Word: guantã
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...Newsweek magazine published an article with claims that U.S. interrogators at Guant??namo Bay had flushed a Koran down the toilet to unnerve Muslim detainees. Riots and violence ensued; the deaths of 17 people were attributed to the publication of such an incendiary claim as the destruction of the holy book. A week later, Newsweek issued a retraction of the article stating that “Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Koran abuse at Guant??namo Bay.” Such negligence on Newsweek?...
...story unfolded. The inflammatory reference to the alleged toilet incident amounted to only a few words in an 11-sentence item in Newsweek's front-of-the-book "Periscope" section, in the issue that hit newsstands May 2. For more than two years, other news outlets had reported Guant??namo detainees' claims that U.S. guards had thrown the Koran to the floor and even tossed it into a latrine. But the Newsweek item went further by asserting that a Pentagon report would substantiate the alleged toilet incident as well as another in which a prisoner was led around...
...probe was under way and phoned "a longtime reliable source, a senior U.S. government official who was knowledgeable about the matter." The source told him that the report would contain the Koran incident. Looking for confirmation, Isikoff approached a spokesman for the Pentagon's Southern Command, which operates the Guant??namo prison. The spokesman declined to comment. John Barry, the magazine's national-security correspondent, took the unusual step of providing a draft of the item to a "senior Defense official." According to Newsweek's account, the official challenged one part of the article, which did not involve the Koran...
Whatever the spark, after the disturbances broke out, the Pentagon reviewed details of its Guant??namo probe and concluded that investigators were not even examining the toilet-flushing allegation. Defense Department spokesman Lawrence Di Rita called Newsweek on May 13 to say the story was wrong. Four days later, he told reporters there were no credible allegations of Koran abuse to look into...
...even if it were true. Robert Zelnick, chairman of Boston University's journalism department and a former Pentagon correspondent for ABC News, draws a distinction between Abu Ghraib, where there was a systematic pattern of prisoner abuse, and the allegation of an isolated act of Koran desecration at Guant??namo, however deplorable. "In this case," he says, "I think the potential for mischief was so great and the journalistic value of the information so small that I would have made a decision not to go with...