When the Agenda Hits the Fan

The headline fairly drips with that patented New York Times air of moral superiority: Symbol of Abu Ghraib Seeks to Spare Others His Nightmare, and the copy is written in their smarmy and lugubrious the-evil-that-we-do style:

AMMAN, Jordan, March 8 — Almost two years later, Ali Shalal Qaissi's wounds are still raw.

There is the mangled hand, an old injury that became infected by the shackles chafing his skin. There is the slight limp, made worse by days tied in uncomfortable positions. And most of all, there are the nightmares of his nearly six-month ordeal at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003 and 2004.

Mr. Qaissi, 43, was prisoner 151716 of Cellblock 1A. The picture of him standing hooded atop a cardboard box, attached to electrical wires with his arms stretched wide in an eerily prophetic pose, became the indelible symbol of the torture at Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad.

There's just one problem, Ali Shalal Qaissi isn't the prisoner in the photograph, as the Times was forced to admit today in a humiliating mea culpa. Today on page one is the fake-but-accurate explanation of the incident:

Certainly, he was at Abu Ghraib, and appears with a hood over his head in some photographs that Army investigators seized from the computer belonging to Specialist Charles Graner, the soldier later convicted of being the ringleader of the abuse.

You'll excuse me if I take anything further the Times has to say on the affair with a large grain of salt.

The man the Gray Lady described with such assurance as the "indelible symbol" of Abu Ghraib is a fraud. Birds of a feather.

Via Michelle Malkin.

Also posted at The Jawa Report.