Iraqi police officer Jamil Hussein, a source for multiple AP stories whose accuracy has come under fire, is now confirmed to be, in fact, an Iraqi police officer, despite several weeks of charges from the hawkish blogosphere that he was some sort of fictional character, as his name was absent from both Iraqi and U.S. military lists of police personnel. Rounding up reactions on the right, Michelle Malkin writes: “As many others who followed this story are now recognizing, this should provoke a bit of soul searching on our part. In retrospect, we had two choices: We could have chosen to believe that, in the chaos of Iraq, some clerical error had led to the omission of his name for the ordinary records. Instead, we were so prepared to believe in the anti-American bias of the Associated Press that we found it more likely that it had engaged in a kind of institutional conspiracy of deception, fabricating a source for the purpose of spreading negative stories about the war. Maybe a second look at some of our own biases is overdue.”

Hah! No, no, only fooling, of course. Actually, she assembles a chorus of bloggers stressing that the accusation about Hussein, despite having been blown up and trumpeted so vigorously for weeks, was actually never all that important. It was just a kind of symbol of very real problems at the AP. Fake but accurate, if you will.