody at CENTCOM called the police station in question and asked if there was anyone called Hussein working there?
[I’m assuming nothing, but they said they checked employment lists. He wouldn’t have been on those if the “third way” idea is right. — P]
Neville Chamberlain (80a4fa) — 12/20/2006 @ 6:21 amDecember 12 brought news that Associated Press Television News cameraman Aswan Ahmed Lutfallah was killed in Mosul while filming a gun battle between police and insurgents. Considering the daily wave of killings that washes ashore in Iraq, there wasn’t much reason for Lutfallah’s slaying to be especially newsworthy to the general public, given the fact that 129 journalists and their support staff have been killed in Iraq since 2003. The same low-level interest seemed to hold true for right-wing warbloggers, who uniformly ignored the news of the cameraman’s murder.
Except for the fact that Lutfallah worked for the AP and, over the last three weeks, warbloggers like Michelle Malkin and sites such as Power Line, Wizbang, Confederate Yankee, and Flopping Aces have been in high dudgeon, eviscerating the global wire service for producing allegedly pro-terrorist reporting from Iraq. Warbloggers, all boosters of the doomed U.S. invasion, have been poring over the AP’s dispatches, feverishly dissecting paragraphs in search of proof for their all-consuming conspiracy theory that biased American journalists, too cowardly to go get the bloody news in Iraq themselves, are relying on local news stringers who have obvious sympathies for insurgents and who actively “spread terrorist propaganda,” according to right-wing blog Little Green Footballs. The result of the AP hoax? Gullible, or “average,” Americans have been duped into believing there is a “civil war” raging in Baghdad today.
According to the warbloggers, Iraqi insurgents like the AP; they have friendly contacts with the AP; and they use the AP as a conduit to advance their propaganda war. Indeed, insurgents badly want for the AP to broadcast images and write stories about bloodshed in order to create the illusion of chaos in Iraq.
See, it’s really the AP’s fault we’re losing the war. (Plus, it’s ignoring all the “good news” from Iraq.) For warbloggers who have been chronically wrong about Iraq for nearly 50 straight months, the AP conspiracy theory represents a cure-all so important that Malkin herself has vowed to travel to Iraq to wander around the bombed-out streets of Baghdad in order to prove her AP allegations. (More on that later.)
Warbloggers are obsessed with all things AP, or the “Associated (with terrorists) Press,” as Malkin subtly calls it. Which brings us back to news of Lutfallah’s death and the odd silence that emanated from the warblogs — and by odd, I mean, wildly hypocritical, because the silence sprang from the fact that the circumstances of Lutfallah’s murder didn’t fit the warbloggers’ ideological script. Namely, that Lutfallah was executed by insurgents, which completely undermined the warbloggers’ theory that the AP enjoys close ties to terrorists.
According to warblogger logic, the insurgents should have made sure Lutfallah got the best film of the gun fight with police; in fact, insurgents might have even tipped him off that a battle was going to take place. That’s how the drill is supposed to work. Yet insurgents in Mosul, after seeing the AP cameraman filming and then identifying him, approached the father of two and emptied five bullets into his body, took his equipment, cell phone, and press ID. They shot him like a dog in the street.
So much for the AP and insurgents working in concert.
You can be sure that if Lutfallah had been killed by Iraqi police during the gun battle and warbloggers in any way could have portrayed him as an enemy, they would have howled about Lutfallah’s death for days, smearing his name with all sorts of terrorist innuendos and demanding that the AP explain itself. But when word came that an AP journalist had been executed by Iraqi insurgents, the warbloggers knew to keep quiet.
Of course, for anybody who’s paid even passing attention to events in Iraq, the killing of Lutfallah was, sadly, not unique. Insurgents for years have targeted journalists for kidnappings, beheadings, and assassinations. As CNN international correspondent Michael Ware recently noted, “In terms of the insurgency, [journalists] are seen as legitimate targets: part of the problem, not the solution.”
Specifically, insurgents have often targeted local Iraqi journalists working for Western-friendly news outlets for execution; the same Iraqi journalists warbloggers insist have such chummy relationships with Baghdad terrorists. Consider:
Amjad Hameed, the head of programming for the U.S.-backed Al-Iraqiya TV, was murdered by insurgent gunmen on his way to work, March 11, 2006.
