Imaginary Friend 

There are a couple of ground rules in journalism. If you quote someone, he should be real. You should be certain of it. Unfortunately, those ground rules have been thrown out the window by the Associated Press and McClatchy Newspapers in recent months in their coverage of Iraq.

Over the last two years, the name Abu Omar al-Baghdadi has been used to terrify Iraqis. During that period, the terrorist group al-Qaeda in Iraq, supposedly led by al-Baghdadi, held the Sunni population tightly in its grip through a campaign of terror in which it killed Sunni tribal leaders and turned them against each other.

Al-Baghdadi's weekly threats, issued via al-Qaeda's Web sites, to slaughter Iraqi civilians who opposed him were dutifully parroted worldwide by the media. A search of Lexis-Nexis shows he was quoted or mentioned in over 400 articles around the globe during that period. In many of them, he was listed as the main source.

The U.S. military has long warned the media that al-Baghdadi likely wasn't real. Not that that stopped them from giving his latest pronouncements top billing in their news coverage. In March, the AP reported that al-Baghdadi had been captured, despite additional warnings from the military that he likely never existed. The AP later reported that he may not have been captured.

Then in May, The New York Times reported that he had been killed, despite more admonishments from the military. A month after that, the Times was put in an awkward position when the White House announced the U.S. military had captured a key al-Qaeda figure in Iraq who had admitted, among other things, that the media's main man, al-Baghdadi, was actually a mythical figurehead al-Qaeda leaders outside Iraq had invented to make it appear as if the group's leadership inside Iraq was Iraqi.

Al-Qaeda even hired an Iraqi actor to impersonate al-Baghdadi in speeches. The Times couldn't exactly ignore the White House pronouncement given its extensive past coverage of al-Baghdadi's messages of the week. So the paper had no choice, given its inability to prove otherwise, than to report that al-Baghdadi wasn't real, which it did in July. The admission resulted in a global belly laugh at the Times and the AP's expense from the blogosphere and the punditry.

You'd think that would be the end of al-Baghdadi, but amazingly, it hasn't been. Because reporters rarely leave Iraq's green zone for fear of being kidnapped, they have been covering the war through a series of dueling press releases -- the U.S. military's and al-Qaeda's.

The media has never been a big fan of the military, and they haven't believed much of anything it had to say after the Jessica Lynch fiasco. So al-Qaeda's claims have often been given top billing in articles. This posed a huge problem for the media because after al-Baghdadi bit the dust in the Times, al-Qaeda still insisted al-Baghdadi was real and continued releasing its press releases and recorded speeches in his name.

For the first few months, when the AP and McClatchy reported these statements off the al-Qaeda Web site they described al-Baghdadi as the "purported" head of al-Qaeda in Iraq and al-Qaeda in Iraq as "a fictitious al-Qaeda front organization." But as the months passed, in many cases, the "fictitious" part gradually got dropped out of articles.

By September, al-Baghdadi had risen from the ashes. With the media's help, he was again terrorizing the Sunni population with his threats to the lives of those who cooperated with the U.S. dutifully parroted by the press.

In a new low in journalistic malpractice, the AP produced an article headlined, "Al-Qaida group threatens to hunt down Sunnis in Iraq who cooperate with U.S." Al-Baghdadi, who was quoted off an audio file, was the only person named as a source in the September article.

By October, the AP was reporting that al-Baghdadi had put a $100,000 bounty on the head of Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks for drawing Mohammad's head on a dog's body. The news service neglected to mention the highly dubious nature of al-Baghdadi's existence. In fact, between August and October, al-Baghdadi was quoted 39 times in AP and McClatchy articles picked up by hundreds of publications around the globe.

Oddly enough, it was right around the time that The New York Times declared al-Baghdadi a sham in July that Sunni tribes in Iraq's most dangerous provinces abandoned al-Qaeda and shifted their alliances to the U.S. military. By finally ripping the mask off al-Baghdadi, a terrifying mask al-Qaeda couldn't have created or maintained without the help of the media, Sunnis were set free from the fear of a ghost. The truth was clear. There never was an Iraqi-led Sunni resistance movement -- just a band of foreign terrorists claiming Iraqi leadership but terrorizing the very Sunni tribal leaders they claimed to represent.

Only the media and al-Qaeda refuse to abandon the fiction. And so al-Baghdadi lives on, if only in the pages of newspapers with declining circulation.