Thoughts on the "discovery" of Jamil Hussein

A while back I wrote a long list of things you would have to believe in order to believe the AP's explanation of the provenance of Capt. Jamil Hussein, which included this:

Alternatively, you would have to believe that CENTCOM's and the MOI's investigations were so perfunctory that they couldn't ascertain the truth of "Capt. Jamil Hussein's" employment. That CENTCOM's media relations people were willing to piss off the AP--a critical source of worldwide news--over a shoddy, half@ssed investigation into whether or not one guy works at a particular police station and has worked for the MOI since at least 2004. You would have to believe that CENTCOM:

I. Could have checked with payroll, but they didn't. Except that they say they did. As a Maj. Jeff Pool notes in an e-mail to Patterico, "The Iraqi MOI keeps accurate listings of verified police officers, for pay purposes." So you would have to believe Major Jeff Pool is lying about that, or...that there was a misunderstanding over Capt. Jamil Hussein's name and it was one of those Arabic names with parts you use sometimes and sometimes you don't, which the Iraqi MOI couldn't figure out. They didn't bother to check, for example, alternatives like (for example) "Jamil Hussein al-Basrah". In other words, you have to believe that CENTCOM and the Iraqi MOI read down the "accurate list of verified police officers" looking for captains in Yarmouk and al-Khadra and said, "Hmmm....Here's a Capt. Jamil Hussein al-Basrah who works at al-Khadra police HQ. Could this be the same guy?" "Nahhhh...." Besides, AP gave his full name as "Jamil Gholaiem Hussein", way back on Nov. 28th, and there has been plenty of time to check that fact and correct that error, if there was one. Instead, both sides have doubled down.

II. Could have picked up the phone and said, hey, Jamil there? But they didn't. ...

But no, you'd have to believe they did none of these things and preferred instead to initiate an existential conflict with a worldwide media organization whose amity they depend on to do their jobs. Over a modestly important story.

And now the stupid not-checking-the-alternative-name thing is exactly what the MOI says they didn't do. I believed CENTCOM, and they believed the MOI, and the MOI said there was no Jamil Hussein. Now they say there is. Oops, you mean Jamil Gholaiem Hussein? Well why didn't you say so, sillies?

Ultimately the relentless and rather adversarial fact-checking of the MSM by the blogosphere exposed the MOI as an organization that either lies through its teeth or is so dreadfully incompetent it cannot even be trusted to handle the simplest tasks. As Allahpundit succinctly put it, "They can’t get an execution right. Why should they be able to find a guy’s name on a list?"

Now I think in retrospect it was entirely reasonable to rely, as CENTCOM and I and numerous other bloggers did to varying degrees, on the MOI's simple assertion that it could freaking find a fricking name on its farking payroll list. This isn't even something so complicated as a criminal investigation. You don't have to believe (as war opponents seem to think we all do) that everything in Iraq is peaches and cream to think the MOI can accurately and truthfully read their own damn payroll sheet. In fact, it would border on racism to assume otherwise.

Even so, I didn't throw it all in on the assertion that Jamil Hussein is fake. Reviewing what I've written about this matter, I've mostly just been skeptical of the AP's account of what happened in Hurriya and (quite reasonably) pointing out that the burden has shifted to them to exonerate their reporting and produce their source. I was certainly starting to believe he was fake, since after six weeks of this story the AP was making no effort at all to produce him or answer any of the blogosphere's reasonable criticisms with anything more than a stamp of its arrogant little foot and an assertion that he is too real, and you'll just have to trust us. Which they gave us plenty of cause not to do.

Still, I implied that Capt. Jamil Hussein was a fraudulent source here and here. Now the MOI's admission has shown that implication was not correct, and the fraud or error concerning Hussein's identity was MOI's, not AP's.

But whether or not Capt. Jamil Hussein is an MOI employee changes very little in the overall situation concerning what happened in Hurriya on Nov. 24th. I was interested in this matter since before the MOI denied his status, and noted at the time:

...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? At best, this is a policeman who is not authorized to speak for the Ministry of the Interior, being consulted for his version of events as if he were, and his version is being reported as if it were the official version because of...lazy journalism. That's a problem, because we don't know how it is he's supposed to know the things he says he knows. Or why he's always inserting himself into these stories like some kind of Iraqi Greg Packer.

That's still the big question, and one of several problems that still stand about the reporting on Hurriya. Let me sum them up:

Conflicting contemporary accounts:
The New York Times said that residents denied the man-burning story. The Washington Post's Iraq Bureau called it a rumor. And before Capt. Jamil Hussein came on the scene, "Police officials in the region told Associated Press reporters that nothing had happened in the Hurriyah district..."

AP changes its story and its sourcing:
Mary Katharine Ham caught the AP fibbing about who first told them the story--they claimed it was Captain Hussein and Imad al-Hashimi, who later retracted his account. Actually Hashmi was added to the AP wire reports eight hours after the story broke. And Captain Jamil Hussein was added thirty minutes after the first AP wire report, which sourced the story to "Sunni residents".

The immolated bodies were taken directly to the Kazamiyah morgue--or they were snuck out of the city after the battle and buried? The AP changes its story about the disposal of the bodies without noting any inconsistency.

Perhaps most damning, the AP implicitly backed off its assertion--originating with Captain Jamil Hussein--that four mosques were burned, and speaks of only one. Just like CENTCOM said.

The AP insists Jamil Hussein has never been wrong:
This claim was repeated in yesterday's AP story about his discovery. It's still not right. An AP reporter says so!

Jamil Hussein himself:
So he's real. How then does he cover the entire city of Baghdad? As I wondered then:

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 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?

Where does Capt. Jamil Hussein get his information? The most benign, though not completely satisfying, explanation, is that he gets it from some centralized police dispatcher or radio. In other words, ultimately...

...through the Iraqi MOI.

Perhaps there is some reason to think Jamil Hussein's information is different and inherently more accurate and free of bias than the MOI's. If not, the problems with relying on a secondhand MOI source ought to be especially obvious to the AP.