Newsweek has issued a retraction in connection with a story it wrote claiming that an internal Pentagon report found that U.S. personnel at the Guantanamo prison had flushed pages of the Quran down the toilet. The story is said to have set off riots in Afghanistan and unrest elsewhere.
The unfortunate effect of Newsweek's error is to divert attention from the important story: American abuse of Muslims and disrespect for their religion.
Officials in the government are only too happy to change the story from one of torture and cruelty to one of journalistic malfeasance. Thus, the misstatements of a journalist's source loom larger in importance than the kind of abusive behavior occurring at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and elsewhere. The same thing happened during the election campaign to the CBS story on President Bush's record of service in the National Guard: Phony charges from a dubious source obscured actual issues about Bush's service.
The administration has used Newsweek's mistake to issue the usual denunciation of the press's use of unnamed sources, even though it routinely uses unnamed sources to spin the news.
...
The United States cannot act with impunity forever. There is a limit to how long we can remain in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Uzbekistan. This is not about Newsweek. This is about arrogant and foolish behavior by Americans who have only made the struggle for peace and democracy all the more difficult to achieve
The White House has gone ballistic over the retracted statement in the May 9 Newsweek that "investigators probing abuses at Guantanamo Bay have confirmed" that "interrogators, in an attempt to rattle suspects, placed Qur'ans on toilets and, in at least one case, flushed a holy book down the toilet." White House spokesman Scott McClellan flat-out said Newsweek was responsible for causing the rioting in Afghanistan that led to at least 17 deaths. Newsweek editors appear to have accepted that responsibility. They shouldn't have; the White House is simply changing the subject from abuse at Guantanamo to Newsweek's journalism. It would have been prudent, and more responsible, for Newsweek to have confirmed the story with a second source; that failure gave the White House the opening it has now seized to such good effect. Newsweek then compounded the error by going only halfway in its first correction.
As for this short Newsweek item causing the rioting and deaths in Afghanistan, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan told Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Myers that the violence was "not at all" tied to Newsweek, but was an insurgency seeking to prevent the national reconciliation that President Hamid Karzai is trying to promote. Before the Newsweek item was even published, both the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse reported a new surge of Taliban-led violence.
Besides, the White House itself committed much more egregious errors in the way it so casually used dubious intelligence to make a case for going to war in Iraq. As the blog Daily Kos pointed out Tuesday, McClellan seems to have a double standard. In his discussion with reporters on July 17, 2003, he was asked: Bush is "president of the United States. This thing he told the country on the verge of taking the nation to war has turned out to be, by your own account, not reliable. That's his fault, isn't it?"
McClellan responded: "No."
The accusations concerning Qur'ans in toilets have been published repeatedly over the past three years in a number of media, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, a number of other American newspapers, the BBC and a Moroccan Islamic newspaper. The only thing Newsweek added was a claim of "official confirmation." While not a small thing, that supposed confirmation did not break this story; it is old news. And one source's faulty memory over where he saw information about it does not prove that the accusations of Qur'an abuse are un1. Indeed, they still deserve further investigation.
The White House response fits a pattern of trying to intimidate the press from exploring issues the administration doesn't want explored. Compare it, for example, to the Dan Rather report on President Bush's military service. To this day, we don't know if what Rather reported was accurate or not, or to what degree it may have been accurate. Nor do we know whether the documents he cited were genuine. All we know is that CBS can't verify that they were genuine.
Yet the hullabaloo caused by that incident appears to have intimidated other journalists from trying to pin down the full truth about Bush's military service. And now there will probably be less enterprise reporting on prisoner abuse or anything else that might embarrass this administration. It also fits neatly in with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's effort to muzzle public television and radio. This behavior seems so Nixonian, except that the current crew is much better at the press-intimidation game than William Safire and Vice President Spiro Agnew were. For Newsweek and other media that come in for this treatment, we have one word: Resist.
