The Media and Iraq: You Fell For It Again, America
Part 1 of a 2 part series
This story is about a story that became the story.
Back around Thanksgiving, the Associated Press published a horrifying account of Mahdi Army militiamen storming a Sunni mosque in Baghdad, dragging six worshipers out of the mosque, dousing them with kerosene, then setting them ablaze. The story was independently [...]
Part 1 of a 2 part series
This story is about a story that became the story.
Back around Thanksgiving, the Associated Press published a horrifying account of Mahdi Army militiamen storming a Sunni mosque in Baghdad, dragging six worshipers out of the mosque, dousing them with kerosene, then setting them ablaze. The story was independently verified with several sources, including quotes from Iraqi police Captain Jamil Hussein. But almost as soon as the report broke, a funny thing happened.
The U.S. military claimed it couldn’t verify that the event even occured. Iraqi government sources claimed that they had no record that a Captain Jamil Hussein even existed. And right wing blogs smelled another Dan Rather-style opportunity: maybe they could take down the AP for reporting bad news out of Iraq. Apparently encouraged by the response of warbloggers and conservative fruitcakes like Michelle Malkin, the U.S. military responded to the AP:
We can tell you definitively that the primary source of this story, police Capt. Jamil Hussein, is not a Baghdad police officer or an MOI employee. We verified this fact with the MOI through the Coalition Police Assistance Training Team…
Unless you have a credible source to corroborate the story of the people being burned alive, we respectfully request that AP issue a retraction, or a correction at a minimum, acknowledging that the source named in the story is not who he claimed he was. MNC-I and MNF-I are always available and willing to verify events and provide as much information as possible when asked.
Very respectfully,
Michael Dean
Lieutenant, U.S. Navy
MNC-I Joint Operations Center
Public Affairs Officer
In the weeks after Thanksgiving, the conservative blogosphere was in full foam mode over the allegedly “fake” immolation report. They demanded a retraction of the story. The story about the story became the story on Fox News and other wingnutosphere outlets. And so, Associated Press (who I’ve had no problem calling out in the past for their apparent pro-Bush regime slant) became the latest media victim of the howler monkey court of opinion. As recently as yesterday, the wingnutosphere was all a-glow because former CNN exec Eason Jordon could not find credible evidence that a “Jamil Hussein” existed in the Iraq police force.
It gets better. But first, we need to take a short trip in the wayback machine to understand why.
When the report of the Sunni Iraqis being burned alive first broke, and questions arose about AP’s credibility, USA Today ran an excellent synopsis of the controversy. It’s worth reading the entire article to get the flavor of what was happening two short months ago, but here’s the money shot:
The dispute comes at a time when the military is taking a more active role in dealing with the media.
The AP reported on Sept. 26 that a Washington-based firm, the Lincoln Group, had won a two-year contract to monitor reporting on the Iraq conflict in English-language and Arabic media outlets.
That contract succeeded one held by another Washington firm, The Rendon Group. Controversy had arisen around the Lincoln Group in 2005 when it was disclosed that it was part of a U.S. military operation to pay Iraqi newspapers to run positive stories about U.S. military activities…
Ok. So, we have a horrific story from the civil war in Iraq - perhaps one of the most disturbing portraits of the quagmire since four contractors were killed, burned, and hung off of a bridge in Fallujah. The AP finds out about it, and asks around. The AP reporter checks in with a source (Capt. Jamil Hussein) who is credited with background information on more than 25 past incidents reported by such venerable news organizations such as foxnews.com, and gets the full and dirty scoop. Hussein was there when it happened. AP writes the story. The story is attacked from the moment it hits the wire. And (again), the story about the story becomes the story. The unsettling and horrifying manner of death of 6 Iraqis worshiping in a mosque becomes an afterthought.
In other words, this event had the potential for being so craptacularly negative that every possible bit of right wing discrediting effort had to be poured into debunking the report - or at least, making (gawd, I’m getting redundant) the story be about the story, and not immolation of 6 Sunnis by the Shia Mahdi Army.
