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Blood and Shrieking Buffoons
Posted by Kevin

As you have probably already heard, the AP reporter that the Iraqi government and the US government claimed did not exists actually exists and has precisely the job the AP claimed for him:

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 AP’s 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 Hussein’s identity in order to disseminate false news about the war.

Khalaf offered no explanation Thursday for why the ministry had initially denied Hussein’s existence, other than to state that its first search of records failed to turn up his full name. He also declined to say how long the ministry had known of its error and why it had made no attempt in the past six weeks to correct the public record.

Has that prompted a bit of soul searching form the various blogs who attacked the AP on this issue? What do you think?

I am not gong to crow about the loss of credibility of the right wing blogs over this matter. As Glenn Greenwald demonstrates, only a person ignorant of the behavior of the people in question could ever believe they had anything even remotely close to credibility to begin with. At this point, if you still think people like Malkin, Instapundit, or Treason in Defense of Slavery Confederate Yankee have any credibility left then you aren’t ignorant, you’re stupid. And I can’t cure stupid. You’re on your own, there.

No, what I want to focus on is this:

Khalaf told the AP that an arrest warrant had been issued for the captain for having contacts with the media in violation of the ministry’s regulations.

Hussein told the AP on Wednesday that he learned the arrest warrant would be issued when he returned to work on Thursday after the Eid al-Adha holiday. His phone was turned off Thursday and he could not be reached for further comment.

The man faces arrest. And remember, arrest by Iraqi police — police dominated by Shiite militia — often means torture and death. These bloggers spent weeks making this man’s existence the focal point of a witch hunt, raising his profile immeasurably. They did this based on nothing more than the fantasy that their fellow citizens who happen to be reporters were deliberately trying to help terrorists and death squads drive the United states out of Iraq and advance the cause of the radical Islam in the Middle East. (If that sounds like a stupid reason, that’s because it is a stupid reason.) And now that man is facing arrest at the hands of an organization that has a history of abusing and killing people. And none of the bloggers seem to feel the least bit upset by that. They are too interested in making sure they find some excuse for their pathetic behavior. It is vile and despicable behavior and would leave them shunned in a decent world.

The AP has already lost contact with the man. I wonder, in six months, if (and, please, God, don’t let this happen) he turns up dead or broken by torture, if any of these shrieking buffoons will feel the slightest tinge of conscience? I wonder if any of them will have any response other than “Jamil who?”

January 5th, 2007 Politics, Iraq, Media | one comment