A week ago, Mowaffak Rubaie, Iraq's national security advisor, went on television with great fanfare to declare that authorities had arrested Hamed Jumaa Farid Saeedi, allegedly the No. 2 man in Al Qaeda here.
"This is a major blow for Al Qaeda in Iraq," Rubaie declared, trumpeting a story that spread across the globe.
Later in the week, U.S. officials acknowledged that the suspect had been captured more than two months earlier, and had been sitting in detention all that time.
"When Dr. Rubaie said we had just captured him this week, we've gone back and what he really meant was they had just been cleared to announce that he was in fact in captivity," Caldwell told reporters.
The question of Iraqi casualties has also been a contentious one.
Iraqi officials stopped giving out daily death counts more than a year ago, Iraqi authorities said, after government officials decided that the steady stream of casualties was too bleak.
One of the most reliable barometers of the bloodshed here has been the monthly numbers report from the Baghdad morgue, where coffins strapped to car roofs arrive hourly, and residents trying to identify loved ones look through gruesome autopsy photos.
Last week, health officials unveiled a change in morgue policy: All requests for statistics would henceforth be routed through the Health Ministry. Morgue officials who previously provided details have abruptly "retired" or left the country.
Iraqis worry about a sinister turn. Sadr loyalists head the Health Ministry. In effect, Sadr controls an agency in charge of putting out information on killings reportedly committed by his own gunmen.
Even as information sources have been squeezed, Iraqi authorities have cracked down on the media, threatening to close newspapers and TV stations whose reporting falls afoul of the government line. Last week, the Iraqi government closed the widely watched, U.S.-style satellite channel Al Arabiya for a month, dispatching police to the channel's Baghdad offices. The Shiite government charged that the station, based in Sunni-dominated United Arab Emirates, had aired "sectarian" reports.
Even Iraqi officials acknowledge that Al Arabiya's reports about Iraq are more straightforward than dispatches from Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based channel that authorities here considered pro-insurgency and whose Baghdad office was shut down two years ago.
Still, the government Friday issued a public warning -- this is the final chance for Al Arabiya to "correct its behavior."
"We have a problem in Iraq with media that is against the Iraqi people," explained Ali Dabbagh, a government spokesman. "They present reports that have a hostile character and try to foment the view that Iraq is about to fall into a sectarian war. This is a problem."
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patrick.mcdonnell@latimes.com
Times staff writers Louise Roug and Solomon Moore contributed to this report.