Stick with me, because here’s the punch line:
BAGHDAD AP, Jan. 4 — The Interior Ministry acknowledged Thursday that an Iraqi police officer whose existence had been denied by the Iraqis and the U.S. military is in fact an active member of the force, and said he now faces arrest for speaking to the media.
Ministry spokesman Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, who had previously denied there was any such police employee as Capt. Jamil Hussein, said in an interview that Hussein is an officer assigned to the Khadra police station, as had been reported by The Associated Press.
The captain, whose full name is Jamil Gholaiem Hussein, was one of the sources for an AP story in late November about the burning and shooting of six people during a sectarian attack at a Sunni mosque.
The U.S. military and the Iraqi Interior Ministry raised the doubts about Hussein in questioning the veracity of the APs initial reporting on the incident, and the Iraqi ministry suggested that many news organization were giving a distorted, exaggerated picture of the conflict in Iraq. Some Internet bloggers spread and amplified these doubts, accusing the AP of having made up Husseins identity in order to disseminate false news about the war…
This is an outrage on so many levels. It’s not just that the right wingers got the thing so damn wrong - they were willingly led down the path and spun by a government that they still trust - a regime of controllers that are hell bent on hiding the truth from a hellhole half a planet away. The report of a horrifying incident in Iraq (like there’s any shortage of them) was completely stage-managed by the U.S. government from the moment an intrepid AP reporter sniffed out the story.
As of today, we can safely assume that the initial report was correct - or at least correct from the standpoint of accepted journalistic standards, in that the reporter obtained the information from a previously known and trusted source, and that the report was corroborated by multiple witnesses.
So, why was it so important to stage-manage this particular story?
Think about the timing. What was the really big story back when this event happened? The Iraq Study Group, and their call for a phased withdrawal. If the story of six Sunnis burned to death by a marauding Shia militia had been allowed to blossom at the same time…well…you do the math. Public reaction would have been overwhelming.
And most importantly: could it be that the upcoming escalation of the conflict in Iraq was the only option that was ever being considered by the regime? If that’s the case, they obviously needed to get past the election, regardless of the outcome, to make their move public. This particular incident could have thown a significant PR kink into the surge gambit, so the story of Jamil Hussein had to become the story.
They pretty much pulled it off, didn’t they? And how about the timing of the admission that Capt. Jamil Hussein does, indeed, exist? It’s buried by the clamor of reporting on the new congress being sworn in today, essentially rendering it as a non-story.
You fell for it again, America. You get your reward next week.
Update: Need a smile? You just gotta read this.
Hey Richard, the propaganda machine is in full swing mode, it’s just examples like the above that illustrate the point perfectly… yet, no one is willing to investigate the full extent of the problem. With billions of tax dollars admittedly being poured into “perception management” of everything in the US from the WOT to global warming and everything in between, it’s way past time for a complete “de-bullshitting” of the media. A good place to start would be to unmask the “journalists” that participated in the original Operation Mockingbird…
Good to see you around, Sukabi!
I really don’t know how we get to “de-bullshitting” of the media. We now have a generation of journalists that have been trained in regurgitating talking points, be those points from a corporation or from a government. We have a generation of politicians (and people in general) who tiptoe around issues, either looking for the PC answer or a way to avoid giving an answer. Hell, I’m guilty of that myself, to an extent. Trained by osmosis, as it were.
People like Keith Olbermann can actually crack through the bullshit. We just don’t have enough Olbermann’s around (yet, anyway).
Richard, I have been thinking about this problem for a looooong time.
The current media, or at least some instructive examples, have to be driven out of business.
Now, this is actually happening. The Washington Post Group share price ran ahead of the S&P from ca. 9/11 until the start of 2005. The share price, which had touched 1000, then fell to 750 and shows no sign of recovering. They are laying off journalists.
The problem is that there’s nothing quite yet ready to replace major media. Blogs mostly do news aggregation or news analysis, not reporting. There is some reporting. On the day that center/left sugar daddies open up their own major news outlet and start committing some real journalism, mainstream media will fold up. They are pretty much reduced to editing wire service reports and recycling press releases as it is. People want news.
Sukabi is onto something. Media have *always* been rotten. It’s only now, when they keep fawning over the Boy King long after everyone else has headed for the exits, that we see what has been before us for oh so many years.
