Bateman Responds to Latest AP Scandal

LTC Bateman who took the AP to task for their flawed article about the No Gun-ri article during the Korean War, has been one of the central figures in taking the AP to task once again for flawed reporting in Iraq.  Bateman’s latest article is about the flawed AP reporting of the “Jamil Hussein” controversy can be found over at Media Matters. 

Here is what he had to say about his prior experience dealing with the AP after uncovering the flaws in the No Gun-ri article:

In early 2001 the AP called my boss at work (an Army colonel) and tried to get my research (and book) about events that occurred at a place called No Gun Ri, in the summer of 1950, stopped. I was teaching History at West Point at the time. In effect their efforts were an attempt to have my career ended through an adverse report by my boss. Why would they do this? Well, because my research collided with that of the mighty AP. (Cue the irony bell) Because of information I had uncovered about an AP story which dealt with an event of military history, information that revealed that the AP had been completely duped by at least one fraud (and perhaps as many as three), the AP was not happy with me. The AP would not admit that there were any problems, though, and insisted everything was just fine. They chose to counterattack rather than re-examine. When their efforts to coerce my boss into squelching me failed miserably, they contacted my publisher and tried to censor me that way. Again, they did all of this rather than admit that their story had serious problems. The irony of the largest news organization in all of human history attempting to silence an individual soldier is almost too much to believe.

Here is what LTC Bateman had to say about the latest Jamil Hussein controversy:

The AP, I should note, in their counterattack against those who questioned their story and sources, said, "It’s awfully easy to take pot shots from the safety of a computer keyboard thousands of miles from the chaos of Baghdad." The AP executive who said that did so from New York City, but ya know what? Unlike that AP editor, I know something about Baghdad. Having lived in Iraq for a year (returning this past February, if you all recall), and knowing Baghdad well, one additional thing that has blown my mind about this, and the silence from the majority of the media (except E&P, which is covering the story well), is a simple element of geography.

The AP cites their source as being an officer in the Yarmouk district of Baghdad. Fine. Most people in the U.S. and the world don’t know Baghdad’s geography. But the question that hit me is "why is somebody in Yarmouk the main quoted source (originally) for a story about events in Hurriyah?"

Yarmouk is a neighborhood on the north side of what many people know as "Route Irish." Between Yarmouk and Hurriyah neighborhood are the districts of Al Andalous and Al Mansoor (parallel w/ each other), above that is Al Mutanabbi, and above that is Al Urubah … before you get to Hurriyah. It’s more than 3 miles away. Now for country folk like me, 3 miles isn’t but spitting distance. But in a city of 7 million, like NYC or Baghdad, 3 miles is a huge distance.

In other words, in going to their "normal" source for this story, the AP went to the equivalent of a Brooklyn local police precinct for a story that occurred in northern Yonkers! Hello? What would a cop in Brooklyn know about a crime in Yonkers? That’s what doesn’t make sense to me. (And why didn’t the AP reveal, until challenged, that this source was not from the district where the events allegedly occurred, or even from a neighboring district, but is from a moderately distant part of this 7-million-person city?)

To make things even more interesting is that Michelle Malkin has agreed to go to Baghdad with former CNN head honcho Eason Jordan to look for Jamil Hussein.  It will be interesting to see how the AP is going to cover their tracks this time.