May 16, 2005

Check out the NYSlimes carrying water for their MSM pals over at Newsweak:
Newsweek Apologizes for Report of Koran Insult

Newsweek apologized yesterday for printing a small item on May 9 about reported desecration of the Koran by American guards at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, an item linked to riots in Pakistan and Afghanistan that led to the deaths of at least 17 people. But the magazine, while acknowledging possible errors in the article, stopped short of retracting it.

Move over, Dan Rather and Mary Mapes--the hubris crown has other, more worthy claimants!
Continuing, the Gay Lady explains:

The report that a Koran had been flushed down a toilet set off the most virulent, widespread anti-American protests in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban government more than three years ago.

"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," Mark Whitaker, Newsweek's editor, wrote in the issue of the magazine that goes on sale at newsstands today. In an accompanying article, the magazine wrote that its reporters had relied on an American government official, whom it has not identified, who had incomplete knowledge of the situation.
[WTF does this mean??? Their "anonymous source" doesn't exist and/or doesn't know what he's talking about...or did they just make it up because it suited their anti-American, anti-military agenda?--Jen]

But Mr. Whitaker said in an interview later: "We're not retracting anything. We don't know what the ultimate facts are."

THEN WHY DID YOU RUN THE STORY?!!?
(As if we can't guess!)

The information at issue is a sentence in a short "Periscope" item on May 9 about a planned United States Southern Command investigation into the abuse of prisoners at the detention facility in Guantánamo. It said that American military investigators had found evidence in an internal report that during the interrogation of detainees, American guards had flushed a Koran down a toilet as a way of trying to provoke the detainees into talking.
[Even this "justified" spin isn't right--the only incident that came close to this was a story that a Muslim Gitmo inmate had tried to flush some pages from his Koran as a form of protest.--J.T.]

Pentagon officials said that no such information was included in the internal report and responded to Newsweek's apology with unusual anger.
[Well, people are dead, you know, and months and years of our military and Bush Administration officials working hard to win Muslims hearts and minds in the Muslim world have been completely undone by this "short" and completely irresponsible "sentence."]

In a statement, Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said: "Newsweek hid behind anonymous sources, which by their own admission do not withstand scrutiny. Unfortunately, they cannot retract the damage they have done to this nation or those that were viciously attacked by those false allegations."
Indeed, as Instapundit would say.

The original account, he said, was "demonstrably false" and "was irresponsible and had significant consequences that reverberated throughout Muslim communities around the world."
[...]

Newsweek's apology comes as the use of anonymous sources by news organizations around the country is under heightened scrutiny. Reader surveys have said that the use of unnamed officials is one of the biggest reasons their trust in the news media has eroded, and several news organizations, including The New York Times, have been tightening the rules on the use of unnamed officials.
[Hahaha! This is too funny!
They haven't done bupkis!
The Slimes is just treading water until the next time they're caught!--Jen]

Mr. Whitaker said yesterday that the magazine adhered as often as possible to a policy of identifying its sources of information.
[I'm still laughing at the lies, aren't you?--Jen]
But, he said, "there are certain sources who will only talk to us on a not-for-attribution basis, particularly when it involves sensitive information, and who would be worried about retribution or other consequences if their identities were known."
[I don't suppose they mean "retribution" in the sense of revenge by the relatives of Afghans killed in the Newsweak riots?]

He said that in this case, the magazine had followed careful and proper reporting techniques. The source had been reliable in the past, he said, and was in a position to know about the report he was describing.
[Uh-huh.
And if you believe they had this "source," Mary Mapes and Bill Burkett has "fake, but accurate" "documents" about Lt. GWB going AWOL from the TANG thirty years ago to sell you!]

In addition, the reporters, Michael Isikoff, a veteran investigative reporter, and John Barry, a national security correspondent, showed a draft of the article to the source and to a senior Pentagon official asking if it was correct. The source corrected one aspect of the article, which focused on the Southern Command's internal report on prisoner abuse.

"But he was silent about the rest of the item," Newsweek reported. "The official had not meant to mislead, but lacked detailed knowledge of the SouthCom report."

In its article published today, the magazine said that although the reference to the Koran was a side element in an article, it was worth printing because it had come from an American government official. Other news organizations had written that American guards had desecrated the Koran,
[Name one.]
Newsweek said, but those reports were based on testimony from former detainees who had been released from Guantánamo.

The magazine said that because of reports of other abuses of prisoners by guards at Guantánamo, the possibility that a Koran was flushed down the toilet did not seem that far-fetched. But it said that to Muslims, such an act was especially inflammatory.
[This is one of the biggest problems revealed by "Toiletgate:" Why is it that the MSM takes it as an article of basic faith that the U.S. military is bad and that no allegation against them is too preposterous???]

In its reconstruction of what happened, Newsweek reported that a copy of the original news item was apparently waved at a news conference on May 6 in Pakistan (the articles are dated several days after their actual publication).

By Tuesday, students in the eastern city of Jalalabad in Afghanistan had started anti-American demonstrations, citing the Newsweek article. It is unclear exactly how the students and other protesters learned of the article, though many Afghans get information from radio programs broadcast in local languages by the Voice of America, BBC and Radio Liberty, which often broadcast foreign news reports.
[No Al Jizz there? Don't you believe it!]
[...]

But some senior Pentagon civilians and military officers in Washington challenged General Eikenberry's assessment and said they saw a direct link between the violence and the Newsweek article.

