Walking a Beat With "Capt. Jamil Hussein"
If Michelle Malkin is still planning on a trip to Iraq to track down the infamous "Captain Jamil Hussein", she'd better pack her hiking shoes. Because he walks a pretty hard beat.
I think I may have been the first to notice the significance of the wide variety of Baghdad locations from which "Captain Jamil Hussein" had reported incidents of violence to the AP. On November 26th, I said he was
...reporting chaos and mayhem in Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods all over Baghdad--Sadr City, Dora, Mansour, and others.(As it turns out, Sadr City is one of the few places in Baghdad he hasn't reported from.) The problem of the geographical plausibility of Captain Hussein's claims has been commented on several times since then, most recently by Lt. Col. Bob Bateman, who noted that the distance between Hurriyah and Yarmouk made him an odd choice to comment authoritatively on the Huriyah mosque burning: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?
In other words, in going to their "normal" source for this story, the AP went to the equivalent of a Brooklyn local police precinct for a story that occurred in northern Yonkers! Hello? What would a cop in Brooklyn know about a crime in Yonkers? That's what doesn't make sense to me. (And why didn't the AP reveal, until challenged, that this source was not from the district where the events allegedly occurred, or even from a neighboring district, but is from a moderately distant part of this 7-million-person city?)Actually, though, it's worse than that. If I can continue Col. Bateman's analogy, since April, the AP has been relying on that same Brooklyn cop for reports on violence in not just Yonkers, but the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island, and Jersey City.
To track down where Capt. Hussein reports from, I used Lexis-Nexis to check the AP Newswire for "Jamil Hussein". Sifting through 269 hits (most of which were simply updates of the same stories) going back to April 24th, I found AP had reported 51 separate incidents of violence sourced solely to Jamil Hussein (as opposed to, e.g., "police"). All but one of these incidents included the neighborhood where the incident occurred or at least a general geographic designation (e.g. "Southwest Baghdad"). Rather than list them, I collaborated with blogger geoff from Uncommon Misconceptions--himself an early skeptic of Capt. Hussein's geographical contortions--to plot them on a map of Baghdad.
Captain Jamil Hussein: he's everywhere!
Or, he's nowhere.
So how does he know what he knows about things all over the city, and so quickly? And why does he rush to tell the AP about them? If he's just sitting there scanning the police radio, why does Reuters need him at all--or why do they bother to talk to anyone else? There's simply no way he's getting all this information first-hand; at one point he describes two incidents that happened in different neighborhoods at the same time. I've no reason to believe he was in Hurriya on the day of the mosque attack, especially since his version of events has been contradicted now not just by CENTCOM, and the MOI, but also by Marc Danziger's associates there.
I noted before that at one point when AP tried to verify one of Capt. Hussein's tales, they couldn't do it. Let me ask again what I asked then: Who is Jamil Hussein? How does he know the things he says he knows, why does he tell them to you (at great risk to his own career), and why should we trust him?
PS Thanks very much to Geoff for his work on the map!