Captain Hussein Surfaces

You may recall the flap over the AP source quoted when they ran the story of the burning mosque and the six burned bodies? Captain Jamil Hussein? No one could produce him and the various ministries said he didn't exist?

Well, now he's surfaced, and the authorities are considering arresting him for talking to the press in violation of internal regulations. Michelle Malkin has the best roundup on the story here.

Anyway, the Iraqis say that

with the arrest of Hussein for breaking police regulations against talking to reporters, the AP would be called to identify him in a lineup as the source of its story.

Should the AP decline to assist in the identification, Khalaf said, the case against Hussein would be dropped. He also said there were no plans to pursue action against the AP should it decline.

He said police officers sign a pledge not to talk to reporters when they join the force. He did not explain why Jamil Hussein had become an issue now, given that he had been named by AP in dozens of news reports dating back to early 2006. Before that, he had been a reliable source of police information since 2004 but had not been quoted by name.

Which seems to me like a Catch-22 for the AP.

The veracity of the story has been called into question because no one could produce the source of their story, one Captain Jamil Hussein. Now that he has surfaced, the Iraqis want to charge him with a crime. If the AP identifies him, he goes to jail. If they don't identify him, the charges will be dropped. Of course, if they don't identify him, then they haven't produced him, have they? The story still has the same problems it had yesterday. If they do identify him, he is arrested and tried.

The original story has more problems than a pregnant prostitute, but without Jamil Hussein, it has no legs at all. So, the AP still needs to produce Jamil Hussein. It's a hell of a quandry to be in. Yet the AP brought it on themselves by using stringers to get the "news". If they were doing their own reporting...