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| By israelinsider staff November 30, 2006 |
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Reports surfaced today that the American news agency Associated Press ran items containing serious factual errors and even fabrications related to highly inflammatory stories about incidents in Iraq.
Strategy Page, a well-known intelligence news website, reports that an AP story which claimed that Sunni Muslims had been massacred in the past weeks were based on testimony from a fictitious source. The source, a Captain Jemil Hussein, was cited in more than ten stories over a seven month period.
Many of the tainted stories were bombshells in both the Western and Arab media. In the former, tales of gruesome crimes against Sunnis were used as a political tool-- particularly in the buildup to the recent Congressional election-- to demonstrate the failed course of the war in Iraq.
In other cases stories were used, apparently by Sunni sources that planted them, to fan flames against Shiite Muslims around the world.
Associated Press is expected to come under significant criticism for this breach of journalistic standards. Strategy Page noted in this regard that in all cases a simple process of fact-checking names and identities with the Central Command in Iraq would have quickly exposed the error.
The US military, which says it checked with the Iraqi Interior Ministry and found that no such Captain Jemil Hussein exists, says it is currently looking into the matter.
For its part Associated Press, a US-based cooperative agency of roughly 7,000 partners, fired back, saying, "The attempt to question the existence of the known police officer who spoke to the AP is frankly ludicrous and hints at a certain level of desperation to dispute or suppress the facts of the incident in question,"
AP also claims that it found independent witnesses to corroborate the possibly-fake captain's testimony.
Strategy Page also noted that other AP stories that sent shockwaves through the political world, such as a story about US military guards at Guantanamo Bay flushing copies of the Koran down a toilet, were similarly false. In the Guantanamo Bay case prisoners, not guards, were responsible for the incident.
News of the incident, despite being false, caused rioting, injury, and further incitement in the Muslim world.
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