Posted on 05/16/2005 7:51:49 PM PDT by jimbo123
After a drumbeat of criticism from the Bush administration and others, Newsweek magazine yesterday went beyond an apology it issued Sunday and retracted an article published May 1 that stated that American interrogators at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had tried to rattle Muslim detainees by flushing a Koran down the toilet.
The original article was blamed for inciting widespread protests and riots in the Muslim world, where desecration of the Koran is viewed as an incendiary act, and where at least 17 people were killed in the ensuing violence.
"Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Koran abuse at Guantánamo Bay," the statement from Newsweek said.
The carefully worded retraction came after the White House said the Newsweek article had damaged the image of the United States abroad. It reflected the severity of consequences that even one sentence in a brief news item can have at a time of intense anti-American sentiment overseas and political polarization, as well as extreme distrust of the mainstream media at home.
Mark Whitaker, editor of Newsweek, said in an interview that the magazine was retracting that part of the article saying sources told Newsweek that a coming military report would say interrogators had flushed a holy book down the toilet to unnerve detainees. As it turned out, Newsweek now says, there was one source. And Mr. Whitaker said that because that source had "backed away" from his original account, the magazine could "no longer stand by" it.
"I did not want to be in the position of splitting hairs," Mr. Whitaker said, "to look like we were being evasive or not fully forthcoming."
The magazine's retraction yesterday was the latest step in a complicated and fast-moving drama that involved a disparate cast of players, ranging from one of the nation's top investigative news reporters to a legendary cricket star in Pakistan. In the span of a few short days, the saga has added a new dimension to the journalistic debate about anonymous sources as well as new questions about how the United States treats captives from the Muslim world.
In the interview, Mr. Whitaker contrasted his action with that of CBS News when it refused to back down immediately last year from a report that raised questions about President Bush's National Guard service.
"Cleary it became a problem for CBS because people thought they weren't acknowledging that they screwed up," Mr. Whitaker said.
He continued: "Unlike CBS, we felt we were being extremely forthcoming by publishing all the details and publishing the Pentagon's denials and saying we committed an error. But then it seemed that people felt like we weren't apologizing. In order for people to understand we had made an error, we had to say 'retraction' because that's the word they were looking for."
Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said Monday morning that he found it "puzzling" that Newsweek had not retracted the article. "There is a certain journalistic standard that should be met," he said, "and in this case it was not met."
Mr. McClellan said neither he nor any other senior White House officials had spoken privately to Newsweek's management to seek a retraction. After Newsweek retracted the article in the afternoon, Mr. McClellan called it a "good first step."
"We encourage Newsweek to work diligently to repair the damage done by their reporting," he said.
Mr. McClellan and other administration officials blamed the Newsweek article for setting off the anti-American violence that swept Afghanistan and Pakistan. "The report had real consequences," Mr. McClellan said. "People have lost their lives. Our image abroad has been damaged."
But only a few days earlier, in a briefing on Thursday, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had said that the senior commander in Afghanistan believed the protests had stemmed from that country's reconciliation process.
"He thought it was not at all tied to the article in the magazine," General Myers said.
In the interview, Mr. Whitaker expressed frustration at the Pentagon for not informing the magazine of questions about the accuracy of the original account until about 10 days after it was published. He added that the magazine was continuing to report on the underlying allegations of Koran desecration.
An article in the current Newsweek said the original item, written by a veteran investigative reporter, Michael Isikoff, and the magazine's national security correspondent, John Barry, relied on a "longtime reliable source" who told Mr. Isikoff that a new report on prisoner abuses at Guantánamo would include a mention of a Koran being flushed down a toilet. The magazine said it showed the original article to a Pentagon official who challenged one aspect of the story but not the report about the desecration of the Koran.
Because of other reports about prisoner abuses there, the magazine said, the toilet incident "seemed shocking but not incredible."
In fact, complaints from released inmates that the Koran had been thrown into a toilet go back at least two years.
Among the more detailed accounts of United States soldiers mishandling copies of the Koran were depositions from three Britons who were released from Guantánamo in the summer of 2004. Asif Iqbal, one of the men, who were from Tipton, England, and had been captured in Afghanistan, said that guards "would kick the Koran, throw it in the toilet and generally disrespect it."
