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The Public Editor BAD mistakes happen even at the best newspapers, and public editors should usually watch for patterns rather than single out a specific incident. But when a Times front-page article highlighting the sensitive detainee-abuse aspect of the Iraq war turned out to be fatally flawed, it seemed to me that a closer look at the journalistic practices involved was warranted. The March 11 article profiled a man who said he was the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner famously photographed about two years ago, standing on a box with wires attached to his extended hands. The article included an interview...

NEW YORK For the second time in less than a week, The New York Times today admitted to a serious error in a story. On Saturday it said it had misidentified a man featured in the iconic "hooded inmate" photograph from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Today it discloses that a woman it profiled on March 8 is not, in fact, a victim of Hurricane Katrina--and was arrested for fraud and grand larceny yesterday. As it did in the Abu Ghraib mistake, the Times ran an editors' note on page 2 of its front section, along with a lengthy news...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The New York Times said on Saturday it had identified the wrong man as the hooded prisoner standing on a box in a photograph that came to symbolize U.S. military abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. The newspaper's March 11 profile about Ali Shalal Qaissi was challenged by online magazine Salon.com, which said an Army investigation had concluded the prisoner was a different man. "The Times did not adequately research Mr. Qaissi's insistence that he was the man in the photograph," The Times said in an editor's note accompanying a front page story on the misidentification. "A...

On March 11, the New York Times printed the gripping story of Ali Shalal Qaissi, the Iraqi in the most famous photo from Abu Ghraib, depicted below: The story begins: 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. The story continues in lurid detail, a searing...

NEW YORK (AP) - The New York Times acknowledged in Saturday's editions that it incorrectly identified an Iraqi man in a front-page story as the hooded figure shown in a photograph from Abu Ghraib prison that became an icon of abuse by American captors. After the original story appeared March 11, the online magazine Salon.com challenged the man's identity, based on an examination of 280 Abu Ghraib pictures it had been studying for weeks and an interview with an official from the Army's Criminal Investigation Command. The Times said it was investigating the matter. The Times said Qaissi and his...

In the summer of 2004, a group of former detainees of Abu Ghraib prison filed a lawsuit. One claimed to be the man in the photograph -- wires attached to his outstretched arms. The trouble was, the man in the photograph was not Mr. Qaissi.

A prominent Iraqi singer who used to glorify deposed president Saddam Hussein was assassinated by unidentified armed men in his Baghdad home, neighbours said Sunday. "I saw three people driving in a pickup truck around the neighbourhood at 6.30pm Saturday (local time). At 6.45pm, one of them came to the gate of the garden where Daoud al-Qaissi was standing and started talking to him," Samir Doush said, according to AFP. "He was joined by an accomplice who fired at Qaissi's head. The bullet pierced through the glass of the house," he said, adding that the three then sped away. Qaissi,...