Forgive this exercise in the surreal, but that's how I'm feeling about the apparently phony Iraqi police official called "Jamil Hussein," who is now claimed to be real after all.

I know it sounds nutty, but this whole thing had been reminding me of an old friend named "George Harleigh" until Jamil Hussein's apparent resurrection from the phony to the realm of real life.

Might it be time to bring back George Harleigh?

I don't know how many readers remember him, but George Harleigh was a famous Political Science professor who had worked in both the Nixon and Reagan administrations, and who was always heard to sound off against Bush at a "news" site called "Capitol Hill Blue."

At the time, it didn't make sense to me that any news site could do this consistently and get away with it. But the guy who ran the site was once a regular reporter. How, I wondered, could a formerly "good" reporter could "go bad"? I assumed that he had once learned how to do proper reporting, but that somehow he had become corrupt or lazy.

In light of the Jamil Hussein allegations (which came on the heels of things like the phony ambulance attack, photoshopped smoke, the Green Helmet man, and more), I was beginning to think that George Harleigh might not have resulted from the imagination of a reporter who became corrupted, but that using fictitious sources is just the way things are done.

Bloggers have seen this so many times that the natural reaction of many is to believe CENTCOM's assertion that there was no Jamil Hussein in the Iraqi police. Gateway Pundit (via Glenn Reynolds) had a remarkable post about the Jamil Hussein "Iraqi police captain" affair. Flopping Aces seems to have uncovered the hoax, and NewsBusters had more.

I liked Jeff Goldstein's explanation of the dynamics:

Whether this narrative is the product of willful distortion or merely the laziness that comes with being fed stories that match your preconceptions is, in effect, beside the point--though the former is clearly more despicable, and, should it prove to be the case, has the practical effect of undermining a representative democracy that can only work properly if citizens are being given accurate accountings of events by those purporting to do so.

And of course, if it turns out that he did exist after all, those who claimed he didn't will be more than wrong. They'll be morally evil -- to the core. And their moral wrongness is the most damning argument possible in favor of absolute and unconditional withdrawal from this absolutely immoral war!

Real or not, Hussein is of course as replaceable as "George Harleigh." The important thing is what Americans must remember (especially in November):

Leaving aside the elitist and racist underpinnings informing such a subtext, what is important to note here is that the majority of Americans who don't follow politics closely will remember nothing but the ghastly imagery and the message it is intended to further: that we are dealing with a society of savages who, given the opportunity for freedom, will reject it in favor of bloodsport and retribution.

Why? Because they simply are not ready for freedom, partly because the guiding hand of a caring, ruling elite is not available to bring them into the light....

As to those who still manage to support the war, they're mentally ill:

The dwindling few who still, for reasons known only to God or their psychiatrist, support President George W. Bush's failed invasion if Iraq, continue to claim the situation is not as bad as portrayed by the media.

Isn't there an assumption that a war which is apparently being lost should be lost?

And now that the fake Jamil Hussein story is claimed to have been true and accurate after all, apologies are being demanded. From bloggers of course! (Did they not believe the evil lying lies from the evil lying military?)

here we have so many conservative bloggers, after days of castigating the Associated Press for running what the wingnuts claimed was a fictitious story about six Sunnis being burned alive in sectarian violence in Iraq on Friday, having to once again face what a bunch of putzes they really are.

The AP reported last night on eyewitnesses to the immolations, that occurred when Sunni worshippers were leaving a Mosque on Friday and have also substantiated the identity of Iraqi police Capt. Jamil Hussein, who the AP cited as the primary source for its story that the Sunnis were killed while the Iraqi military stood by and did nothing.

[...]

Newsbusters took it a step further by also concluding that NBC's decision to begin calling what's going on in Iraq a "civil war" was based in part on the "bogus" nature of that story.

Flopping Aces, which seems to have started this embarrassing affair, has been running a lengthy series ominously called "Getting The News From The Enemy" while The Jawa Report really stands proud and proclaims that "It's unlikely that the Associated Press and other news agencies will issue corrections approaching the sensationalism with which they originally pushed the false stories."

Ouch. That kind of strident crap's got to make their red-state faces pretty damned crimson about right now.

But then, to grotesquely paraphrase Sir Charles Barkley, they would feel the shame that's coming to them, but then they realized that they have no shame.

Have we forgotten the maxim going back to Aeschylus?

In war, truth is the first casualty.

Whether this story turns out to be true or not, why should it be an argument in favor of defeat?

