Newsweek:We were wrong, no Koran Desacration

[barbnf]

I believe the name Michael Issikoff (sp?) is connected with the story ... I don't think he writes with little research ...

I think there is a LOT going on behind the scenes ... This Administration more than any previous one is into "censorship" and that is a scary thing! ...

People really do need to wake up!

Terrorism thrives when people spread lies! ... We win ONLY when we speak truth, for truth resonates ...

The American people need to wake up! ...

I am a patriot, but I do not like what I see!

Money, power, and elitism are what are behind a lot of what goes on these days, and I hope more people begin to see what is behind the headlines!

[RickSp]

Isikoff was blindsided by the military. The Pentagon even reviewed the piece prior to publication. The story was true. The military source simply walked away.

The Red Cross reported Koran desacration and at least one soldier has been reprimanded for it. (Guess that was one docuemnt that didn't get scrubbed.)

Report U.S. soldier rapped for Koran abuse at lockup

[gbayoo]

WELL! Here we go again. I see a pattern here regarding hard hitting stories that have a tendency to make this administration look bad. There is no way all these big media outlets are messing up and presenting "bogus" stories over and over. Someone in the White House or Pentagon got to the source and/or Newsweek to pull back on the story. I think the fury we saw all over the Muslim world was just the "straw that broke the camels back". The story itself did not ignite all that. The story was not the first on this subject. There have been numerous ones since 2002. The problem is, the media today, for some reason is scared of this administration. This administration is controlled by some very powerful people. The proof is inside the story itself. The pentagon and Whitehouse had this story before it broke. The military corrected one small point regarding the rank of an officer. They said nothing to cause concern over the "toilet" issue. The Quaran has been desicrated all over US situations. This includes talk radio like Rush. How many times have we heard derogatory remarks on this and that our military etc have done things that have been reported over time. No one has the courage except the LA Times and I thought Newsweek. Now they join the ranks of the gutless media. My comments regarding things this country have done is not anti-America. Quite the contrary, it is very American to question our government when there is a need to. Since when are Americans supposed to sit back and let this government do as they please. It is not against the US itself. These are comments and opinions about the administration at the time. Conservatives are still railing about the Clinton administration. How many times do conservative talk attack our government. Constant attacks against US Senators, Reps, judges and on and on. Conservatives despise the government and would love to reduce federal govt to nothing. So, when you hear these people attack and make comments like, here we have it again, these weak kneed, gutless senators" or how about these whacko judges" or "Clinton is a rapist and murderer. To make issue about attacks on Bush as though they never would is nuts. I have so many stories about the names they called the Clintons. To call the president a rapist and murderer with no justification is anti-American. Starr after 7 years of trying to find something to get the Clintons on, finally admitted he found NOTHING! So lets try to be real here and see conservatives for what they are, spinners and liers who love to hate and smear those who simply do not think as they do.
gbayoo
gbayoo

[rmnunez]

When I first saw note of the story I pictured some interrogator desecrating a Q'ran. I'd see him (or her) throw the book at the prisoner, hit him on the head with it, rub it on their genitals or something. Maybe rip its pages out, spit on it and then hurl it into the toilet and (we read) flush it down the drain. How many of you guys think fa Q'ran could foreseably be flushed down the toilet without some serious plumbing problems at the prison? Did they have specially-designed toilets with extra big drains to accomodate this process or schedulle the flushings so it gave the plumbers time to fix the flusher by the time the captive got back?

The reaction was what shocked me, how many dozens of westerners do you think might lose their lives in demonstrations to protest bibles being flushed down toilets? I'd also wonder about Newsweek's liability. People did die as a consequence of unsubstantiated allegations which subsequently have been disproven. This much has been acknowledged, what of liability?

[RickSp]

And the ever insightful war monger from down-South speculates on toilet design. Amazing.

For those less blinded by dogma and plumbing, Frank Rich's "It's All Newsweek's Fault" is well worth reading.

