Posted on 05/15/2005 12:19:09 PM PDT by hipaatwo
Yesterday's London Times reports on the rioting and deaths triggered by Michael Isikoff's Periscope item in Newsweek on alleged abuse of the Koran at Guantanomo: "Newsweek sparks global riots with one paragraph on Koran." The new issue of Newsweek carries an account by assistant managing editor Evan Thomas on Isikoff's Periscope item: "How a fire broke out." Thomas appears to concede that Isikoff erred and explains how. Thomas writes:
Late last week Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita told NEWSWEEK that its original story was wrong. The brief periscope item ("SouthCom Showdown") had reported on the expected results of an upcoming U.S. Southern Command investigation into the abuse of prisoners at Gitmo. According to NEWSWEEK, SouthCom investigators found that Gitmo interrogators had flushed a Qur'an down a toilet in an attempt to rattle detainees. While various released detainees have made allegations about Qur'an desecration, the Pentagon has, according to DiRita, found no credible evidence to support them.
How did NEWSWEEK get its facts wrong? And how did the story feed into serious international unrest? While continuing to report events on the ground, NEWSWEEK interviewed government officials, diplomats and its own staffers, and reconstructed this narrative of events:
At NEWSWEEK, 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. A SouthCom spokesman contacted by Isikoff declined to comment on an ongoing investigation, but news-week National Security Correspondent John Barry, realizing the sensitivity of the story, provided a draft of the NEWSWEEK periscope item to a senior Defense official, asking, "Is this accurate or not?" The official challenged one aspect of the story: the suggestion that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, sent to Gitmo by the Pentagon in 2001 to oversee prisoner interrogation, might be held accountable for the abuses. Not true, said the official (the periscope draft was corrected to reflect that). But he was silent about the rest of the item. The official had not meant to mislead, but lacked detailed knowledge of the SouthCom report. So Isikoff relied on a telephone call with an anonymous government official paraphrasing a forthcoming report, confirmed by placing a draft of the Periscope item before another anonymous government official. Isikoff never saw the underlying report or even had it read to him. Thomas also writes:
After the rioting began last week, the Pentagon attempted to determine the veracity of the NEWSWEEK story. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers told reporters that so far no allegations had been proven. He did appear to cryptically refer to two mentions found in the logs of prison guards in Gitmo: a report that a detainee had used pages of the Qur'an to stop up a crude toilet as a form of protest, and a complaint from a detainee that a prison guard had knocked down a Qur'an hanging in a bag in his cell.
On Friday night, Pentagon spokesman DiRita called NEWSWEEK to complain about the original periscope item. He said, "We pursue all credible allegations" of prisoner abuse, but insisted that the investigators had found none involving Qur'an desecration. DiRita sent NEWSWEEK a copy of rules issued to the guards (after the incidents mentioned by General Myers) to guarantee respect for Islamic worship. On Saturday, Isikoff spoke to his original source, the senior government official, who said that he clearly recalled reading investigative reports about mishandling the Qur'an, including a toilet incident. But the official, still speaking anonymously, could no longer be sure that these concerns had surfaced in the SouthCom report. Told of what the NEWSWEEK source said, DiRita exploded, "People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said. How could he be credible now?" Thomas doesn't offer any answer to DiRita's question. What does Isikoff have to say? How about another call to Isikoff's anonymous source for comment? Isn't that the least we could expect? But Thomas launches into an even more untrustworthy allegation collected by Isikoff:
In the meantime, as part of his ongoing reporting on the detainee-abuse story, Isikoff had contacted a New York defense lawyer, Marc Falkoff, who is representing 13 Yemeni detainees at Guantánamo. According to Falkoff's declassified notes, a mass-suicide attempt—when 23 detainees tried to hang or strangle themselves in August 2003—was triggered by a guard's dropping a Qur'an and stomping on it. One of Falkoff's clients told him, "Another detainee tried to kill himself after the guard took his Qur'an and threw it in the toilet." A U.S. military spokesman, Army Col. Brad Blackner, dismissed the claims as unbelievable. "If you read the Al Qaeda training manual, they are trained to make allegations against the infidels," he said.What is this doing in an article devoted to Isikoff's original Periscope item asking "How did NEWSWEEK did get its facts wrong?" Thomas appears to be having a hard time concentrating; his attention appears to be wandering. He winds up:
More allegations, credible or not, are sure to come. Bader Zaman Bader, a 35-year-old former editor of a fundamentalist English-language magazine in Peshawar, was released from more than two years' lockup in Guantánamo seven months ago. Arrested by Pakistani security as a suspected Qaeda militant in November 2001, he was handed over to the U.S. military and held at a tent at the Kandahar airfield. One day, Bader claims, as the inmates' latrines were being emptied, a U.S. soldier threw in a Qur'an. After the inmates screamed and protested, a U.S. commander apologized. Bader says he still has nightmares about the incident.