Munsuf Abdallah al-Khaldi, an anchor for Baghdad TV, was assassinated in his car, March 7, 2006.
Adnan al-Bayati, a producer working for the Italian television station TG3, was murdered by three gunmen in his home, July 23, 2005.
Fakher Haider, a reporter for The New York Times, was abducted from his home and executed with a single bullet to the head, September 19, 2005.
Karam Hussein, a photographer for the European Pressphoto Agency, was killed by gunmen in front of his home, October 14, 2004.
Duraid Isa Mohammed, a producer for CNN, was killed in a car ambush, January 27, 2004.
Something doesn’t add up here, and I assume it’s something warbloggers don’t want to address, as they cling to their anti-press fantasy to explain the Iraq debacle. Namely, if insurgents view journalists as their allies — weapons in their sophisticated propaganda war against the United States — then why are insurgents killing journalists at an alarming rate? The entire premise of the warblogger theory makes no sense.
With no facts to back up their allegations, warbloggers instead lean heavily on name-calling in their never-ending attempt to libel and smear journalists. “The Western press is negligently or carelessly (I’m not ready to believe knowingly) passing along terrorist propaganda disguised as news,” announced warblogger SeeDubya at The Junkyard Blog. Talk about hubris — stateside warbloggers claim they have a better handle on what’s happening in Iraq than reporters who are actually there.
The warbloggers’ deliberate and daily condemnation of wartime correspondents as being cowardly, unethical, and un-American is likely unprecedented in American history, as the dwindling number of Bush defenders online try desperately to pin the blame for Iraq on the media. (But not even war cheerleader and neocon columnist David Brooks is buying that line.)
Warbloggers, stressing their contempt for the First Amendment — “The government needs to slap down the press,” urged The Anchoress — would prefer that information about the war in Iraq be disseminated only by the United States military, despite the fact the bipartisan Iraq Study Group just concluded that for years the U.S. military wildly underreported violence inside Iraq. But that’s the version of history the warbloggers want Americans to embrace.
Obsessing over Jamil Hussein
Actually, there is another possible reason why the AP-hating warbloggers were silent regarding Lutfallah’s murder — they were all too busy obsessing over the hugely important story of Jamil Hussein.
In a November 24 dispatch, the AP, quoting Iraqi police Capt. Jamil Hussein, reported 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.” Warbloggers were skeptical of the chilling report, in part because no other news organizations could confirm the horrific event. The U.S. Central Command’s communications machine then jumped in, issuing a statement that it could not corroborate the killings and that Hussein was not a Baghdad police captain, and even if he were, somebody of his rank was not authorized to speak to the press. Central Command then filed an official complaint with the AP and demanded a retraction. Warbloggers declared that the AP had concocted Hussein — a “fake policeman.”
The AP has stood by its story though, and the disputed, he said/she said facts didn’t budge much for three weeks. Rather than being content with a possible sharp-eyed press catch and holding the AP accountable for questionable sourcing in an isolated incident, warbloggers, in need of a much larger scapegoat, franticly inflated the Burned Alive story, insisting questions about a single dispatch could negate years’ worth of reporting from Iraq. That if Jamil Hussein were confirmed to be a fraud that would somehow mean Baghdad is not being ripped apart by a civil war, and reporters would be revealed for the “traitors” that they are.
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.
The story reached such a Holy Grail status that Malkin announced her plans to parachute into Baghdad and gumshoe the story herself. Note to Malkin: You might want to re-read this recent quote from ABC’s man-in-Baghdad, Dan Harris: “I said to my driver casually the other day, ‘If I get out of this car, take off my flak jacket or get rid of all my security and walk down the street, how long would I last?’ He said, ‘Four or five seconds.’ ”
Unfortunately, given her widely read blog and her platform as a Fox News analyst, Malkin has influenced a new generation of right-wing press critics, who sloppily draw all sorts of dark and dishonest conclusions about the press. The phenomenon has been rampant during the Hussein controversy.
