'Newsweek lied, people died'

I've never been a big fan of Newsweek magazine. I've always found it very fluffy and lightweight. Though owned by the same company as the excellent Washington Post, The Post's journalistic standards apparently have never transferred to Newsweek.

Newsweek seriously screwed up. In its last issue, it published a story claiming that U.S. investigators found evidence interrogators at Guantanamo Bay prison camp desecrated the Koran. This allegedly caused angry riots in Afghanistan. Newsweek has since retracted the story under pressure from the White House

The magazine has egg on its face, and deservedly so. This was always going to be a controversial story. If you're going to run a controversial story, you need to be darn sure you're right. You need to be extremely confident not just in the gist of the story, but in the details as well. As I wrote before in relation to the Dan Rather case, sloppiness with the details can destroy the credibility of a news article (and news organization), even if the main thrust of the story is true. In journalism, the small stuff matters.

Newsweek fully deserves the public flogging it's received.

That said, it's worth keeping things in perspective. If details did in Newsweek, then the magazine's critics should be wary of details as well.

As I said, Newsweek retracted the story. So that means US 'interrogators' didn't do anything to the Koran, right?

Well, not quite.

Many British ex-prisoners of Guantanamo claim that Koran 'abuse' did occur there.

Is that proof that the offensive actions occurred? No. But they can't be totally dismissed with a wave of the hand since even the military still feels compelled to continue their investigations into the allegations.

Even Newsweek's carefully worded retraction doesn't make that claim.

Editor's Note: On Monday afternoon, May 16, Whitaker issued the following statement: Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Qur'an abuse at Guantanamo Bay.

In other words, Newsweek isn't saying now that Koran 'abuse'* didn't occur. The magazine is saying that no internal military investigation discovered Koran 'abuse.'

As Donald Rumsfeld would say, "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence."

[*-Though I oppose the gratuitous desecreation of sacred texts, I won't use the word 'abuse' in relation to a book]

But Newsweek's unreliable source led to rioting and death in Afghanistan, right? That's according to right-wing critics, the White House and bloggers who proffer fanciful titles like 'Newsweek lied, people died.'

Two people who disagree with this assessment are the miltiary's top officer, Gen. Richard Myers, and the top US general in Afghanistan itself.

As Voice of America reported: General Myers also told reporters at the Pentagon Thursday that the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General Carl Eichenberry, disagrees with the reports that protests in the city of Jalalabad were caused by anger over the alleged Koran incident.

"It is the judgment of our commander in Afghanistan, General Eichenberry, that in fact the violence that we saw in Jalalabad was not necessarily the result of the allegations about disrespect for the Koran, but more tied up in the political process and the reconciliation process that President Karzai and his cabinet are conducting in Afghanistan. He thought it was not at all tied to the article in the magazine," he explained.

So how did Newsweek mess things up? In the magazine's own words: veteran investigative reporter Michael Isikoff's interest had been sparked by the release late last year of some internal FBI e-mails that painted a stark picture of prisoner abuse at Guantánamo. Isikoff knew that military investigators at Southern Command (which runs the Guantánamo prison) were looking into the allegations. So he called a longtime reliable source, a senior U.S. government official who was knowledgeable about the matter. The source told Isikoff that the report would include new details that were not in the FBI e-mails, including mention of flushing the Qur'an down a toilet.

Essentially what happened is that, when pressed, Newsweek's source suddenly had doubts about where he saw his evidence. Newsweek clearly needs better sources.

Now, if the potentially inflammatory story was flat out wrong, then surely military and government officials would've rushed to deny it.

But they didn't.

A spokesman for the Southern Command declined to comment during research into the initial, controversial article. A senior Pentagon official contacted by the magazine contradicted a minor aspect of the initial article but said nothing about the part that caused all the controversy.

An administration source says one thing, then changes his mind after the article appears. Officials won't comment when a story's being researched but angrily deny it after it appears. You almost wonder if it was a trap.

Showing that the administration's gall knows no limits, White House spokesman Scott McClellan huffed: "The report had real consequences. People have lost their lives. Our image abroad has been damaged. There are some who are opposed to the United States and what we stand for who have sought to exploit this allegation. It will take work to undo what can be undone."

Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice added, "Of course, 16 people died but it's also done a lot of harm to America's efforts" to demonstrate tolerance and breed goodwill in the Muslim world.

Of all the things that have had destructive real consequences, of all the decisions that have caused people to lose their lives, of all the things that have damaged America's image abroad, of all the screw ups that require work to undo, of all the things that have damaged the American government's token efforts to demostrate tolerance and breed goodwill in the Muslim world, Newsweek's gaffe ranks somewhere around #982 on the list. Most of the first 981 are related to decisions made by Mr. McClellan's and Sec. Rice's boss.

The BBC reported: The White House has urged Newsweek to take the lead in repairing the US' image among Muslims after its retracted report about desecration of the Koran. McClellan spoke of "lasting damage."

This is a neat trick. Willy nilly invasions and half-baked occupations of random countries for bogus reasons has absolutely nothing to do with America's bad reputation in the Muslim world, but a small blurb in a magazine is the real cause of "lasting damage." Screw up repeatedly and expect others to clean up your mess.

The media needs to be careful. It's clearly in the Bush administration's crosshairs. The administration needs a smokescreen to distract from the messy occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The administration can be totally wrong about its justifications for the Iraq invasion and they get rewarded with re-election; but a news organization can make a small error of detail in one small piece that doesn't affect the gist of the story and be blamed for all of America's problems in the Muslim world. Sure, it's unfair. Sure, it's a double standard. Sure, it's hypocritical. But that's the modern reality. The media needs to be very careful. It needs to be basically perfect, lest give the tiniest opening to a clueless administration looking for scapegoat.

[National Public Radio and particularly PBS are also being assaulted by the administration who is putting the networks' non-partisanship under pressure. they are particularly vulnerable since the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS, is headed by a particularly partisan Bush shill appointed by the president.]

It's even more of a neat trick when you consider this observation. Perhaps these specific allegations are true, and perhaps they are not. But people tend to believe them, because there have been so many other allegations of deliberate anti-Islamic acts from Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq - of prisoners being forced against their religious convictions to shave their beards, and even to eat pig-meat. The shaving clearly happened: there is pictorial evidence for that.

Furthermore, a new book by a former US soldier who served at Guantanamo alleged further abuses at the probably unconstitutional prison camp. He claimed that a female interrogator sexually taunted a prisoner and even wiped menstrual blood on the face of a prisoner and then sent him back to his cell.

He volunteered for Guantanamo in 2002. He was a US Army linguist, an expert in Arabic and had high security clearance.

But in his book, Sgt. Eric Saar says what he saw completely changed his attitude towards the camp, and his country.

There were many more suicide attempts in the camp than the US government has ever admitted, Sgt Saar says.

He claims storm trooper-like IRF (initial reaction force) teams were involved in numerous beatings of captives.

And of the 600 or so prisoners there, no more than a few dozen were "hardcore terrorists", says Erik Saar.

"The US Government portrays Guantanamo as a place where we are sending the worst of the worst, but this is not true.

"Guantanamo was the beginning of a mistake. It set a precedent in labelling people as enemy combatants, blurring the line between right and wrong.

"You can see it as the seed that may well have led to the naked human pyramids in Abu Ghraib."

Yet it's Newsweek, not Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, random invasions, counterproductive torture and unconscionable policies, that cause anti-American hatred and violence.

The media used to just get blamed for being "liberal" or for sensationalizing. Now, it's deemed solely responsible for all the anti-Americanism on the planet.

Welcome to our brave new world.


Update: The watchdog group FAIR applauds Newsweek's retraction but wonders why the weekly didn't apply the same standards to its claims on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.



Further update: The International Committee of the Red Cross reported allegations of 'Koran abuse' to the US authorities "multiple times"... long before the Newsweek story appeared


Yet another update: Far from being unfounded, the claims of 'Koran abuse' made by Newsweek were far from the first such allegations. The Pentagon claimed that it had seen "no credible and specific allegations" about 'Koran abuse.' Yet the exact same allegations were mentioned in FBI documents recently declassified. See no evil...