Centcom Officially Denies AP's "Police Captain Source" Is A Cop At All

AP dodges the issue, stating they merely erred by calling him an official police spokesman.

But that's not the charge: The charge isn't that he's not a spokesman. It's that he's not a cop at all.

Based AP's claim to have "verified" the man was a cop, I began to wonder if it's isn't possible he's sort of a cop. Not officially a cop, not employed by the government, but serving in a cop-like role for the Sunnis. Patterico explores this.

Even if that is the case, he's still not a cop, and, furthermore, he would be a "shadow cop" with a specific constituency (the Sunnis) to appease and serve. We have "shadow cops" in this country, too-- on all race-related matters, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson jet in to become shadow district attorneys. And one can see in that case too the agenda-driven lack of objectivity and the need to serve an ethnic consituency above the law or facts.

Allah's got a great run-down, which includes the New York Times' blogger weighing in on the story. (It's beneath the Times proper to question the reportage of AP, it seems.)

n the evening, a resident named Imad al-Hashemi said in a telephone interview on Al Jazeera, the Arab news network, that gunmen had doused some people with gasoline and set them on fire. Other residents contacted by telephone denied this.

[Allah's comment;] Emphasis mine. I hadn’t heard that before.

He’s also suspicious about how/why an e-mail sent by Centcom to the AP made it so quickly onto conservative blogs. Er, because Centcom shared it with Flopping Aces after he inquired about Jamil Hussein? Surely America’s one-stop shopping center for leaks isn’t tut-tutting at us over this, is it?

It's interesting that our press corps, the Priesthood of Truth, gets so suspicious about non-credentialed reporters doing any reportage of their own. He seems flabbergasted that Curt from Flopping Aces could actually call up CENTCOM, same as any reporter, get a comment, and then publish it.

This strikes him as very nefarious.

Possibly because he's a little bothered at how easy his job really is most of the time.

Rejecting that his job just might be easier than he'd like to pretend, he instead hints darkly at other forces at work. It's just not possible a blogger with a phone could call up CENTCOM; no, there's good reason to be suspicious here. It must be that CENTCOM called up the blogger to put the story out there.

(Which is half of "reporting" anyway; but suddenly the NYT is very worried about the possibility that sources are calling reporters rather than the other way around.)

So what have we learned? Unless a story comes from an Official, Credentialed, Reverend of the Holy Truth (i.e., a paid straight reporter), it is almost certainly planted and almost certainly untrue.

posted by Ace at 04:16 PM

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