Here’s one small example. Warblogger Curt at Flopping Aces raised doubts about a December 12 AP dispatch, which reported that 66 Iraqis had been killed by an insurgency car bomb in downtown Baghdad. The number of dead was probably inflated, according to Curt at Flopping Aces, given the “prior reporting history by the AP.” Specifically, the warblogger questioned the report because it was written by the two AP journalists who had previously quoted Jamil Hussein, the “fake policeman,” which meant “anything printed by these two” was possible fiction. [Emphasis added.]
Slight problem: Central Command quickly confirmed that a car bomb on December 12 did kill 66 people in Baghdad, which matched what AP had reported. So much for that round of media gotcha. In fact, the awkward swing-and-miss simply highlighted the glaring fact that despite the hundreds of stories AP files from Iraq each week, and the thousands posted annually since the invasion, warbloggers can only find fault with a single story, yet insist that one is enough to tarnish the AP’s Iraq reporting and all mainstream news reporting from Baghdad.
It’s not going to work. If warbloggers want to prove that cowardly American journalists are being duped by local Iraqi stringers pushing a terrorist agenda, or that the AP is guilty of chronically manufacturing bad news, they are going to have to do more than flush out Jamil Hussein.
As for Aswan Ahmed Lutfallah, the AP cameraman shot dead by insurgents in Mosul, he’s of no use to warbloggers — he doesn’t fit their press-bashing script.
AF (8f7ccc) — 12/20/2006 @ 8:42 amAF,
I’m glad you brought Aswan Lutfallah to my attention. I had never heard of him. His death was a tragedy and the terrorists that killed him were cruel and heartless, weren’t they?
The author of the article you post, Eric Boehlert, apparently distrusts CENTCOM and by extension the American military. It’s interesting that his article fails to make it clear who killed Aswan Lutfallah. He was vague enough in describing Mr. Lutfallah’s death that the reader could believe it was the result of a stray bullet rather than a deliberate and intentional execution by insurgents.
It’s also interesting that Mr. Boehlert is willing to trust CENTCOM when it verifies reports of Iraqi deaths that substantiate his views, but villifies CENTCOM when it questions reports of deaths. If Mr. Boehlert were really concerned about the welfare of Iraqis, wouldn’t he be glad to hear that some Iraqis might not have been burned to death?
Tell me, AF. Do you find Eric Boehlert’s analysis to be logical and credible or is it merely convenient?
DRJ (a5fa81) — 12/20/2006 @ 10:39 am*BAGHDAD – Iraqi police found 76 bodies around Baghdad, all with gunshot wounds and most with signs of torture, the Interior Ministry said.
*BAGHDAD – Two U.S. soldiers were killed in two separate roadside bomb attacks in southern Baghdad, the U.S. military said in a statement.
*MOSUL – Police said they found 11 bodies, all with gunshot wounds, in the northern city of Mosul.
BAGHDAD – Gunmen killed university professor Muntathar Mohammed Mehdi in his car, along with his brother and cousin, relatives and hospital sources said. Relatives said Mehdi was a member of Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s political movement.
AF (8f7ccc) — 12/20/2006 @ 11:38 amThen I guess the AP aren’t conspiring against us. Or was this just the result of a lovers quarrel?
AF (8f7ccc) — 12/20/2006 @ 11:40 amAF,
I would hope that events like Mr. Lutfallah’s murder might cause the AP to reconsider whether the US is the bad guy in Iraq.
DRJ (a5fa81) — 12/20/2006 @ 12:09 pmArabs only use about a dozen first names and Hussein is obviously a fairly common surname. If Centcom is supposed to run down every Jamial Hussein in Iraq in order to prove they’re not a police captain in the area stated, then I think you’ve raised the bar to a point you can safely begin sniping again.
IOW, Neville, you’re working pretty hard to make your case against Centcom. I doubt you’ll be anywhere near these threads when the truth is revealed.
spongeworthy (45b30e) — 12/20/2006 @ 12:19 pmThat’s kind of a broad accusation, sponge.
I don’t have anything against Centcom.
My interest is just in Centcom’s statement that there is no Capt. Jamail Hussein working for the Iraqi Police…
I’m not sure we’ll ever know the truth about this, but the difficulty in learning the truth says something about the state of Iraq these days.
