Newsweek fiasco....give me a break....

Newsweek puts a small blurb in about the Quran being used as part of the mind games US soldiers played on the prisoners of Guantánamo. Other news sources have covered this but from reports from prisoners. We of course, being American don't believe the prisoners.....So Newsweek gets the information from one of those (cue datadah music) "Unnamed sources" who happens to be an American unnamed source. Now, do they just run with the article without confirmation? Nope.

In addition, the reporters, Michael Isikoff, a veteran investigative reporter, and John Barry, a national security correspondent, showed a draft of the article to the source and to a senior Pentagon official asking if it was correct. The source corrected one aspect of the article, which focused on the Southern Command's internal report on prisoner abuse.

"But he was silent about the rest of the item," Newsweek reported. "The official had not meant to mislead, but lacked detailed knowledge of the SouthCom report."

So, neither the source nor the Pentagon says "WAIT, this isn't true", so then Newsweek publishes it and all of a sudden there are uprisings, protests, demands from other countries that this be investigated and punished.

Gee big surprise that the US government is denying it happened? They claim their logs only show this:

At his news conference, General Myers said that military investigators at Guantánamo were searching their interrogation logs to find the case cited in the Newsweek article.

"They have looked through the logs, the interrogation logs, and they cannot confirm yet that there were ever the case of the toilet incident, except for one case, a log entry, which they still have to confirm, where a detainee was reported by a guard to be ripping pages out of a Koran and putting in the toilet to stop it up as a protest," he said. "But not where the U.S. did it."

Of course....a muslim would do that....What planet do they think we live on? The planet Bullshit?

I don't know which is stupider, Newsweek not realizing this would be a big deal, or our Government thinking we'd be dumb enough to believe them. The source at the Pentagon that saw this and didn't correct it? Blame him also, as he has more responsibility than Newsweek, Newsweek went to him for confirmation and by not correcting them, he gave it to them with his silence. If he thought it wasn't true he knew they were going to publish it....Look at how the cover-up still continues on Abu Ghraib, unless some type of photographic or video evidence comes out they will deny, deny, deny.

While we're at it, let's look at some other articles written last week as well on this very same issue. From the Guardian, two British detainees:

The Guardian has learned that some of the British detainees released from Guantánamo Bay have reported that they were sexually abused. There is no way to independently verify these details.

According to a source, who has interviewed them in secret since their release, they were initially too ashamed to talk about it, and are only now starting to give details. The source said: "They are embarrassed about talking about it because they feel humiliated. We have had an account that their religion was used against them, that a copy of the Koran was brought in front of them and pages torn out."

Liberty Post provides an article from the New York Times that states among other things:

Mr. al-Mutairi said there were three major hunger strikes in his more than three years of imprisonment at Guantánamo. He said that after one of them, a protest of guards' handling of copies of the Koran, which had been tossed into a pile and stepped on, a senior officer delivered an apology over the camp's loudspeaker system, pledging that such abuses would stop. Interpreters, standing outside each prison block, translated the officer's apology.

BBC reports:

In an interview last week with the BBC's Haroon Rashid, Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, an Afghan prisoner recently released from the Cuban detention centre, said a number of Arab prisoners had still not spoken to their investigators after three years to protest at the desecration of the Koran by guards.

So let's all rally round and burn Newsweek because it was obviously only them reporting this "error".