Brilliant
Funny that a government might deny the existence of some guy to make things look better.
Not so funny when they finally admit that the guy exists, but….they are going to arrest him. Dandy.
The right wing blogs have been running all over this story thinking they had a big story. The essential thread was that it was the AP making up a story to make things look worse in Iraq than they really were. As d over at LGM put it:
I truly fail to understand Right Blogistan’s obsession with Jamil Hussein, but I suppose if it can be proven for certain that he doesn’t exist, then everything else will arc toward a resolution — the non-existent WMD will suddently unearth themselves; the abattoir outside the Green Zone will de-escalate; the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who fled the country last year will return and bring forth a new generation of virtuous citizens; the death squads being run by the government we ushered into power will put down their guns and drills; the execution of Saddam Hussein will be shown to be a model of due process and sobriety; the insurgency will evaporate like the morning dew; and Iraq’s infrastructure will bloom like wild prairie flowers.
It’s fine to challenge the AP, however, most professional journalists aren’t going to make up people. There are cases like Blair and Glass, but the editors checked their stories eventually and caught it. In this case, the AP pushed back hard–it wasn’t too hard to guess there was a reason for that.
But don’t let the Iraqi Government confirmation of the guy get in the way of a good conspiracy story, Confederate Yankee is trying to assert that the AP made up the fact that the Iraqi government actually identified a guy as Jamil Hussein. Malkin is skeptical of the story still because, you know, they must have made up that ethnic violence leads to horrible events.
Let me give them some advice. When you fuck up a story. Admit it. It makes it all easier in the end. I know this from experience. It might hurt your ego, but it’s a lot less hurt than if you have to do it in three weeks.
January 4th, 2007 at
[...] ArchPundit is missing the mark badly in his criticism of conservative bloggers and their attack on AP over its Iraq reporting. [...]
January 5th, 2007 at
They whine and whine and whine and now the guy is getting arrested. Brilliant. Can those bloggers get anything right?
January 5th, 2007 at
My favorite part is the “hey, guys on the left” bit. Uh, other than laughing at your stupidity nobody cares about this retarded story. 6 dead people? 6? 6!? That’s probably 1/50,000th of the domestic death toll from this war.
January 5th, 2007 at
Oy vey!
Dan Curry is still waging the “they’re only reporting the bad news” battle.
The whole “other than that, how did you enjoy the liberation?” meme is so patently absurd, I can’t believe any reasonable person would deign to repeat it.
Mark Shields addressed it best (and quite some time ago) by suggesting that if a bomb went off in the National Cathedral, killing 100 people, and on the same day, a Wal-Mart opened somewhere else, both are technically news, but one is obviously more important and more newsworthy than the other.
January 5th, 2007 at
The larger point that I think Dan misses (and I bet him a pitcher of beer so you know I’m serious) is that Iraq is going to hell and the right wing blogs are debating whether one story of horror is true or not. Given most reporters are pretty limited in the reporting they can do, and given the stories we know are true, Iraq is still a giant shit sandwich which we seem to be savoring instead of just swallowing. It’s great to fact check, but this obsessiveness on the Jamil Hussein story is a bit silly. 6 people died according to the story in a particularly horrific way. However, there are hundreds of people dieing in particularly horrific ways every day in Iraq.