President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, commenting on the reported desecration after returning home on Saturday from a trip to Europe, said he blamed "enemies of stability" for exploiting student anger about it to foment violence. Afghans in Ghazni, a city south of Kabul that suffered some of the worst violence, have also said that local "troublemakers" may have taken advantage of the anger to shoot at police.
[...]
"They have looked through the logs, the interrogation logs, and they cannot confirm yet that there were ever the case of the toilet incident, except for one case, a log entry, which they still have to confirm, where a detainee was reported by a guard to be ripping pages out of a Koran and putting in the toilet to stop it up as a protest," he said. "But not where the U.S. did it.

This explanation had little or no effect on the demonstrations in Afghanistan, which spread throughout the week, leaving at least 17 civilians dead and many more wounded.

By the end of the week, the military had completed its internal inquiry and was convinced that the allegation as reported by Newsweek never happened and that the article had played a significant role in inciting the violence in Afghanistan, Mr. Di Rita said. He informed Newsweek that its report was wrong.

Newsweek said this prompted Mr. Isikoff to go back to his source to try to confirm the original account.
[Uh, where is Michael?
MIA all weekend and into this morning...
Izzy is known for sitting on the Monica story, too, to protect his pal Slick Willie.
Drudge was grateful, though.]

"But the official, still speaking anonymously, could no longer be sure that these concerns had surfaced in the SouthCom report," Newsweek wrote, suggesting that it had perhaps been in other investigative reports. "Told of what the Newsweek source said, Di Rita exploded," the magazine wrote. " 'How could he be credible now?' " it quoted him as saying.

I have serious doubts as to whether this "anonymous senior Pentagon official" source even exists--my gut reaction is to to say that Isikoff and Barry just made "him" up, like Woodward and Bernstein's fake "Deep Throat."
The story's authors seem to be in hiding and aren't out front and center defending their report.
If the MSM got their Valerie Plame investigation (for which NYSlimes reporter Judith Miller and Time Magazine's Matthew Cooper are about to go to jail because they refuse to reveal their "anonymous sources"), then this should occasion something far more severe, in that people are actually dead as a direct result of the story.
The American public wants answers and we want them now!

As for the Muslims around the globe who have been upset and outraged by the story, I don't think that apologies, retractions or even flower arrangements sent to the funerals of the vicitims of the resulting violence will be able to undo what these criminally irresponsible journalists have done.
The damage has been done.
One of the largest questions raised by the scandal is whether the Newsweak people were naive and dumb enough to believe that the story wouldn't attract the attention of Muslims on the other side of the world and that therefore, it wouldn't "hurt" to publish it or whether their hatred of this country, its military and this president is so virulent that they knew the story would have an inflammatory effect on the world's Muslims and published the known false story for just such a purpose.
The other problem we face is that there still remain radical Islamists who can be enraged to kill at the drop of a hat.
In the present instance, we have Muslims killing other Muslims, but how long before this little mob on the mean block of the "Arab street" turns their anger to whites, Christians and Jews, Westerners, Americans, American GIs, etc.?
Obviously, we had struck a delicate balance in Afghanistan before the shock waves from this "sexed up" story appeared which is now destroyed, perhaps for a very long time.
As we've seen radical Muslim terrorists burn down and blow up churches and synagogues (with our Holy books the Bible and the Torah in them) around the world and kill, arrest and torture Christians and Jews on a regular bases in their countries, we haven't launched deadly riots to protest their intolerance of any religion but Islam.
(Not even when "Palestinian" terrorists trashed and looted the place of our Lord's birth in Bethlehem a couple of years ago, using Bibles there as toilet paper.)
Freedom House's Paul Marshall had this to say about the Newsweak story at NRO:

In all of these countries, the greatest danger is not from the courts, but from vigilantes and mobs. In Pakistan in 1997,Shantinagar, a Christian town of some 10,000 people, was burned to the ground after a man there was accused of tearing pages from a Koran. In the Netherlands last fall, the documentary producer Theo Van Gogh was butchered after he produced a documentary Submission featuring Koranic verses on women’s bodies.

Even if Newsweek publishes a full retraction, the damage is done. Much of the Muslim world will regard it merely as a cover-up and feel reconfirmed in the view that America is at war with Islam.
[Well, yes. Radical Islamism, anyway.--Jen]
It will undercut the U.S., including in Afghanistan and Iraq, far more than Abu Ghraib did. “We can understand torturing prisoners, no matter how repulsive” Newsweek quotes one Pakistani saying, “But insulting the Qur’an is like torturing all Muslims.”

This contrast is meaningful, not only because the terrorists have a double standard regarding the respect demanded by their religion and not given to ours, but it also points up the ready appropriation of violence and murder on the part of the Religion of Pieces.
On a related note, there was a pitiful turnout of 50 people on Saturday in Washington, D.C. for the March against Terror, supposedly organized to give peaceful, "moderate" Muslims a rare chance to make a stand against their murderous, violent and radical Muslim brothers and sisters.
One wonders if the concept of "moderate Muslims" isn't as much a myth as US soldiers at Gitmo flushing the Koran...

There's more excellent analysis of Toiletgate by Roger Kimball, Austin Bay, who calls it the MSM's "Abu Ghraib"--another story they "sexed up"-- and naturally, The PowerLine men.
Do I have to point out that this horrible reverse occurs at a critical point in the Global War on Islamist Terror?
Where is the outrage, America?!
Will this one stupid, horrible "story" lose us the whole war???