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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...
According to Newsweek's accounts last week of how the article came about, Michael Isikoff, the magazine's best-known investigative reporter, became aware that a Pentagon 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 Guantnamo prison. The spokesman declined to comment. John Barry, the magazine's national-security correspondent, took the unusual step of providing a draft...
Whatever the spark, after the disturbances broke out, the 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...
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...