More AP Shenanigans?
What is the deal with our wonderful friends at the AP? Don’t they know when to say when? This report on the escape of Saddam’s nephew is hard enough to believe considering the source but what I found by doing a couple of Google searches blows my mind.
It starts reasonably enough:
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A nephew of Saddam Hussein serving a life sentence for financing insurgents and possessing bombs escaped from prison Saturday in northern Iraq with the help of a police officer, authorities said.
Pretty straight forward so far but the obligatory deathcount that has nothing to do with the main story comes along next, as usual:
Sectarian attacks killed at least 20 people, including five who died in a suicide car bombing outside a Shiite shrine in Karbala, police said. Officers also found 39 bullet-riddled bodies in Baghdad that apparently were victims of revenge killings by Sunni Arabs and Shiites.
Revenge killings by Sunni Arabs and Shiites? Are they working together now?
The escape by Saddam’s nephew underlined one of the problems facing the U.S. military as it tries to train enough Iraqi security personnel so U.S. troops can go home: the ability of Sunni Arab insurgents and Shiite militiamen to infiltrate Iraqi police forces.
OK, now Sunnis are insurgents while Shiites are militiamen.
Anyhow, lets get to the “authorities” mentioned in that first paragraph:
Ayman Sabawi, son of Saddam’s half brother Sabawi Ibrahim Hassan al-Tikriti, escaped from a prison 45 miles west of the northern city of Mosul in the afternoon with the help of a policeman, said a local police commander, Brig. Abdul Karim al-Jubouri.
Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, an Interior Ministry spokesman, confirmed the escape but declined to discuss any details.
We’ve heard all about the problems verifying the mysterious Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf @ Michelle Malkin, Hotair, Gateway and all the rest, but I found it strange that both of the characters in the above paragraphs had the same first names.
I am by no means an expert on middle eastern naming schemes and that combination may be as common as Bobby-Joe and Peggy-Sue are in these parts but it stuck in my craw.
I wanted to see how many articles referenced these two Brigadiers at the same time so I ran this search on Google. Pretty much all of them referenced a Dec 8th article by Daniel Wagner, the AP “journalist” who wrote the above article… until I clicked this link.
Now get this, it references police Brig. Khalaf al-Jubouri.
What? is this some horrible muslim mutant? A quick search of that name and I got 10 pages of links mostly referencing the (mostly cached) Nov 24th “6 doused sunnis” article. And on top of that, he’s referenced in the caption of a photo taken by none other than our old friend, AP photog Mohammed Ibrahim who was detained by Coalition forces back back in April.
A tangled web indeed!