Newsweek Clogs SuperToilet with Blood

Remember the big spash story the noted "news" magazine went with last week reporting that a U.S. interrogator at Gitmo attempted to "intimidate" an al Qaeda prisoner by flushing a copy of the Koran down the commode? Well, guess what? It was all a bunch of, um, crap.

Newsweek magazine on Sunday said it erred in a May 9 report that said U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, and apologized to the victims of deadly Muslim protests sparked by the article.

"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," Editor Mark Whitaker wrote in the magazine's latest issue...

Something about this story, er, smelled from the beginning. Leaving aside Jim Geraghty's wry observation that, "I mean, in most parts of the United States, flushing a Bible down a toilet would be NEA-funded performance art," there was something practically implausible about the very concept, as one of TKS's readers pointed out:

Even in paperback, his'd be a heckuva flush. Where can I get a couple of those government flushinators?

As for doing this as "intimidation," that never quite made sense to me either, precisely because the far more likely reaction was major-league pissed-offedness, certainly not the sort of response that would be conducive to either breaking a prisoner or loosening his tongue.

Now we come to find out that Michael Isikoff, the author of this incendiary "nugget," ran with it based upon "a telephone call with an anonymous government official paraphrasing a forthcoming report, confirmed [it] 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."

Is there anybody with three brain cells to rub together who can possibly claim with a straight face and no straitjacket that Isikoff didn't gallop to the presses with this piece of tenuous fiction for no other reason than that it was a way to make the Bush Administration look bad and sabotage the dramatic progress it has been making in the GWOT and transformation of the Middle East? And now they say that they "erred"? "WHOOPS!" is supposed to paper over this exercise in al-Jazeeraism?

Like the pit, it does. Fifteen people (at last count) are dead because of Isikoff and his feminine napkin of a publication. God only knows how much damage has been done to U.S. efforts to "drain the swamp" that has been the breeding ground for Islamist terrorists. Lengthening this conflict even minutely means more dead Americans, both military and possibly civilian. Heck, that could include Isikoff himself ultimately. By all rights, it should if, God forbid, it comes to that.

But just how contrite are they down at Newsweek? Not very, it would seem, if Evan Thomas' exercise in ass-covering is any indication.

After the rioting began last week, the Pentagon attempted to determine the veracity of the Newsweek story. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General 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. [my emphasis]

This is what got conflated by Isikoff's "anonymous source" (i.e. anti-Bush axe-grinder) into "flushing a Koran down the toilet." A distinction Isikoff evidently ignored in the orgasmic adrenaline rush.

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?" [my emphases]

Is it any wonder that Isikoff is off hiding somewhere, no doubt in a fetal position sucking his thumb, rather than publicly atoning for the blood he has on his hands? Why isn't he writing this column taking responsibility for his unforgiveable-on-so-many-levels actions? Why is he hiding behind his editor? The f'ing coward.

But then, after delving into some detail as to just how comprehensively Isikoff soiled himself, Thomas pirouhettes and picks up where Isikoff originally left off:

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 Colonel 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. [my emphasis]

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.

And then comes the hopeful sounding afterthought:

Such stories may spark more trouble...

Naw - ya think?

"Apology," my ass. Isikoff's Koran/SuperToilet gaffe was but one more malevolent mudball hurled against the Bush White House in the hopes that one of them will stick, and that the remainder will cause trouble for the country even if they don't.

My friend George Meredith cc'd me on his protest email to Newsweek. I think this makes a pretty good peroration:

So, you've expressed 'regrets' over your Koran-in-the-toilet story. So, what? Regrets don't mean didily, and they certainly don't mean you're sorry for running the story. An apology is called for - a sincere apology, so don't run it unless you mean it - and a 2,500 word explanation of how you could have committed such a monumental screw-up. The story wasn't monumental; it's the consequences which have been monumental. People have died. More will die. You've just made our Afghan job a lot more difficult (there are many people saying that was your intent - who can blame them for thinking it).

I'm sure you have regrets: you regret you got caught running a highly dubious story; you regret you don't get to slap Bush and Rummy around any more with this piece of trash; you regret you can no longer work up a bunch of terroristic lunatics into a frenzied lather over this lie.

Poor you.

[HT: Blogs for Bush]

UPDATE/BUMP TO 5/16: The Newsweekers learned their Dan Rather lessons well, didn't they? Today they're claiming that "Toiletgate" is the Pentagon's fault:

[Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker] said that a senior Pentagon official, for reasons that "are still a little mysterious to us," had declined to comment after Newsweek correspondent John Barry showed him a draft before the item was published and asked, "Is this accurate or not?" Whitaker added that the magazine would have held off had military spokesmen made such a request. That official "lacked detailed knowledge" of the investigative report, Newsweek now says. Whitaker said Pentagon officials raised no objection to the story for 11 days after it was published, until it was translated by some Arab media outlets and led to the rioting.
The item was principally reported by Michael Isikoff, Newsweek's veteran investigative reporter. "Obviously we all feel horrible about what flowed from this, but it's important to remember there was absolutely no lapse in journalistic standards here," he said. "We relied on sources we had every reason to trust and gave the Pentagon ample opportunity to comment. . . . We're going to continue to investigate what remains a very murky situation." [my emphases]

Captain Ed has so terse thoughts on the fecality of Newsweek's ducking and dodging that can be distilled down a single sentence:

Not only have Isikoff and Baker, and Whitaker, put American soldiers and Marines in further danger, now they blame the military for not censoring them. [my emphasis]

And if the military had censored the story? Can you imagine the euphoric peroxysms of muckraking glee that Isikoff would have experienced then? Can you say "Abu Ghraib with a Watergate chaser"?

"Journalists" should keep fiascos like this in mind when they wonder why men and women in uniform think the press is out to get them. It's far from an unfounded impression.

[As always, Michelle Malkin is Grand Link Central.]