BLOOD ON THEIR...

BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS. Via Markos, I see that the yet another right-wing blogger attack on the press -- in this case, calling into question the existence of an A.P. source named Jamil Hussein in Iraq -- has been shown to be baseless:

The Interior Ministry acknowledged Thursday that an Iraqi police officer whose existence had been denied by the Iraqis and the U.S. military is in fact an active member of the force, and said he now faces arrest for speaking to the media.Ministry spokesman Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, who had previously denied there was any such police employee as Capt. Jamil Hussein, said in an interview that Hussein is an officer assigned to the Khadra police station, as had been reported by The Associated Press.The captain, whose full name is Jamil Gholaiem Hussein, was one of the sources for an AP story in late November about the burning and shooting of six people during a sectarian attack at a Sunni mosque....Khalaf told the AP that an arrest warrant had been issued for the captain for having contacts with the media in violation of the ministry's regulations.

My first thought when I heard of this controversy, via the "Send Michelle Malkin to Iraq" fundraising drive on Eschaton, is that the A.P. was trying to protect its source, who might potentially be killed for his conversations with the American media. In the sectarian atmosphere of Baghdad, just wearing the wrong color jewelry can lead to death, and feeding stories to the foreign press about atrocities committed against Sunnis is not the kind of thing that makes Shiite militas happy.Malkin's response: "Faces arrest?" She sounds surprised. What did she think was going to happen? The Interior Ministry is notorious for its secret prisons and torture chambers, as reported by The New York Times in 2005:

The Interior Ministry is run by Bayan Jabr, a member of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a leading religious Shiite party that has an Iranian-trained armed wing called the Badr Organization. Many Iraqi officials have said the ministry has recruited heavily from Badr and other Shiite militias, and there is growing evidence that such forces are abducting, torturing and killing Sunni Arabs.

The leadership of the Interior Ministry has changed since then, but it is still a fearsome -- and Shiite -- force. If Hussein is arrested by the Interior Ministry, that means Malkin and her peers have now endangered the life of a man who was trying to get word out about what was happening in his own country. And that makes them collaborators, too. They have turned Jamil Hussein into a target, and if he's killed or injured because of their actions, they will bear some responsibility for his death and pain.

I hope the A.P. follows up in six months and let's us know if Jamil Hussein is still alive. Because somehow I don't think Malkin will stick with his story -- already, she and her pals are saying he wasn't all that important a figure in the broader media controversy.

Greg Sargent has more.

--Garance Franke-Ruta