I Say Jamil, You Say Jamail

Yesterday "Armed Liberal" at Winds of Change posted a short blurb about queries he had made to friends of his in Iraq:

With the help of some friends who have been doing a smidgen of looking, and it appears - appears, but is not certain - that there is in fact a Jamail Hussein in the Yarmouk police station in Baghdad. We'll know more tomorrow.

This morsel, and a hasty discharge from the sometimes overly excitable Allahpundit was enough to get the tools at Editor & Publisher boiling in their pants about the imminent vindication of the Associated Press (who started the whole thing by being even bigger tools for jihadi propaganda than E&P are for them) and the humiliation of any blogger so unwise as to have questioned their liegelords at the AP.

But now, Winds of Change is clarifying, they're not "backing off" - they supplied plenty of caveats to their original post, E&P just chose to ignore them:

So, after some calls, IMs, and e-mail we get a call back by Sat night (California time)/Sunday morning (Baghdad time); there is no Capt. Jamil Hussein at Yarmouk, but there is a Sergeant by that name, with a somewhat dubious reputation (worked directly under Uday, Baathist remnant, etc.)...

...Reporters from Al Sabah agreed to go interview the superior officer at the police station. They were on the phone at 4:30 am PST today, and they had gone to Karrada and established there is no Jamail Hussein there (would have been unlikely since Karrada is mostly Shiite, and in fact is mostly the power zone of SCIRI, Hakeem has his HQ there - and the Sgt at Yarmouk was obviously Sunni). Information then came in that there is a Colonel Jamail Hussein working at Abu Gharib. (Via sources at the Interior Ministry.)

This begs the questions: why can a blogger in California come closer to solving the Captain Jamil Hussein mystery than the Associated Press, and why is Editor & Publisher so visibly desperate to validate AP's burning six story?