Yesterday, Newsweek backed off its hit piece aimed at the military and the Bush administration. Today, they completely retracted it. Tomorrow, the resulting riot victims will still be dead and the tarnished U.S. image will still be stained.
Newsweek magazine has retracted a story that said U.S. interrogators desecrated the Qur’an to get inmates at Guantanamo Bay to talk – a report that led to anti-American riots in which at least 17 people died.
“Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Qur’an abuse at Guantanamo Bay,” the magazine’s editor, Mark Whitaker, said late Monday.
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The report sparked the biggest outpouring of anti-American sentiment in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.
At least 17 people have been killed over the past week as protests turned into violent clashes with police.
The May 9 article said American interrogators were placing copies of the Qur’an on toilets to rattle suspects, and in one case “flushed a holy book down the toilet.”
Guess what? Yeah, the damage is already done. This retraction is meaningless where it counts, the Islamic world. Chad at In the Bullpen points to a story showing Islamic clerics ain’t buying what Newsweek is now selling, and then goes on to explain why the retraction has no traction.
Again this comes not only from a group already believing the United States is in a war against Islam, something the MSM and several Left-leaning politicians and pundits advance ‘unwittingly’, but it also comes from people that only have the slightest clue of what a free press is. The lack of understanding that Newsweek is not controlled by the government is partially responsible for the same non-believing that a retraction was not pushed by the Bush Administration.
Chad goes on to show how the radical clerics have historically used such opportunities to their advantage.
Meanwhile, Phil at Shades of Gray agrees the piece was a political hit and repercussions will continue.
What to make of this? First, it seems that (once again) our highly reliable media has screwed up. Second, it seems that (once again) it has screwed up in a way that is, to say the least, unhelpful for the ongoing war on terror. Finally, it seems that (once again) this may blow over too quickly.
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Thanks to this slap-dash journalism, we can expect even more bad blood between the US and her allies and groups within the Middle East and the like, as this story will no doubt enter into the great domain of the urban legend – sure, the story is wrong, but expect to hear various Middle Eastern sources to cite this non-incident as yet another example of the US’s evil.
Newsweek opened it’s own Pandora’s Box, and now we all have to wait and see how much of a butcher’s bill is to be extracted.