Word: koran
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...Newsweek magazine published an article with claims that U.S. interrogators at Guantánamo 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 Guantánamo Bay.” Such negligence on Newsweek?...
Anti-American sentiment has been increasing in scope and intensity for years, exacerbated by the current administration’s cowboy diplomacy, zealous hegemony, and use of questionable interrogation tactics as we wage the “war on terror”—tactics that make the Koran desecration seem unremarkable. The Newsweek article might have been a catalyst for the recent flare of riots and violence. But for the Bush administration to use this mainstream magazine as a scapegoat for our shameful image abroad is ridiculous...
...Pentagon reviewed details of its Guantnamo 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...
...magazine compounded its mistakes when reporter John Barry took the story to the Pentagon for confirmation and assumed he had it when the Pentagon did not raise objections to the Koran allegation. The Defense Department's silence, however, didn't amount to confirmation. "There's a famous scene in the book All the President's Men," says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism and former chief congressional correspondent for Newsweek. "Bernstein says to a source, 'If I count to whatever, and you stay on the phone and don't say anything, then I know the story...
...have published it, 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 Guantnamo, 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...