Allah at Hot Air was tipped to an interesting facet of the Jamil Hussein story. Mainly that the AP had stated soon after the Jamil Hussein story broke that they corroborated the story via hospital and morgue employee’s:
A few days after Thanksgiving, back when Jamilgate was just starting to break, AP International Editor John Daniszewski issued a statement promising that a new, more complete article on the burning six was forthcoming. Included in the statement:
AP reporters who have been working in Iraq throughout the conflict learned of the mosque incident through witnesses and neighborhood residents and corroborated it with a named police spokesmen and also through hospital and morgue workers.
The new article hit the wires the next day. Quote:
One witness said he and other people from the neighborhood took the six immolation victims to the Sunni cemetery near Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib suburb and buried them after the gunbattle. That witness said one of the victims was the Mustafa mosque muezzin or prayer caller, Ahmed al-Mashadani. He did not know the names of the five others, but said they were all members of the al-Mashadani tribe.
Query: what happened to the hospital and morgue workers? That paragraph strongly implies that the locals took the corpses directly to the graveyard and the article doesn’t so much as mention a hospital or a morgue. How did the AP corroborate the story with workers at those locations if, presumably, they never even saw the bodies?
Holy Batman! Completely missed this the first go around. The editor of the AP has said they corroborated the story via hospital and morgue workers but then issued a statement that the bodies were buried quickly after. Implying they were never taken to either a hospital nor a morgue. Just when I thought they couldn’t dig themselves any further into a hole they prove me wrong.
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Sounds an awful lot like there should be an “official report” including the names of the victims if hospital or morgue folks were in the loop. So far no other media organization has found any confirmation of the incident. I suspect AP hasn’t either. Well, let’s just rewrite the story and leave out the inconvenient facts, and hope no one notices. It’s business as usual for the AP.
Curt, you are doing an outstanding analysis of this story. AP and the media are trying to marginalize their critics by calling us a small group of right wingers. They can call us anything they like. Truth trumps all.
AP would like the truth to go away.