Playing the Fool
Soon after the AP reported the story, U.S. and Iraqi officials dismissed the report as false and said they had no record of an Iraqi police captain by the name of Jamil Hussein. The AP issued strong statements in defense of its original report and provided additional reporting quoting anonymous witnesses who claimed to have seen the disputed episode. The Baghdad-based CPATT officer says there is no "Sgt. Jamil Hussein" at Yarmouk, which contradicts what Marc Danziger's contacts found. I have another military source on the ground who works with the Iraqi Army (separate and apart from the CPATT sources) and is checking into whether anyone named "Jamil Hussein" has ever worked at Yarmouk. 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.
They fooled everybody - almost.
How often do you question what you read? My history tutor certainly impressed on me that crucial skill: always question the source, whether it is a first-hand or second-hand account, what ideological, cultural or historical bias may be surreptitiously ingrained in the text, how the passages are framed and phrased, and what feelings or thoughts it is trying to elicit from the reader.
Jamilgate has had the bloggers talking for quite a few weeks since Flopping Aces posted that tremendously revelatory article that pointed towards a certain "Captain Jamil Hussein" that Associated Press had used in not one, not two, but sixty-one separate articles across the time frame of two years.The AP cited him as the key source of a November 24 AP story in which it was reported six Sunnis were burned alive by a Shia mob as they departed a mosque in the Baghdad neighborhood of Hurriya.
Truth be told, we still have no clarification on whether this Captain Jamil Hussein actually exists, but the reluctance - even petulance - at which AP has embraced to attempt to shimmy their way out of this scandal is utterly condemnable. The issue has been thriving in the blogosphere for quite a while now, but still to this day AP refuses to produce Captain Jamil to validate their sources and vindicate themselves.
Michelle Malkin delves right into the latest news - or lack thereof - about our mystery man-of-the-moment:According to two CPATT officials--one in the U.S, one in Iraq--there is no one named "Jamil Hussein" working now or ever at either at the Yarmouk or al Khadra police stations. That is what they have said all along and nothing has changed.
Now I say "complicit" and "propaganda" because it doesn't matter whether people consider the reportage coming from AP to be accidental or deliberate - what is significant to note is that for a very, very long time, the MSM has painted, no, white-washed the entire scenario to be one of doom and gloom, and this impetus to craft an ever more apocalyptic future for Iraq (is that an oxymoron?) was catalysed by the November mid-terms when the Democrats won Congress and decided initially to seize the momentum and hand Iraq over to the dogs.
To me, it matters not whether the AP self-righteously defends its innocence and untainted integrity, for their ignorance - at best - has made them guilty of that crime of non-deliberately/consciously (again, it doesn't matter) aiding our enemies and being their mouthpieces for the past few years. If AP continues to deny us any evidence of this Jamil Hussein that they speak of, we will have to assume that their articles and sources are falsified - which further incriminates them as complicit in distorting and manipulating the media for vested interests. Or profit.
Eric Boehlert published his argument this week, accusing warbloggers of being vehemently anti-press and attempting to fabricate a conspiracy of AP-insurgent collaboration: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.
The Burned Alive story - and it should be referred to that in the strictest of terms, as a work of fiction - did not simply signify the lack of evidence, or the ineptitude of the reporter in collecting enough sources and information for this one article. Boehlert is so fixated on dismissing the warbloggers - who have taken the imperative to challenge the accuracy of the news that is being disseminated to the public - that he momentarily and conveniently forgets that it is not just one article but sixty-one separate ones over a period of two years.
The magnitude of such sloppy - or premeditated - reportage cannot be underestimated. In fact, just think of the impact of such a storyline: citizens being burned alive and shot, a cruel, perverted act of barbarity that manifests the culmination of all the other stories that seem to be perpetuating from various outlets of the MSM.
What's even more deplorable is that Boehlert is seemingly able to allow AP to get away with this without even the decency of an apology and a retraction - you know, Eric, a single retraction might not seem much, but the invalidation of an entire storyline would shift the trend away from negative reporting and towards a more balanced perspective. AP, being one of several main outlets, should feel grateful for shouldering such responsibilities, but have instead abused their power.
