The New York Times has been caught peddling a phony front page story about Abu Ghraib, an interview with a man who said he was the infamous hooded prisoner: N.Y. Times’ Iraq Detainee Story Challenged.

NEW YORK - The New York Times is investigating questions raised about the identity of a man who said in a Page 1 profile that he is the Abu Ghraib prisoner whose hooded image became an icon of abuse by American captors.

The online magazine salon.com challenged the man’s identity, based on an examination of 280 Abu Ghraib pictures it has been studying for weeks and on an interview with an official of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command. The official says the man the Times profiled Saturday, Ali Shalal Qaissi, is not the detainee in the photograph.

In an e-mail to the Times, Chris Grey, chief spokesman for the Army investigations unit, wrote: “We have had several detainees claim they were the person depicted in the photograph in question. Our investigation indicates that the person you have is not the detainee who was depicted in the photograph released in connection with the Abu Ghraib investigation.”

“We take questions about our reporting very seriously, and we will carefully investigate Salon’s findings,” Susan Chira, the Times’ foreign editor, said in Tuesday’s editions. “We attempted to verify the claims of Mr. Qaissi thoroughly. We spoke with representatives of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, who had interviewed Mr. Qaissi and believed him to be the man in the photographs.”

Interesting. When the Times wants to check a story about Abu Ghraib, they don’t call anyone in the US government. They call Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, two of the most politicized left-wing NGOs in the world.

UPDATE at 3/14/06 8:47:15 am:

More on this story at Mediacrity: The Times Buries The Truth.