"Our United States military personnel go out of their way to make sure that the Holy Koran is treated with care," said the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, as he eagerly made the magazine the scapegoat for lethal anti-American riots in Afghanistan. Indeed, Mr. McClellan was so fixated on destroying Newsweek - and on mouthing his own phony P.C. pieties about the Koran - that by omission he whitewashed the rioters themselves, Islamic extremists who routinely misuse that holy book as a pretext for murder. That's how absurdly over-the-top the assault on Newsweek has been. The administration has been so successful at bullying the news media in order to cover up its own fictions and failings in Iraq that it now believes it can get away with pinning some 17 deaths on an errant single sentence in a 10-sentence Periscope item that few noticed until days after its publication. Coming just as the latest CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll finds that only 41 percent of Americans think the war in Iraq is "worth fighting" and only 42 percent think it's going well, this smells like desperation. In its war on the press, this hubristic administration may finally have crossed a bridge too far.

[Gilligan]

And then again, maybe it didn't spark angry and violent protests. Maybe something else sparked the protests and the violence and the Pentagon want's us to think it was a news story (I was reading the press conferences regarding this incident, this part struck me as something important which actually makes more sense) that sparked such extreme violence that over 15 died and 100's were injured. Besides, I highly doubt that Afghanistan's people would give their lives over anything the American media says, without verifying it somehow:
Excerpt from DEFENSE DEPARTMENT NEWS BRIEFING

MAY 17, 2005

SPEAKER: LAWRENCE DI RITA,
PRINCIPAL DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
FOR PUBLIC AFFAIRS

QUESTION: There's still some confusion about what General Myers said in which he said the violence in Afghanistan, in the view of U.S. commanders, didn't appear to be linked at all to the Newsweek article. And what Secretary Rumsfeld said yesterday, in which he said people were dying essentially because of the reporting.
Can you reconcile those two statements for us?
DI RITA: Again, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to do it to your satisfaction.
What I've said is that our commanders at the time -- I'll note the lack of interest at the time the commander said it in this room, but Myers said that the commanders at the time believed that there was some pre-planning that went -- we're talking about in Afghanistan. I don't believe he was speaking about the other regions -- and that the coalition forces commander there believed that there had been some evidence of pre-planning that would suggest that there were some anti- government protests that were going to happen and that without question -- period.
Now, it has been subsequently reported that -- and if you watched the protests you could see -- there were references to the actions involved in the Newsweek story.
So it could have been a sort of unfortunate coincidence of two strains of activity.
But the commander's assessment at the time was there was some pre-planning that went into this. I believe, although not certain, that the Afghan government had comments to that affect, as well.
QUESTION: Do you now believe that people died because of this erroneous report in Newsweek?
DI RITA: I do. I absolutely do.
QUESTION: Larry, I do have another Newsweek question. (OFF- MIKE) you addressed this yesterday but Newsweek again, the editor said it took the Pentagon 10 days to come out with any kind of official response.
Given that back in 2003, January, the Pentagon realized the sensitivity of handling the Koran, why didn't you guys respond much quicker when the article first came out. In the past, you've issued press releases when there have been questionable broadcast or news reports.
DI RITA: I didn't know about it. I think when we learned about it and started to understand it better, we went after it and tried to understand it quickly.
I don't know that there's a better answer to that. It appeared, I'm told, as early as May 2nd or something like, or May 3rd. And when it started to become something that we were cognizant of, we focused on it. There's an enormous amount of stuff out there.

[RickSp]

I think it was just the straw that broke the camel's back, to invoke the old cliche.

Today a US MP pleaded guilty to beating an Afghan prisoner to death. He got three months jail time. So much for American justice.

The abuse and in some cases murder of prisoners and the attack on Islam by the US has thr entire Middle East in an uproar. Eighteen words in a Newsweek article may or may not have set it off, but is sure as hell didn't cause the riots. US military brutality did.

[rmnunez]

Yes, the Afghans are tiring of the occupation too (and things are going better there than in Iraq). I saw a note saying Karzai's request for more authority in military operations in his country was flatly rejected directly by Bush.

I'd suggest those lending credibility to Newsweek's accounts try this simple test, take a cheap paperback novel and try flushing it down their toilets. You should take into account yours are puny "civilian" toilets, but just try to picture the sort of toilet it would take to flush something about the size of a Q'ran down it. Guantanamo, where the events described allegedly took place, is an enclosed bastion which didn't have much by way of prisons before they started hauling terrorist suspects there. The present facilities were specifically built to hold the detainees and much upgraded over the original wire cages we saw in those early pictures, does anyone think they installed some special flushers anticipating a need to flush Q'rans?

