Word: newsweekly
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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?...
...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...
Before the Newsweek article went to print, the writers ran it past a Pentagon official who made no mention of the toilet incident because, according to the magazine, it “seemed shocking but not incredible.” Given Guántanamo’s notoriety, as well as the Bush administration’s infamous approval of highly questionable interrogation tactics—which have led to some of the most disgraceful incidents of torture during the war—it seems reasonable that the official did not question the story. The claims about Koran desecration...
...always a feasible one. Sources cannot always be expected to go on the record, particularly when they come forward with the most damning or unpopular information. And it is not as though the media is unaccountable for what it prints—as in this case, Newsweek has come under scrutiny and has now set the record straight. The irony, of course, that the Bush administration—who took us to war based on the most anonymous and absent of evidence—is lamenting the lack of transparency in the magazine’s sources is quite astonishing...
There are some who argue that because of the story's potential to harm the U.S. abroad, Newsweek should not 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...