Is the goal to win this war, or is wanting to win the war a symptom of my mental illness?

Anyway, the AP is sticking by the story, and they're now claiming that a reporter went to visit Jamil Hussein after bloggers raised a fuss, and that he definitely exists:

...[T]he U.S. military said in a letter to the AP late Monday, three days after the incident, that it had checked with the Iraqi Interior Ministry and was told that no one by the name of Jamil Hussein works for the ministry or as a Baghdad police officer. Lt. Michael B. Dean, a public affairs officer of the
U.S. Navy Multi-National Corps-Iraq Joint Operations Center, signed the letter, a text of which was published subsequently on several Internet blogs. The letter also reiterated an earlier statement from the U.S. military that it had been unable to confirm the report of immolation.

The AP received no comment Friday when it first asked the U.S. military for information. It then carried portions of a U.S. military statement Saturday that said the U.S. had been unable to confirm media reports that six Sunni civilians were allegedly dragged out of Friday prayers and burned to death. The U.S. military said that neither police nor coalition forces had reports of such an incident.

The Iraqi Defense Ministry later said that al-Hashimi, the Sunni elder in Hurriyah, had recanted his account of the attack after being visited by a representative of the defense minister.

The dispute comes at a time when the military is taking a more active role in dealing with the media.

For its part, the AP makes it quite clear which side it's on:

The AP reported on Sept. 26 that a Washington-based firm, the Lincoln Group, had won a two-year contract to monitor reporting on the Iraq conflict in English-language and Arabic media outlets.

That contract succeeded one held by another Washington firm, The Rendon Group. Controversy had arisen around the Lincoln Group in 2005 when it was disclosed that it was part of a U.S. military operation to pay Iraqi newspapers to run positive stories about U.S. military activities.

Seeking further information about Friday's attack, an AP reporter contacted Hussein for a third time about the incident to confirm there was no error. The captain has been a regular source of police information for two years and had been visited by the AP reporter in his office at the police station on several occasions. The captain, who gave his full name as Jamil Gholaiem Hussein, said six people were indeed set on fire.

On Tuesday, two AP reporters also went back to the Hurriyah neighborhood around the Mustafa mosque and found three witnesses who independently gave accounts of the attack. Others in the neighborhood said they were afraid to talk about what happened.

Who was this reporter? How do we know he exists?

I thought I should attempt to contact George Harleigh again, and I found him apparently alive and well. While he wasn't reported as predicting defeat in Iraq, I have to give him credit for predicting defeat in November:

The rapidly-multiplying scandals ripping through Washington like a category five hurricane has Republicans reassessing their political futures while Democrats rub their hands with glee amid dreams of massive gains in the 2006 midterm elections.

"It's the kind of upheaval we see every so often," says political scientist George Harleigh. "It happened after Watergate and during the midterms of Bill Clinton's first term (the 1994 elections when Republicans seize control of Congress."

George Washington was right to tell his father the truth about cutting down the cherry tree, even if he didn't.

MORE: Austin Bay looks at the Jamil Hussein affair, and concludes that there are many questions:

MNCI could be wrong, but the distinct possibility exists that the AP has been misled by its own stringers or duped by an enemy propaganda operation. The AP insists it reported the basic story accurately. However, if Jamil is another Jimmy," the APs story as a weapon in a war of perception-- is far more damaging than Janet Cookes Washington fiction.

Jamil and his various stories require investigation and substantiation; an AP self-investigation will strike many as inadequate. 25 years ago the NY Times dismissed the National News Council as unnecessary. Jimmys World proved the Times wrong. We need to revive the National News Council and have it investigate Jamils World muy pronto.

MORE: CBS News reports that AP is "hitting back" and speculates that the fight is just beginning:

The message between the lines in all this is that the AP believes the government is going to be more aggressive in challenging the press - even when they don't have the goods to back it up, as the AP believes is the case here. "I have infinitely more faith in the U.S. military than in the Associated Press, but that doesn't mean the military is always right or the AP always wrong," writes Powerline. "It seems that the AP believes it is in a strong position. I'm tempted to say that one institution or the other must emerge from this affair with its credibility damaged." This could be one fight that's just beginning.

MORE: Michelle Malkin is keeping track of the story with numerous updates.

UPDATE: My thanks to Glenn Reynolds for linking this post, and a warm welcome to all new readers.

(And welcome back, George Harleigh! I missed him so much that maybe I should write some new quotes just for him.)