[RickSp]

Again, he obsesses about plumbing and chooses to miss or ignore the point. The story was about desecrating the Koran and oh yes, by the way, the horrific abuse of detainees.

It is a poor debating tactic to hide an untenable position by focussing on minutia, ignoring all else.

[tinybear]

How many of our ordinary American citizens took to the streets, started a riot, committed arson and murdered innocent people in the aftermath of 9/11? And do you not think what happened to the Twin Towers was more outrageous than a Koran flushed down the toilet?

[Matt W]

TB - there were Muslims & Sikhs battered & assaulted - not just in the US - in the aftermath of the twin Towers. Tell me, how do you feel about the scale of the casualties so far...I think we're looking at over 50 to 1 Iraqis/Afghans killed to the amount of folk killed in the Twin Towers?

[tinybear]

So what's your point? That America's the villain 'cos we have an awesome war machine which killed more towelhead terrorists than they killed innocent men and women who were just minding their own business when they were burnt alive in their offices?

[Matt W]

more towelhead terrorists

And how many innocents? Like your stereotyping again, TB.

And how many folks have the US 'military machine' tortured in cold blood and locked up merely because they look different?

Neither 'side' are the good guys. The world is not black and white. Live with it.

[Libertarian]

The US does use torture. And when it does not want to use torture, it ships the people to other countires that DO USE TORTURE!!!

[Osborn F Enready]

Not to mention that the innocence of those that worked in certain parts of the towers is strictly subjective to opinion.

[Osborn F Enready]

Also, if you haven't read the editors words from Newsweek on this topic, you should. It is in the Editors notes section of this weeks Newsweek, and it quite clearly says there was no RETRACTION, since the story is not only still active, but MOSTLY correct.
The only things that led to the apology was that their source changed his stance on how "official" SOME of the findings were, and that source was a government official who DID NOT want to be named.

Don't blame the whistle blowers, blame the people trying to cover up the truth.(politicians and complicit media.)

[rmnunez]

Sp I wouldn't call the toilet "minutiae" in Newsweek's story on Q'ranic desecrations by the US military. Toilets are an integral part of the story, the Muslim holy book is described as "flushed" down these. In fact I recall specific descriptions of the entire text being "hurled" into these toilets before the military activates the lever. It was precisely this that caused my earliest doubts (I can imagine interrogators resorting to desecrative acts to provoke their captives but can easily picture the atendant consequences if the practice were as widespread and recurring as described). How long do you think it would take before the military engineers enquiried into bathroom procedures in interrogation due to plumbing problems?

[tinybear]

Quote by: Osborn F Enready Not to mention that the innocence of those that worked in certain parts of the towers is strictly subjective to opinion.

Who are you referring to? Care to elaborate?

[Milton Bradley]

Quote by: Osborn F Enready Also, if you haven't read the editors words from Newsweek on this topic, you should. It is in the Editors notes section of this weeks Newsweek, and it quite clearly says there was no RETRACTION, since the story is not only still active, but MOSTLY correct. The only things that led to the apology was that their source changed his stance on how "official" SOME of the findings were, and that source was a government official who DID NOT want to be named. Don't blame the whistle blowers, blame the people trying to cover up the truth.(politicians and complicit media.)

I still don't think it excuses them from printing the story with only one source.


This is the evidence that there is a real lack of investigative journalism going on now. It seems every American news agency have become cut, and paste journalists. Every news agency manages to get a reporter to the Michael Jackson trial, but nobody seems to be able to validate the truth if the story comes out of the Pentagon, or the State Department. Oddly enough, almost every news agency has a Washington bureau.


Sad.

[IndieC]

Yes, very sad. Stupid too, I have to say. There was a recent article in the Independent o, Monday commenting on this issue, I recommend it to all of you, if I can find it... It was in editorial and opinion, if you have the paper handy... "People matter more than holy books" by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. It isn't on the internet yet, unfortunately.

Resuming it though, it basically says that its outrageous that newspapers should print such a thing, and outrage all of the Muslim world, when they aren't sure about the source, which was apparently a quite credible source, and it is even worse that the riots which ensued in the Muslim countries caused Muslims to die. Her argument is that surely, although the desecration of a holy book is a serious crime in her opinion, the people who died in the riots matter far more, and people should not be pushed to kill or harm others of their own faith especially, simply because of a news story claiming desecration of the Koran.