A front-page article last Saturday profiled Ali Shalal Qaissi, identifying him as the hooded man forced to stand on a box, attached to wires, in a photograph from the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal of 2003 and 2004. He was shown holding such a photograph. As an article on Page A1 today makes clear, Mr. Qaissi was not that man.
The Times did not adequately research Mr. Qaissi's insistence that he was the man in the photograph. Mr. Qaissi's account had already been broadcast and printed by other outlets, including PBS and Vanity Fair, without challenge. Lawyers for former prisoners at Abu Ghraib vouched for him. Human rights workers seemed to support his account. The Pentagon, asked for verification, declined to confirm or deny it.
Despite the previous reports, The Times should have been more persistent in seeking comment from the military. A more thorough examination of previous articles in The Times and other newspapers would have shown that in 2004 military investigators named another man as the one on the box, raising suspicions about Mr. Qaissi's claim.
The Times also overstated the conviction with which representatives of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International expressed their view of whether Mr. Qaissi was the man in the photograph. While they said he could well be that man, they did not say they believed he was.
In other words, the Times had reporting in its own newspaper that contradicted this guy's story, but because his story was another excuse to run Abu Ghraib headlines out there again they didn't bother to do any checking as to its veracity at all. I mean, you can't tell me they spent a lot of time researching the facts if they didn't even check the reporting in their own paper.
What's really sad is that this is the second time in two days that the Times has been caught reporting something that is at odds with something they reported in their own paper.
As I said before, no wonder the Times' circulation numbers are plunging. The reporters at the Times itself don't even read their own paper.