As we noted earlier this week, the New York Times was so eager to splash another Abu Ghraib story all over Page One that they let themselves be hoodwinked by a fraud: Cited as Symbol of Abu Ghraib, Man Admits He Is Not in Photo.

In the summer of 2004, a group of former detainees of Abu Ghraib prison filed a lawsuit claiming that they had been the victims of the abuse captured in photographs that incited outrage around the world.

One, Ali Shalal Qaissi, soon emerged as their chief representative, appearing in publications and on television in several countries to detail his suffering. His prominence made sense, because he claimed to be the man in the photograph that had become the international icon of the Abu Ghraib scandal: standing on a cardboard box, hooded, with wires attached to his outstretched arms.

He had even emblazoned the silhouette of that image on business cards.The trouble was, the man in the photograph was not Mr. Qaissi. [Editors’ Note, Page A2.]

Military investigators had identified the man on the box as a different detainee who had described the episode in a sworn statement immediately after the photographs were discovered in January 2004, but then the man seemed to go silent.

Mr. Qaissi had energetically filled the void, traveling abroad with slide shows to argue that abuse in Iraq continued, as head of a group he called the Association of Victims of American Occupation Prisons.

The original story was titled, “Symbol of Abu Ghraib Seeks to Spare Others His Nightmare.”

UPDATE at 3/18/06 7:58:35 am:

Their corrections page gives you a sense of how sloppy and riddled with bias this piece was, as they rushed it to print with laughably inadequate fact-checking—and even misrepresented statements from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

The Times did not adequately research Mr. Qaissi’s insistence that he was the man in the photograph. Mr. Qaissi’s account had already been broadcast and printed by other outlets, including PBS and Vanity Fair, without challenge. Lawyers for former prisoners at Abu Ghraib vouched for him. Human rights workers seemed to support his account. The Pentagon, asked for verification, declined to confirm or deny it.

Despite the previous reports, The Times should have been more persistent in seeking comment from the military. A more thorough examination of previous articles in The Times and other newspapers would have shown that in 2004 military investigators named another man as the one on the box, raising suspicions about Mr. Qaissi’s claim.

The Times also overstated the conviction with which representatives of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International expressed their view of whether Mr. Qaissi was the man in the photograph. While they said he could well be that man, they did not say they believed he was.