Jamilgate: Many Jamil Husseins, not so many Capt. Jamil Husseins; Update: Map added

posted at 8:20 pm on December 18, 2006 by Allahpundit
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Armed Liberal did yeoman’s work but the results, alas, didn’t match the hype. Here’s what we now know, or what we think we know:

1. There’s a Sgt. Jamil Hussein at Yarmouk police station who’s rumored to be an ex-Baathist and former employee of Uday Hussein.
2. There’s a Col. Jamil Hussein at Abu Ghraib.
3. There’s a Capt. Jamil Ghdaab who might or might not be the real source of the AP story.

Maybe tomorrow there’ll be more. AL did find out something important, though:

In the meantime two different sources in Hurriyah confirm that at least two of the mosques in question are just fine, are standing strong, a couple of bullet marks on them, but that’s nothing out of the ordinary. We also hear that they are closed for worship from fear of retaliatory attacks. There are two other mosques there that were claimed to have been attacked (the claim was later reduced to one) and we’ll see if we can get some pictures of them all, at which point we’ll have some facts to report. I’m also hoping to get more of a local response to the core story – about the six who were allegedly burned to death.

That’s the first independent confirmation I’m aware of that the original AP story was wrong in a key respect. Remember? November 24th:

The Mahdi Army militiamen, armed with machines guns and rocket-propelled grenades, swept through Hurriyah neighborhood near an Iraqi army post, burning four mosques and several homes, and attacking worshippers as they left Friday services, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein.

The AP didn’t mention the mosque burnings in its second story about the kerosene incident; so far as I know, they haven’t deigned to address the subject again, either by way of retraction or to stand by the original report. As far as they’re concerned, I guess, they never reported it.

In the meantime, See-Dubya’s curious: if, as Kathleen Carroll asserts, “no one” has questioned Jamil Hussein’s accuracy, how’d this end up in an AP article back in June?

According to Capt. Hussein of the al-Yarmouk police station, gunmen opened fire on a minibus in Dora’s predominantly Sunni Arab Mahdiya neighborhood. He said 11 people were killed, but Al-Yarmouk hospital reported receiving only two bodies from a shooting. It was unclear if the victims were Sunni or Shiite. There was no one available at Baghdad’s main morgue to confirm if it had received any bodies.

No matter. Whether the story happened the way the AP said it did is entirely irrelevant to the other side. I commented at length about it on Patterico’s site last night; rather than reproduce the whole thing here, I’ll send him some traffic by asking you to click and read it over there. Ragnar made a similar point today at the Jawa Report, wondering why the left would rush to the defense of a corporation that might be guilty of making an already horrendous situation in Iraq look even worse than it is. He’s speaking rhetorically, I think.

I’ll leave you with Bob Owens, who’s brandishing an elephant-sized pair of cojones in calling for apologies and resignations when we’re not even sure yet who Jamil Hussein is.

Update: See-Dubya wrote a post to accompany the map he drew up, but he didn’t have to. Res ipsa loquitur.

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