So does this mean that this (below, part of the original AP story) is true?
“Earlier that day, rampaging militiamen burned and blew up four mosques and torched several homes in the capital’s mostly Shia neighborhood of Hurriyah, police said. Iraqi soldiers at a nearby army post failed to intervene in the assault by suspected members of the Shiite Mahdi Army militia or subsequent attacks that killed a total of 25 Sunnis, including women and children, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein.”
There actually were four mosques blown up, and several houses torched, and 25 killed (including the later account of the burning) and the military and the MOI are completely hiding it from the Sunni politicians and local residents who have said nothing about it to Al Jazeera or any other Arab media outlet?
Bastards.
Hi Richard, hopefully things in my little universe have started to settle down a bit, and I’ll have more time to participate — it probably won’t be for a while yet … work related re-orgs have left me with too much work, a very open cube and no time to think or decompress, crossing my fingers that this year will be better.
oh, thought you’d like to know, this new format is terribly broken if you’re on a Mac,
We really need to reinstate the draft in this country, and this ‘controversy’ is just further proof of this. We are spending $2billion in Iraq PER DAY and all people care about is what this pea-brained wench Michelle Malkin has to say? I say while in Iraq she wander around Baghdad unprotected for a while to try and get the ‘real story’. What’s the over/under before she gets kidnapped or killed, 5 minutes? I’ll take the under. The draft would cut through all of the bullsh*t and the war would be over in months.
http://www.minor-ripper.blogspot.com
“MNC-I and MNF-I are always available and willing to verify events and provide as much information as possible when asked.
Very respectfully,
Michael Dean
Lieutenant, U.S. Navy
MNC-I Joint Operations Center
Public Affairs Officer”
—–
Does LT Dean have anything to say about this, given that MNC-I and MNF-I are so available and willing? I would like to know his thoughts on what “We can tell you definitively” actually means.
Richard, I think I have found a candidate as a media outlet that needs to be made an example of for persisently refusing to abide by its licensing commitments.
Please link the horse’s mouth, Blogintegrity, rather than MR, which is merely repeating what it has read.
Check out what a former Lincoln Group intern had to say on an interview with Democracy Now:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/21/1348229&mode=thread&tid=25
These are the same folks who were inventing false positive news about Iraq on military payroll, the opposite of what the right-wing bloggers have accused the AP of. Now the Lincoln Group sucked in all of them with this scandal, it seems.
Good call pointing out the timing of this.
Richard - All those Fox News citations of Jamil Hussein you reference are stright lifts of AP stories onto Fox News. None of them are original Fox reporting using Hussein as a source. Your post is misleading referring to others using Hussein as a source unless you have another real example.
Is Hussein’s information credible. No other news organization has been able to verify the Simmering Six incident and there have been no calls for reprisal over the incident by Sunni leaders. Other incidents in which Hussein has served as a source also have a common element, they often can’t be verified by other news organizations or government sources. Either he must be a very good exclusive source or potentially completely full of shit.
Just following links and find that the rightwing excusigensia is busy as beavers everywhere I go. Did four mosques burn or was it three? Did they burn or were they merely set on fire or if they burned, did they burn to the ground?
Were six Iraqi Sunnis immolated or were they merely set on fire or were there only five or was it just a hot day and were they really Sunnis or just going to mosque like many Americans go to church? For that matter did anyone check their passports and IDs to make sure they were not Iranian saboteurs disguised as Sunni Iraqis who then faked their own immolations? For that matter has anyone checked to see if there really is a place named Baghdad or is it a fictitious place?
It is amazing what people can determine about truth from the safety of their keyboards insulated by thousands miles of ocean that eludes people who are actually present at the alleged incidents. BTW when Daleyrocks and RL are serially posting, one has to ask how fluent their Arabic is since Daley reports that no Arab source has mentioned the incident.
Bingo, E-lord.
What the F$#@ are these guys going to do when the US Army is forced to retreat from Iraq?
Tell us it was all because the “liberal media” failed to support their war?
Well, actually, YES! Those &^%4r of %$##^ are doing exactly that!
The Dolschstosslegende lives.
http://www.harpers.org/StabbedInTheBack.html