Emily Litellagate

Never mind:

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.

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.

So, for you keeping score at home:

1. Right-wing bloggers were wrong, wrong, wrong about the whole thing.


2. They were wrong because they believed the Iraqi Interior Ministry and the U.S. military, both of which turn out to have been lying.


3. They ignored the possibility that the officials were lying, despite their obvious motivation for doing so, and assumed AP was lying to further some nefarious agenda, despite the absence of any evidence or even rationale for this agenda.


4. Their criticism of AP for not bringing forward its sources sure looks pretty foolish in light of Hussein's arrest for talking to AP.


5. Notwithstanding all of the above, the initial wingnut reaction (see comments here) is to distrust the AP story reporting that the AP was right all along. (To his credit, Ace himself seems to accept it...although he does try to minimize the right's obsession with Jamil Hussein.)

[That's all, folks]