Military officials dismissed the complaints as commanders at Guantánamo conducted media tours of the facility during which they emphasized steps taken to demonstrate respect for Islam. Inmates, they noted, were given copies of the Koran along with a cloth surgical mask, which they used as a kind of sling to suspend the book from the wire mesh walls to ensure it did not touch the floor.
The official accounts of Guantánamo began fraying in later months, as the International Committee of the Red Cross charged in a confidential report in November that the procedures at Guantánamo amounted to torture, and F.B.I. memorandums disclosed in December portrayed harsh and abusive treatment by interrogators. The F.B.I. memorandums, disclosed in a lawsuit, did not mention any mishandling of the Koran.
Last month, a former American interrogator confirmed to The Times an account given in an interview by a former Kuwaiti detainee, Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi, who said that mishandling of the Koran once led to a major hunger strike. The strike ended only after a senior officer expressed regret over the camp's loudspeaker system, which was simultaneously translated by linguists at the end of each cell block, the former interrogator said.
In that case, the allegations were of copies of the Koran being tossed on the floor in a pile and treated roughly, but there was no assertion that any had been put in the toilet.
Erik Saar, a co-author of the book "Inside the Wire" and an Arabic language translator at Guantánamo from January to June 2003, said in an interview Monday that while he "never saw anything along the lines of a Koran being flushed down a toilet," the issue of how guards and interrogators handled the book was a chronic problem.
"It was one the things that kept resurfacing because guards had to inspect the cells occasionally for contraband," Mr. Saar said. He said that commanders tried to deal with detainees' sensitivity about the Koran in several ways, including enlisting some of the Muslims working for the military as translators to handle the books during inspections, so that nonbelievers would not touch the books. But that was not always done, he said, and there was no regular policy. The issue "created friction and problems all the time," he said.
The outcry over the Newsweek article apparently began in Pakistan, when Imran Khan, the legendary cricketer turned opposition politician, summoned reporters to a press conference on May 6 to draw attention to it. Once close to Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and a onetime crusader against corruption, Mr. Khan has been vocal in recent years against United States strikes in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"Islam is under attack in the name of the war on terror," Mr. Khan, one of Mr. Musharraf's most stalwart critics, told reporters. He pressed the Musharraf regime to demand an apology from Washington.
For the next several days, the report dominated the front pages of English and Urdu-language newspapers in Pakistan and became the center of debate in the Pakistan Parliament. Predictably, a coalition of Islamist parties seized on the Newsweek report to excoriate Gen. Musharraf's government for colluding with the West against Islam. But the criticism was not limited to the religious right. Legislators from across the political spectrum denounced the reported desecration, and by Friday, May 13, Parliament had passed a unanimous resolution condemning it.
Adnan Rehmat, the country director for Internews, a media training program funded by the United States government, said the article struck a particularly sensitive chord among Pakistanis not only because it implied an act of sacrilege against the holy book but also because it represented yet another act of horror out of Guantánamo Bay. He called it "a reconfirmation of what they've suspected, a straight disrespect for the sensitivities of Muslims."
The criticism of Mr. Musharraf, however, did not explode in Pakistan in the way that it could have. As though to clip opposition wings, an official statement from the foreign affairs ministry condemned the reported desecration and called for an inquiry just one day after Mr. Khan's press conference.
"Last Friday, in mass protests called by the Islamist parties, Pakistanis took to the streets holding aloft 'death to America' banners," the statement said. "There were no casualties."
But demonstrations turned violent next door in Afghanistan. On Wednesday, stone throwers were out on the streets, smashing buildings. Along with local government offices, the Pakistani consulate was attacked apparently as a symbol of Pakistani aid for United States intervention in Afghanistan. By Friday, the protests had spread to several other towns in Afghanistan and by nightfall, 17 people were dead, and more than 100 were wounded.
That the outcry against the Newsweek report came from two of the Bush administration's most trusted allies in the Muslim world is not likely to be a coincidence, analysts said.
Both countries, they pointed out, have political forces seeking to undermine their respective United States-allied heads of state: the Taliban against President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, the religious right against the self-described moderate, Gen. Musharraf, in Pakistan.
