By: E&P Staff Earlier this week, an article in Salon, the online magazine, charged that a front-page New York Times profile of the man in the hood in the most famous photo from the Abu Gharib scandal was fatally flawed: the Times got the wrong man. The newspaper said it would investigate.
On Saturday, it responded with an editors' note on page 2 of the "A" section, along with a lengthy news article. The newspaper admitted it, indeed, got the wrogn man. The reporter on the original story, not mentioned in the editors' note, was Hassan Fattah, who is now in Beirut.
The editors' note reads:
"A front-page article last Saturday profiled Ali Shalal Qaissi, identifying him as the hooded man forced to stand on a box, attached to wires, in a photograph from the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal of 2003 and 2004. He was shown holding such a photograph. As an article on Page A1 on Saturday makes clear, Mr. Qaissi was not that man.
"The Times did not adequately research Mr. Qaissi?s insistence that he was the man in the photograph. Mr. Qaissi?s account had already been broadcast and printed by other outlets, including PBS and Vanity Fair, without challenge. Lawyers for former prisoners at Abu Ghraib vouched for him. Human rights workers seemed to support his account. The Pentagon, asked for verification, declined to confirm or deny it.
"Despite the previous reports, The Times should have been more persistent in seeking comment from the military. A more thorough examination of previous articles in The Times and other newspapers would have shown that in 2004 military investigators named another man as the one on the box, raising suspicions about Mr. Qaissi?s claim."
The article in the same edition concludes:
"Meanwhile, it is not clear what happened to the real hooded man, Mr. Faleh. An Army spokesman said he was released from American custody in January 2004. Tribal leaders, and the manager of a brick factory next to the address where prison records say he lived, said they had never heard the name. Besides, they said, detainees often make up identities when they are imprisoned. Mr. Qaissi's attorneys said they have not attempted to search for him."
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