(--sigh--)
There's no need to rehash the whole saga of the last few weeks, although I would like to reflect on what it all meant.
Many on the right are crowing that Newsweek's entire story was wrong. They see the retraction of its brief article on Gitmo interrogators' alleged abuse of the Koran as a repudiation of the facts. On May 16, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said:
What we know is that the Newsweek story about a Koran desecration is demonstrably false, and thus far there have not been any credible allegations of willful Koran desecration, and Newsweek hasn't produced any such evidence either.
On May 16, right-wing blog Captain's Quarters made the startling assertion that "...Newsweek's editorial board finally issued a retraction claiming that the story could not be substantiated."
This is, of course, all bullshit.
As Hendrik Hertzberg points out in The New Yorker,
What Newsweek apologized for was the statement that a claim of Koran abuse would be asserted in a forthcoming report from a particular military organization, the U.S. Southern Command. What it retracted was the statement that such abuse had been uncovered by “an internal military investigation.” Left standing was the source’s testimony that he had seen the abuse documented; he was simply no longer sure whether it was in the SouthCom draft or “other investigative documents or drafts.”
Some of the mainstream media and the vast majority of the right-wing blogosphere have jumped at the chance to blame the deaths of Afghan protesters on Newsweek. "Newsweek sparks global riots with one paragraph on Koran" was one headline in the Times of London. Powerline took a shot at "the rioting and deaths triggered by Michael Isikoff's Periscope item in Newsweek." Little Green Footballs claimed that "Islamist groups rage and riot and declare holy war over Newsweek’s now-retracted 'Quran desecration' story." White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan charged that “The report has had serious consequences. People have lost their lives.”
The right conveniently ignores the fact that Muslims all over the world are already quite pissed off at the US as a direct result of the Bush administration's policies without any help from Newsweek.
The idea that Newsweek was, in fact, not directly responsible for the Afghan violence first arose at a Department of Defense news briefing on May 12, 2005 at which Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers (USAF), Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke. It was Myers who said:
-- it's a judgment of our commander in Afghanistan, General Eikenberry, that in fact the violence that we saw in Jalalabad was not necessarily the result of the allegations about disrespect for the Koran -- and I'll get to that in just a minute -- but more tied up in the political process and the reconciliation process that President Karzai and his Cabinet is conducting in Afghanistan. So that's -- that was his judgment today in an after- action of that violence. He didn't -- he thought it was not at all tied to the article in the magazine.
According to the BBC, Karzai made the same judgment Monday at the White House. "The violence was a political act directed against Afghanistan's stability," Karzai said at a press conference with President Bush. Karzai had also said earlier that the protesters his troops are shooting in Kabul are "enemies of peace," and "enemies of stability" whose actual goal was "to defame Afghanistan and to stop its partnership with the world."
And White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan has begun to back away from the story, too. At a presser on Monday, he said:
President Karzai spoke about how the demonstrations were aimed at undercutting the progress being made toward democracy in Afghanistan, and the progress on elections. They have elections coming up soon.
So that seems to be the truth of it. Newsweek did not kill anyone. Then why was there such an uproar on the right?
The problem here is not sloppy journalism about religious disrespect, psychological abuse, and torture. The problem is religious disrespect, psychological abuse, and torture. And that is the resposibility, solely and entirely, of the Bush administration.
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