Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Newsweek clearly erred in its sourcing, but the White House is committing a far greater sin in ignoring the overwhelming evidence of U.S. abuse of Muslim detainees.
May 19, 2005 | Michael Isikoff has become the
In a blurred sequence of events, the incident traveled rapidly from Afghanistan to Washington, from tragedy to farce. Relying on a single anonymous source, Newsweek had before publication dutifully passed the story along for comment by the Pentagon, which declined to refute it. Appearing as a squib in the Periscope section, it was seized upon by demagogues who exploited it to arouse bands of Islamists and other opponents of Hamid Karzai's government in Afghanistan.
After riots in which 17 people died, the Bush administration pointed the finger of blame at Newsweek. The White House began a series of demands on the magazine, as though it were a rogue state. First, Newsweek had to accept responsibility for its error. Newsweek's single source had suddenly decided he was not a profile in courage and informed the reporter that he was no longer certain of his previous assertion. Second, Newsweek had to apologize profusely and retract the article. Third, it had to explain to the world that it alone was responsible for the anger of the Muslim world and that official U.S. policy dictated respect for the Quran.
In short, Newsweek must do everything that the Bush administration has refused to do about its torture policy. It is Newsweek that is at fault for the utter absence of U.S. prestige and credibility; it is Newsweek's editors that must engage in rituals of accountability at the behest of an administration that disdains accountability for itself; it is Newsweek that must demonstrate transparency about its internal procedures; it is Newsweek that must use its resources to explain to a wary world that the Bush administration has clean hands.
The White House and Pentagon press secretaries have competed in their excoriations of Newsweek, topped with flourishes of double talk and self-contradiction. At the White House, Scott McClellan insisted that Newsweek could rectify itself only "by talking about the way they got this wrong and pointing out what the policies and practices of the United States military are when it comes to the handling of the holy Quran." Asked if he was giving orders to the magazine, the deadpan McClellan replied: "It's not my position to get into telling people what they can and cannot report."
At the Pentagon, Lawrence Di Rita batted down allegations by numerous detainees at Guantánamo that the Quran had been defiled. Instead, he declared, "It's possible detainees themselves have done with pages of the Quran -- and I don't want to overstate that either because it's based on log entries that have to be corroborated." Thus in denying the allegations and shifting blame to the detainees, Di Rita helpfully pointed out that his claim was no more "corroborated" than theirs.
While the administration faults Newsweek for relying on a flawed source, it has refused to respond specifically to the reports of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee and the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction that in constructing its case for going to war in Iraq it was reliant on disinformation from bogus Iraqi émigré sources, especially the agent dubbed Curveball, who was exposed as a duplicitous alcoholic. While demanding a retraction and an apology from Newsweek, nobody in the administration has ever bothered to respond to former Secretary of State Colin Powell's statement that he was "deceived" in delivering his Feb. 5, 2003, speech before the United Nations Security Council about WMD in Iraq, which had 26 major errors. By this standard, perhaps the president should reward Isikoff with the Medal of Freedom that he has bestowed on the architects of "catastrophic success."
In fact, the allegation published by Newsweek has been made by many former detainees at Guantánamo. The New York Times rightly reports that these have not been "authenticated." The reason they have not is that they cannot be. In the absence of the due process of law, denied to detainees in the floating netherworld of this gulag, absolutely nothing can be "authenticated."
The controversy about the desecrated Quran touches on merely one technique. Many other methods of torture have been "authenticated," including the persistent abuse of Islam. Newsweek's item appeared soon after a new book providing just such a firsthand account was published, "Inside the Wire" by Erik Saar, a former Army interpreter at Guantánamo, with Viveca Novak, a correspondent for Time magazine. He witnessed provocatively attired female interrogators rubbing their genitals in front of chained detainees and then smearing them with red liquid they were told was menstrual blood. Saar also documents how detainees were forced to view pornographic videos and magazines. "Had someone come to me before I left for Gitmo and told me we would use women to sexually torment detainees to try to sever their relationships with God, I probably would have thought that sounded fine," he writes. "But I hated myself when I walked out of that room ... We lost the high road ... There wasn't enough hot water in all of Cuba to make me feel clean."
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