Neville Chamberlain (80a4fa) — 12/20/2006 @ 12:29 pmYou’re a Hollywood Conservative. You’d name your son after John Wayne because he played war games on tv. The fact that he was a real life coward means nothing.
“I would hope that events like Mr. Lutfallah’s murder might cause the AP to reconsider whether the US is the bad guy in Iraq.”
So if the press reports failure, they’re against the US. Lies and dreams show loyalty, and ignorance is strength.
He’s a bit late to the game but, here’s Rich Lowry
AF (8f7ccc) — 12/20/2006 @ 12:32 pmi got yer jamil hussein right here:
assistant devil's advocate (9bf1fa) — 12/20/2006 @ 12:40 pmhttp://news.yahoo.com/photo/061220/photos_wl/2006_12_20t150450_377x450_us_iraq_najaf_handover
damn, link didn’t work, priceless pic of iraqi police commando eating a live rabbit.
assistant devil's advocate (9bf1fa) — 12/20/2006 @ 12:43 pmWTF! poor thumper..
anyway the link works. just make sure it stays intact once you click it (mine went from the 377×450 part to something like 377%3C9%450) see the difference?
G (722480) — 12/20/2006 @ 1:04 pmAF, its not about the press reporting failures. Its the press reporting lies, rumors, or getting duped, getting the facts incorrect, and even spreading propaganda.
G (722480) — 12/20/2006 @ 1:07 pmFor anyone interested the article Steve linked above doesn’t actually contain two new eyewitness to the burning Sunnis story. It actually quotes Capt. Jamil Hussein and two civilians who don’t claim to have seen the burning just some attacks.
chad (719bfa) — 12/20/2006 @ 1:22 pmI’m not sure we’ll ever know the truth about this, but the difficulty in learning the truth says something about the state of Iraq these days.
I’m pretty sure no matter how bad the country is or will get, we ought to be able to expect the media to substantiate a source, you ass. If Enrie Pyle can deliver accurate reports with shells exploding around him, I think we can safely expect AP to produce this Jamial Hussein.
spongeworthy (45b30e) — 12/20/2006 @ 1:28 pmOld Neville wasn’t really such a bad chap, JD.
After all, Britain never fell to the Nazis…
Riiiight. Because Ol’ Nev was there the whole time, encouraging the Brits to defend their island “whatever what the cost may be”.
Or did your history book end at “peace in our time?”
Chadster (acdb75) — 12/20/2006 @ 1:56 pmAs Bush has shown us, all the perky cheerleading in the world can’t turn around a lost war.
I’m a fan of Winnie, but it was Stalin who saved Britain. Neville would have been perfectly fine as Britain’s WWII leader.
Neville Chamberlain (80a4fa) — 12/20/2006 @ 5:23 pmNeville, #30:
“As Bush has shown us, all the perky cheerleading in the world can’t turn around a lost war.”
But pussy-ass liberal defeatism can, right?
“I’m a fan of Winnie, but it was Stalin who saved Britain.”
To the extent that Stalin would have you building a road to Siberia, I am a fan of his too.
nk (bfc26a) — 12/20/2006 @ 5:29 pmNeville Chamberlain, describing his intellectual father:
Sure. He’d have agreed to a truce in place on the Western front, and told Der Führer to go smash Russia. I guess that would have counted as “Peace in our time.”
Dana (556f76) — 12/20/2006 @ 6:01 pmi’m a big fan of winnie, in addition to being the greatest leader of the 20th century, he also has numerous sidesplitting quotes. my favorite american president of that century was theodore roosevelt, trustbuster, environmentalist, upfront sanguine guy.
assistant devil's advocate (d3742b) — 12/20/2006 @ 7:30 pmneville chamberlain is now a metaphor for appeasement and defeatism.
i’m glad somebody got the rabbit link to work. these are the folks to whom we’re trying to bring american-style democracy.
[…] Another question that I’d like answered, now that the guy has been found: is he a “third way” Baathist holdover? […]
Patterico’s Pontifications » Breaking: Jamil Hussein Has Been Found (421107) — 1/4/2007 @ 2:54 pm