On Monday, after Newsweek's published clarification, Afghan presidential spokesman Jawed Ludin pressed for a "professional and sensitive approach" to coverage of "potentially sensitive issues."
An article published Monday in Jang, an Urdu-language daily in Pakistan, offered the most biting assessment of the political fallout of the Newsweek report: "Osama must be smiling victoriously in his cave," it declared.
In the interview yesterday, Mr. Whitaker said the magazine did not have a written policy regarding the use of anonymous sources or other reporting procedures but said the incident would prompt the editors to examine its policies.
"We'll look to see if this can be codified," he said.
He said he would "more aggressively" discourage the use of anonymous sources and would consider rules about having a single source on a sensitive article. But he said he was not prepared to issue a blanket rule against having only one source.
"Sometimes there is only one person, a corporate whistleblower, who is brave enough to come forward," he said, "but your level of confidence has to be in inverse proportion to your number of sources."
Still, damage-control experts said that Newsweek's handling of the story had created a public relations disaster.
"They tap-danced," said Robert Passikoff, president of Brand Keys Inc., a consumer loyalty firm based in New York. "They should have immediately bit the bullet and admitted they were wrong. There was no middle ground here.'"
He said that the retraction "seems like too little, too late" because of the nature of the error. "It had such far-reaching effects," he said. "People died because of this story."
Analysts said Newsweek was also damaged by the timing of this event, coming after a spate of high-profile journalistic scandals involving fabrications and plagiarism by reporters at other news organizations, including The New York Times.
"I think that this has the potential to be one of those so-called tipping points," said David Gergen, director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a senior aide to four presidents.
"There is a lot of anger, both here and abroad," Mr. Gergen added. "The Muslim world is going to continue to believe that this actually happened and that Newsweek is only issuing a retraction because of the reaction."
He said the magazine was smart to issue the retraction, but that it would not quell the outrage. "If anything, it is mushrooming and becoming uglier by the hour," he said.
Katharine Q. Seelye reported from New York for this article, and Neil A. Lewis from Washington. Reporting was also contributed by Carlotta Gall from Kabul, Afghanistan; Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan;and Somini Sengupta from New Delhi.
Newsweek corporate contact:
Ken Weine
Director of Communications
Newsweek
ken.weine@newsweek.com
In March of 2003 - The Washington Post reported the same thing - and there were no riots -
I honestly believe that Newsweek is sorry for the 17 Muslims that were killed in violence and rioting. I believe they wish they could have caused American troops to be murdered instead.
WONDERFUL lead-in. Just in case anyone had any illusions that the NYT was planning on being a little less biased.
How about "After pangs of conscience for deaths caused by faulty reporting....", you worthless slimes?
Smart legal move, since this should now be a murder investigation.
Too bad they can't retract the murders. Oh, well.
Every now and then, even the rusty old shit-stained gears inside the feeble brains of liberal old fossils at the New York Times grind to an epiphany.
If it had been Fox News doing it to a President Kerry administration, the NYT would be calling for a firing squad.
' But the criticism was not limited to the religious right. Legislators from across the political spectrum denounced the reported desecration, and by Friday, May 13, Parliament had passed a unanimous resolution condemning it."
ooh now Islomofasciscts are religious right. i guess thats another attempt to equate bush with the taliban
Until all red blooded americans cancel these rags, they will continue with their bashing of all things american. Even if they have to lie.
dear ken weine, resign, you creep
The NYT knows full well how these words will be interpreted overseas.
Remember: Putin to Bush: You Fired Dan Rather
Ah, see, they are saying it's GWB's fault for the riots. If he hadn't angered all the Muslims, there'd be no riot.
Typical liberal logic. It's the police's fault the criminals rioted.
Now comes the matter of compensating for all the dead people from rioting because of the false report. Pakistan is demanding an investigation of Newsweak.
And, we know those complaints came from pillars of the community, don't we?
That wasn't a soldier flushing the Koran down the toilet, that was just the latest installment of government funded performance art.
The leftwing media is a clear and present danger to the national security of the US and the fledgling governments in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I'm hoping the Repugs have the cajones to rectify the situation.
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