Here's the contents, cut and pasted in their entirety, zap:
Newsweek says erred in Koran desecration report
Sun May 15, 2005 9:03 PM BST
By David Morgan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Newsweek magazine on Sunday said it erred in a May 9 report that said U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, and apologized to the victims of deadly Muslim protests sparked by the article.
"We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst," Editor Mark Whitaker wrote in the magazine's latest issue, due to appear on U.S. newsstands on Monday.
Whitaker said the magazine inaccurately reported that U.S. military investigators had confirmed that personnel at the detention facility in Cuba had flushed the Koran down the toilet.
The report sparked angry and violent protests across the Muslim world from Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more than 100 injured, to Pakistan to Indonesia to Gaza. In the past week it was condemned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and by the Arab League. On Sunday, Afghan Muslim clerics threatened to call for a holy war against the United States.
The weekly news magazine said in its May 23 edition that the information had come from a "knowledgeable government source" who told Newsweek that a military report on abuse at Guantanamo Bay said interrogators flushed at least one copy of the Koran down a toilet in a bid to make detainees talk.
But Newsweek said the source later told the magazine he could not be certain he had seen an account of the Koran incident in the military report and that it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts.
The acknowledgment by the magazine came amid a continuing heightened scrutiny of the U.S. media, which has seen a rash of news organizations fire reporters and admit that stories were fabricated or plagiarized.
The Pentagon told the magazine the report was wrong last Friday, saying it had investigated earlier allegations of Koran desecration from detainees and found them "not credible."
The May 9 report, which appeared as a brief item by Michael Isikoff and John Barry in the magazine's "Periscope" section, had a huge international impact, sparking the protests from Muslims who consider the Koran the literal word of God and treat each book with deep reverence.
Desecration of the Koran is punishable by death in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
U.S. officials opened an investigation but maintained that members of the Guantanamo security force were sensitive to the religious beliefs and practices of the detainees in U.S. custody.
U.S. national security adviser Stephen Hadley earlier on Sunday stressed the report had not been confirmed. "First of all, we don't know that it's true," Hadley said on CNN's "Late Edition."
"We've heard these reports before -- if it turns out to be true, obviously we will take action against those responsible," he said.
In January, British prisoners released from Guantanamo said guards threw their Korans into toilets and tried to force them to give up their faith. Human rights lawyer Tom Wilner, who represents several Kuwaiti prisoners at Guantanamo, said in February that his clients told him their Korans were thrown on the floor, stepped on and thrown into toilets at Guantanamo.
Newsweek's Whitaker said that when the magazine first heard of the Koran allegation from its source, staff approached two Defense Department officials. One declined to comment, while the other challenged a different aspect of the May 9 story but did not dispute the Koran charge.
The magazine said other news organizations had already aired charges of Koran desecration based "only on the testimony of detainees."
"We believed our story was newsworthy because a U.S. official said government investigators turned up this evidence. So we published the item," Whitaker said.
"Our original source later said he couldn't be certain about reading of the alleged Koran incident in the report we cited," he wrote.
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You have every right to be outraged, zap. The following is from Little Green Footballs --
"Newsweek?s Evan Thomas tries to put a Band-Aid on their credibility, with a non-apology for their use of an anonymous source in the ?Quran desecration? story: How a Fire Broke Out. (Hat tip: Roger L. Simon.)
"Part of Newsweek?s defense involves the word of released jihadis, who seem to be more credible to Newsweek than the Pentagon:
Quote:
NEWSWEEK was not the first to report allegations of desecrating the Qur?an. As early as last spring and summer, similar reports from released detainees started surfacing in British and Russian news reports, and in the Arab news agency Al-Jazeera; claims by other released detainees have been covered in other media since then.
"Contrast this uncritical citation of reports from prisoners trained to exaggerate and lie about the circumstances of their detention with Newsweek?s obviously skeptical reading of the Pentagon?s statements:
Quote:
After the rioting began last week, the Pentagon attempted to determine the veracity of the NEWSWEEK story. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers told reporters that so far no allegations had been proven. He did appear to cryptically refer to two mentions found in the logs of prison guards in Gitmo: a report that a detainee had used pages of the Qur?an to stop up a crude toilet as a form of protest, and a complaint from a detainee that a prison guard had knocked down a Qur?an hanging in a bag in his cell.
On Friday night, Pentagon spokesman DiRita called NEWSWEEK to complain about the original PERISCOPE item. He said, ?We pursue all credible allegations? of prisoner abuse, but insisted that the investigators had found none involving Qur?an desecration. DiRita sent NEWSWEEK a copy of rules issued to the guards (after the incidents mentioned by General Myers) to guarantee respect for Islamic worship. On Saturday, Isikoff spoke to his original source, the senior government official, who said that he clearly recalled reading investigative reports about mishandling the Qur?an, including a toilet incident. But the official, still speaking anonymously, could no longer be sure that these concerns had surfaced in the SouthCom report. Told of what the NEWSWEEK source said, DiRita exploded, ?People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said. How could he be credible now??
Indeed.
Phred's thoughts on the matter --
This is yet another example of the lengths to which the MSM will stoop. They have long abandoned even the tiniest semblance of objectivity. Anything will do if it makes Bush look bad. Any source is treated as gospel if what he is saying could throw the Bush administration in a bad light. It doesn't matter if the charges are ludicrous on the face of it, if the source has zero credibility, if there is no confirmation or even the most casual second-sourcing -- if there's a chance it might make Bush look bad, then the public just has to know. Even Tricky Dick Nixon and Henry Kissinger didn't have to face this level of partisan hackery.
And this stuff goes on all the time -- every freaking day. Check this headline from CBS on a story about the Islamist riots in Uzbekistan:
US Ally Fires On Its People" http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/05/14/world/main695223.shtml
Because after all, that is the kind of thing that US allies do, isn?t it?
Jesus wept! This is a headline from a freaking American news agency -- albeit the same news agency responsible for RatherGate.
Strangely, I don't remember seeing any CBS headline such as "US Ally Fires on Innocent Civilians in Republic of Ivory Coast" a few months ago. Or barely any mention of the situation at all, for that matter.
Uzbekistan is of course also an ally of Russia, Turkey, and China. Also a member of the UN.
And of course the body of the story -- a jailbreak resulting in the release of 2000 criminals who then attacked a government installation -- has absolutely no relevance whatsoever to Uzbekistan's status as an ally of anyone.
This is Michael Mooreism writ large.
Phred
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