Allahpundit offers his take:Because he doesn’t care if the story’s bogus or not. He’ll say en passant that he does because he knows, as a journalist and media critic, that he has to. But it’s strictly pro forma. His position seems to be that the story’s true in the Larger Sense, as a microcosm of the brutality in Iraq, even if it’s not, you know, technically true (”as if an AP retraction would change a thing on the ground in Baghdad, where electricity remains scarce, but sectarian death squads roam freely”). In other words, “fake but accurate.”
Boehlert seems to think that just because of first-hand experience, the reporters' word should be considered unquestionable:
[...] On the contrary, it’s Boehlert who’s using the war as a fig leaf for yet another credible accusation of shoddy, possibly ideologically motivated war journalism. He’d have you believe that to challenge this report is, essentially, to be guilty of historical revisionism, which is not only ironic vis-a-vis the AP but a nifty way of cowing a critic into backing off. It’s more important that Michelle Malkin be wrong, you see, than knowing for sure whether the world’s biggest news agency is passing off crap stories about the most important issue of our time.Talk about hubris -- stateside warbloggers claim they have a better handle on what's happening in Iraq than reporters who are actually there.
Reporters who are "actually there" are also able to manipulate and distort evidence much more easily without the constant supervision and fact-checking that would have been reinforced if they were closer to home. Warbloggers might be commenting from the "stateside", but the mechanism is one of introspective criticism within the blogosphere: comments flow freely, and nobody can claim a monopoly on evidence and speculation.
The warbloggers induce a certain amount of much-needed scepticism about what we are being fed by the MSM, partly due to a modicum of "opium of the masses":That movement from watchdog to 'advocate' changed the way the MSM viewed itself, viewed its role and viewed the Public. Taking the elitist academic and Socialist viewpoint, the People became the Masses which needed to be 'educated'. Thus the movement from complex reporting to simpler and simplistic reporting, so as to drive these 'Stories' beyond the lowest common denominator to the lowest possible denominator so as to treat the Public as morons. Over time this has led from actual, factual based reporting of times past, to something that is more akin to 'reporting on rumors'. Some of this is driven by the media type, itself, with limited 'air time' pushing to soundbites and reduction of ideas to little tidbits. If it can't fit in 30 seconds, then it goes unreported as *news*. Then 20 seconds. Then 15 seconds. Then 10 seconds. Soon we will be down to the Blipvert and people exploding in their chairs as the information gets compressed down to non-comprehensible noise.
Rick Moran at Right Wing Nut House points out Boehlert's saving grace:Boehlert rightly points out that we don’t give enough credit to the dangers faced by western reporters in Iraq. He highlights the death of an Associated Press Television News cameraman Aswan Ahmed Lutfallah, who was killed in Mosul while filming a gun battle between police and insurgents. Boehlert informs us that Mr. Lutfallah’s death brings the total of journalists and others associated with the media killed in Iraq to 129. Even for the locals, it is an incredibly dangerous place to work.
True enough - but isn't the greater tragedy that these men had sacrificed themselves in order to serve the vested interests of AP? Being paraded as martyrs by people like Boehlert in order to allow him to hide behind his indignant defense of morality - now that is truly shameful.
1 spoke up:
I thank you for the link!
About the only thing I have to add is that Mr. Boehlert cites the AP journalist, but then does not ALSO cite the numerous Iraqi journalists who have died trying to get information for their readers. Somehow independent press in Iraq is just not considered to be something worth looking at by AP or anyone in the MSM. When Mr. Boehlert *also* decries and lobbies to get the deaths of THOSE journalists covered, then he might have an argument to make. Of course that would require actually *contacting* said local journalists and local news organizations and *working with them*. Something the entire MSM appears to be unable to do... actually get the news reported by people who know something about it: the locals.
And it would require dedication to actually getting news and information above 'getting the story'.
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