| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Fred Stone" |
| Date: |
04 Jan 2007 08:34:14 PM |
| Object: |
AP "finds" Jamil Hussein, fears arrest |
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070104/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_jamil_hussein_1
For $10000 I'm sure I could "find" Captain Kangaroo on the Iraqi police
force. See especially the last three paragraphs, if those don't stink
like a six-week old dead fish, I'm a Democrat. So the AP refuses to ID
the guy, Hussein doesn't get arrested after all (yeah right), and we're
supposed to *BELIEVE* this pile of baloney?
Iraq threatens arrest of police officer
By STEVEN R. HURST, Associated Press Writer Thu Jan 4, 5:11 PM ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq - 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.
ADVERTISEMENT
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.
Hussein was not the original source of the disputed report of the
attack; the account was first told on Al-Arabiya satellite television by
a Sunni elder, Imad al-Hashimi, who retracted it after members of the
Defense Ministry paid him a visit. Several neighborhood residents
subsequently gave the AP independent accounts of the Shiite militia
attack on a mosque in which six people were set on fire and killed.
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.
Hussein appears to have fallen afoul of a new Iraqi push, encouraged by
some U.S. advisers, to more closely monitor the flow of information
about the country's violence, and strictly enforce regulations that bar
all but authorized spokesmen from talking to media.
During
Saddam Hussein's rule, information in Iraq had been fiercely controlled
by the Information Ministry, but after the arrival of U.S. troops in
2003 and during the transition to an elected government in 2004, many
police such as Hussein felt freer to talk to journalists and give
information as it occurred.
As a consequence, 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.
His first contacts with the AP were in 2004, when the current Interior
Ministry and its press apparatus was still being formed out of the
chaotic remains of the Saddam-era ministry.
The information he provided about various police incidents was never
called into question until he became embroiled in the attempt to
discredit the AP story about the Hurriyah mosque attack.
Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said
Thursday that the military had asked the Interior Ministry on Nov. 26 if
it had a policeman by the name of Jamil Hussein. Two days later,
U.S. Navy Lt. Michael B. Dean, a public affairs officer with the U.S.
Navy Multi-National Corps-Iraq Joint Operations Center, sent an e-mail
to AP in Baghdad saying that the military had checked with the Iraqi
Interior Ministry and was told that no one by the name of Jamil Hussein
worked for the ministry or was a Baghdad police officer.
Dean also demanded that the mosque attack story be retracted.
The text of the Dean letter appeared quickly on several Internet blogs,
prompting heated debate about the story and criticism of the AP.
At the weekly Interior Ministry briefing on Nov. 30, Khalaf cited the AP
story as an example of why the ministry had decided to form a special
unit to monitor news coverage and vowed to take legal action against
journalists who failed to correct stories the ministry deemed to be
incorrect.
At the time Khalaf said the ministry had no one on its staff by the name
of Jamil Hussein.
"Maybe he wore an MOI (Ministry of Interior) uniform and gave a
different name to the reporter for money," Khalaf said then. The AP has
not paid Jamil Hussein and does not pay any news sources for information
for its stories.
On Thursday, Khalaf told AP that the ministry at first had searched its
files for Jamil Hussein and found no one. He said a later search turned
up Capt. Jamil Gholaiem Hussein, assigned to the Khadra police station.
But the AP had already identified the captain by all three names in a
story on Nov. 28 — two days before the Interior Ministry publicly denied
his existence on the police rolls.
Khalaf did not say whether the U.S. military had ever been told that
Hussein in fact exists. Garver, the U.S. military spokesman, said
Thursday that he was not aware that the military had ever been told.
Khalaf said Thursday that with the arrest of Hussein for breaking police
regulations against talking to reporters, the AP would be called to
identify him in a lineup as the source of its story.
Should the AP decline to assist in the identification, Khalaf said, the
case against Hussein would be dropped. He also said there were no plans
to pursue action against the AP should it decline.
He said police officers sign a pledge not to talk to reporters when they
join the force. He did not explain why Jamil Hussein had become an issue
now, given that he had been named by AP in dozens of news reports dating
back to early 2006. Before that, he had been a reliable source of police
information since 2004 but had not been quoted by name.
--
Fred Stone
aa# 1369
"- Theory is when nothing works, and you know why nothing works.
- Practice is when it works, and you don't know why it works.
- Here theory and practice are joined: nothing works and we don't know
why."
--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com
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