How The AP Helped Stoke Civil War in Iraq
By James Lewis
Just call me “Cassandra”:
The Associated Press is among the large news organizations whose reporting in Iraq has been challenged by bloggers. Beyond the specifics of any one incident, a certain pattern and practice of news gathering has made for systematic bias. The end result is propaganda.
Michelle Malkin has a new report on the “Jamil Hussein” fiasco at the Associated Press. “Jamil Hussein” is the alleged Iraqi Police captain who has been cited 61 times by AP, recently as a source for an atrocity story that now looks mighty dubious.
What has been lost in the debate about “Who is Jamil Hussein?” is the substance of his Iraqi atrocity stories peddled by the AP. The most recent ones have been denied by the US military, which has much better sources than the Associated Press. They have also not been confirmed by other news outlets. Whether “Jamil Hussein” was a cover name, an AP fabrication, or a real person is not as important as the content of his apparent disinformation. What was the purpose of the lie about six Iraqis being deliberately burned to death by terrorists? What about the other 60 AP stories that cited “Hussein”? How many lent credibility to other atrocity tales?
Two hypotheses spring to mind. One is that “Jamil Hussein” was benefiting from being an AP source. He was smart enough to know that AP wanted horror stories, and that’s what he gave them. Maybe he was paid. Maybe he liked instant fame. But 61 citations as an AP source suggests an ongoing relationship, one with a clear and sustained purpose.
A more sinister interpretation is that “Jamil Hussein” was a political plant, whose primary goal was to feed atrocity stories to the AP. He could be an Iranian plant in the Iraqi Police, which is heavily infiltrated by Mahdi Army killers who are paid by Iran. They were the ones who shouted “Muqtada Al Sadr!” when Saddam Hussein was hanged. An Iranian mole’s purpose would be to stir up civil war, and at the same time to provide more “evidence” for the American Leftist news narrative that Iraq is a hopeless mess.
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That is the real take-home lesson about the lies peddled by the Associated Press in the name of “Jamil Hussein.” If full-scale civil war breaks out in Iraq, and if the Democrats force a military withdrawal after the next election, this kind of disinformation will have accomplished its aim.
The propaganda war is the real war.
Read the whole thing.
This stuff has been going on since before the war against Saddam and the terrorists in Iraq. It is “business as usual” for the MSM. I have been watching their misreporting since the Goldwater campaign in 1964 and their blatant lie about the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War.