Such stories may spark more trouble... Wow. Bader claims abuse of the Koran during his detention in Kandahar, and Bader says he still has nightmares. He has no motive to fabricate anti-American stories. Thanks for passing on Bader's complaints, Mr. Thomas. I buy them completely. And thanks for the warning regarding such "stories" possibly sparking more trouble. We'll try to keep it in mind as we deal with our own nightmares.
Like Lawrence DiRita, I have a question of my own for NEWSWEEK. Is this how an elite newsmagazine confesses error and corrects the record when it makes a big mess?
UPDATE: Reader Otto Timmons has pointed out Mark Whitaker's editorial note on the subject:
Two weeks ago, in our issue dated May 9, Michael Isikoff and John Barry reported in a brief item in our periscope section that U.S. military investigators had found evidence that American guards at the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had committed infractions in trying to get terror suspects to talk, including in one case flushing a Qur'an down a toilet. Their information came from a knowledgeable U.S. government source, and before deciding whether to publish it we approached two separate Defense Department officials for comment. One declined to give us a response; the other challenged another aspect of the story but did not dispute the Qur'an charge.
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. Top administration officials have promised to continue looking into the charges, and so will we. But 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. NEWSWEEK regrets it got a part of the story wrong. NEWSWEEK vows to continue looking into the charges. If there's no substance to the charges, they undoubtedly want to break that story. Pathetic.
If not for the story it wouldnt have happened , How can you not blame Newsweek? Placing the blame where it belongs doesnt have anything to do with 911. Isnt anyone else tired of these people writing stories for their sensationalism, to sell their sorry papers? How many died because the papers put Abu Gharib on the street, It was being handled in a perfectly capable manner before the papers decided to let the cat out of the bag. Journalism should require some type of responsibility. Freedom of speech isnt freedom to get people killed.
...and these b*stards complain about bloggers!
Pinko Wolf Blitzer think so. It's a non-issue.
Scuse me but Newsweek and other msm are the ones eating our own. If you think Newsweek didn't have an agenda by publishing this - you need to come out of the dark. This was not just an "oopsie". Our enemies in the ME are rabid dogs and with this type of propaganda can turn their fellow ignorant citizens into packs of rabid dogs. Newsweek knew this and should be persecuted..
Rumors are as good as hard news if it's going to cause trouble for a Republican Administration:-)
Well put!!!
Ideally, Isakoff should be handed over to an Islamic court and tried for the deaths of any people that have died as a result of this story.
Say what?
prosecuted.......well, maybe persecuted too. :o)
bump later read
Shakes head.
You don't throw a lit flare into a sea of gasoline, which is exactly what Newsweek did -- KNOWINGLY.
They WANT to incite anti-US violence, they WANT the US to LOSE, never mind how many people get killed, just to try to make President Bush look bad.
Just because someone may or may not have told them something, they have no obligation to print it. And there were quite a few times recently that we saw reporters totally making up things to support their agenda.
Newsweek is indeed responsible for the violence that errupted, as a direct result of their allegations, presented as facts.
As a lefty, he's from the school of thought that we can reason with those people.
Give him the opportunity to prove it:-)
It wasn't like throwing gas on a fire, it was like tossing a propane tank into a fire and shooting it with both barrels of a shotgun loaded with 00 buck!!
It seems the Taliban has been trying to spread this rumor for sometime and when it got reported by a US mag.......stand back, this isn't going to be good.
But it was Islamics who killed people, in the name of their moongod, not Newsweek.
If we blame Newsweek, then it opens the door to blaming America for 911.
The archer bears responsibility for the arrows that he looses from his bow, so how is it that Newsweek is not directly responsible for the ripples produced from the stone it has tossed?
Put in another way, am I not responsible if I yell fire in a crowded theater and people are subsequently trampled to death?
I feel positively prophetic.
Has anyone seen actual coverage by Al-Jazeera et al. on the story. I would suspect the (hostile) Arab press coverage would have been more than a line or two somewhere in the article.
fyi, this will make your blood boil
Take as a given that both Newsweek and the rioters are in the wrong. I say the principle is "stick and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me."
Or using the toss a match into gasoline analogy ... how can one justify the pool of gasoline represented by the ready-to-rioters? A match is not a bad thing, per se, it takes both, the match and the gasoline to make havoc.
Put in another way, am I not responsible if I yell fire in a crowded theater and people are subsequently trampled to death?
Indeed. But are you responsible for your injuries if you walk up to a bully and tell him his mother wears army boots? Not saying it's smart to do so, just wondering if you are, or if the bully is responsible for the resulting injuries.
There is NO crime in throwing a koran in a toilet. NONE. It is not illegal. It's un-pc, that's it.
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