from nypost.com
Sunday's New York Post featured a full-page op-ed by Michelle Malkin claiming that she has found evidence debunking Iraqi AP stringer's Jamil Hussein's contested report of atrocities committed by Shiite militia against a group of Sunnis leaving a mosque in Baghdad on November 24 of last year. As already reported by Radar and elsewhere, Malkin and other members of the right-wing blogosphere had initially disputed the allegations after the Shiite-run Ministry of the Interior first denied the existence of Hussein. Malkin then accepted an offer from ex-CNN newsman (and now Iraqslogger) Eason Jordan to go to Iraq to investigate the story for herself. Meanwhile, the Ministry ended up acknowledging that Hussein existed after all, and promptly issued a warrant for his arrest.
Malkin, for her part, went ahead with her fact-finding trip to Iraq anyways. The facts found: That the Nidaa Alah and four other mosques which Hussein had originally claimed were "destroyed," "torched" and "burned and [blown] up" by Shiite militia during the alleged attacks on the six Sunnis, are, in fact, "still standing" (though the photographic and other evidence marshalled by Malkin certainly gives credence to the claims that the mosques were at least "torched" and "burned"). So, according to Malkin, the damage done to the mosques in November may have been exaggerated (though whether by Hussein or the AP is another story, as is the question of whether the exaggerations, if such they were, were deliberate or not). (See here for background on how the AP story of the November 24 attack developed.) But does this mean that Hussein's claim that Shiite militia burned six Sunnis alive in that same attack was completely fabricated?
Malkin thinks so:
But at least one story he told the AP just doesn't check out: The Sunni mosques that as Hussein claimed and AP reported as "destroyed," "torched" and "burned and [blown] up" are all still standing. So the credibility of every AP story relying on Jamil Hussein remains dubious.
What about the AP's corroborating witness, Imad al-Hasimi, a Sunni elder in Hurriya, who confirmed Hussein's account of the immolated Sunnis on Al-Arabiya television? Al-Hasimi subsequently withdrew his allegation, alleges Malkin, not because he was acting under pressure from the Ministry of the Interior, as the AP reported: "The other possibility: He recanted because it wasn't true."
Malkin critics may be quick to dismiss such reasoning as spurious. But it turns out that Malkin also spoke with at least two U.S. officers, Capt. Aaron Kaufman of Task Force Justice and civil affairs officer Capt. Stacy Bare, both of whom flat-out denied that anyone had been lit on fire. Conservative bloggers such as Little Green Footballs were quick to gloat over what they considered to be a slam-dunk case that now casts doubt over the veracity of any bad news, from the AP and other sources, coming out of Iraq. That's a tactic also employed by Malkin, who characterizes the accounts given by Hussein as "rumor" (even though they are "quotes" that are "sourced"), and then darkly extrapolates it: "Rumor-based reporting serves no one's interests but those who would see Iraq fail."
Meanwhile, Reuters and the AFP reported that two car bombs blew up in the Haraj marketplace in central Baghdad earlier today. Reuters reports that 88 people have been killed. AFP puts the figure at a hundred. No word yet on when Malkin will prove them wrong.
DESTROYED - NOT [NYP]
