Jamil: Still On
Curt at Flopping Aces fills an inside straight with an e-mail from the Civilian Police Assistance Training Team's Bill Costlow. This is a pretty critical post, which you should go and read, and it's short, too. Here is the part I want to focus on:
Media reports about Jamil didn't use his name as he is known at work so we had trouble finding him (Jamil Gulaim as opposed to Jamil Hussein: the initial query we got from MNFI was for "Jamil Hussein").As Curt notes, a Captain Jamil Ghlaim was questioned at MOI HQ last month. He denied being AP's source. But his rank, employment history, and name track with the AP's sourcing:
Let's review: AP's source, supposedly named "Jamil Gholaiem Hussein," used to work at Yarmouk but now works at al Khadra. CPATT says the one person named "Jamil" now at al Khadra -- Jamil Ghdaab Gulaim -- also used to work at Yarmouk. His rank is the same as that of AP's alleged source. His last name is almost identical to the middle name of AP's alleged source. (FYI: In Arabic, the middle name is one's father's name; the last name is one's grandfather's.)
So CPATT says Jamil Hussein and Jamil Gulaim are the same guy, and he just didn't use his "work name" when talking to the AP. And there's only one Jamil at the al-Khadra station. Now consider this statement from the AP:
...most news organizations working in Iraq have maintained Iraqi police contacts routinely in recent years. Some officers who speak with reporters withhold their names or attempt to disguise their names using different variants of one or two middle names or last names for reasons of security. Hussein, however, spoke for the record, using his authentic first and last name, on numerous occasions.
I am beginning to see a way that this could have happened. Hussein apparently--if this latest CPATT email is correct--used his first and middle name as a "work name", but spoke to the AP under his first and last names.
That would explain a lot. It would explain why the AP's insistence that Jamil Hussein was his real name--even though no one called him that at work. They skirt their ethics requirement against using pseudonymous sources. Meanwhile Captain Jamil can truthfully can say "I'm reporting under my real name" without any fear of consequences for doing so, because he knows that anyone looking for Jamil Hussein at al-Khadra police HQ isn't going to find him. And MOI is baffled because they can't find the guy, since as far as they're concerned his name is just Jamil Gholaiem.
This is an elegant explanation--a scientist might say a parsimonious one-- since it doesn't require a great degree of malfeasance on anyone's part. The AP tells the literal truth, if a somewhat misleading version of it. The Iraqi MOI isn't that incompetent; they really didn't have a file on anyone named Jamil Hussein. And Jamil Hussein himself...well, we don't know much more about him than when we started, but it does explain why he would risk using his real name in AP stories: he had a good reason to believe what he said would never have professional consequences.
But elegant theories are not always correct. I see two main problems with this idea: the first is Jamil's denial. But given that he faces arrest for his AP reporting, it's easy to see why he would want to deny the charges. (It's also easy to understand why the Iraqi government would want to arrest him: by all indications, the story he spread about the Hurriya burning was false, and because if this explanation is true, that means Jamil subsequently lied to the MOI during his interrogation.) The second problem is Captain Jamil Gholaiem Hussein's apparent other name--"Ghdaab". Where that fits into this I'm not sure yet.
I look forward to more info to test out my explanation against. But that's just one little question, and even if I'm right it doesn't answer the big ones about this story, the litany of which is here.