Ramblings' Journal

Newsweek lied, people died --Turk 182

Newsweek printed a story two weeks ago about supposed desecration of the Koran at Guantanamo Bay.

The story insisted that military interrogators at the prison there desecrated the Muslim holy book, with one supposedly flushing a copy of the Koran down a toilet. Islamic clerics demanded apologies from the United States, riots broke out in parts of the Middle East, and at one count, more than 16 were killed in Afghanistan alone. Clerics promised to call for an Islamic holy war against the United States if the interrogators were not turned over to them.

The only catch is that the Newsweek story is not true.

Although other major news organizations had aired charges of Qur'an 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. After several days, newspapers in Pakistan and Afghan-istan began running accounts of our story. At that point, as Evan Thomas, Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai report this week, the riots started and spread across the country, fanned by extremists and unhappiness over the economy.

Last Friday, a top Pentagon spokesman told us that a review of the probe cited in our story showed that it was never meant to look into charges of Qur'an desecration. The spokesman also said the Pentagon had investigated other desecration charges by detainees and found them "not credible." Our original source later said he couldn't be certain about reading of the alleged Qur'an incident in the report we cited, and said it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts.

Translation? Newsweek lied. And in their haste to either get the story in print, they didn't follow up.

So now, a dozen and a half Afghanis are dead, and scores are injured.

Is Newsweek objective here, or are they playing with their own agenda. I'll let you be the judge of that.

Posted by mhking at May 15, 2005 11:35 PM