NY Times says it erred in Abu Ghraib photo report

WASHINGTON, Mar 18 (Reuters) The New York Times said today 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 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,'' it said.

The Times, one of the most respected U.S. newspapers, was stung in 2003 when former reporter Jayson Blair was found to have fabricated and plagiarized dozens of articles. Last year, the resignation of star reporter Judith Miller amid questions about her reporting in the run-up to the Iraq war further damaged the paper's standing.

In last Saturday's article, Qaissi, a former Baath Party official, described how he was arrested in October 2003 and held for nearly six months at Abu Ghraib. It said prison records confirmed he was in detention at the time.

The Times said other media outlets, including PBS and Vanity Fair, had accepted Qaissi's account and identified him as the prisoner in the photograph, which shows a man wearing a hood and a poncho with wires attached to his outstretched arms.

The paper said Qaissi did appear with a hood over his head in other photographs seized by Army investigators.

''However, he now acknowledges he is not the man in the specific photograph he printed and held up in a portrait that accompanied the Times article,'' the Times article said.

But, Qaissi told the newspaper, ''I wore that blanket, I stood on that box, and I was wired up and electrocuted.'' REUTERS CH KP2308