| WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Newsweek magazine on Sunday said it may have erred in a May 9 report that said U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, and apologized to victims of deadly violence sparked by the article.
The weekly news magazine said in its May 23 edition that the original source of the allegation was not sure where he saw the assertion that at least one copy of the Koran was flushed down a toilet in an attempt to get detainees to talk. "We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst," Editor Mark Whitaker wrote in the magazine's latest issue, due to appear on U.S. newsstands on Monday. The report has sparked angry and violent protests across the Muslim world from Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more than 100 injured, to Pakistan to Indonesia to Gaza. On Sunday, Afghan Muslim clerics threatened to call for a holy war against the United States in three days unless it handed over the interrogators in question. |
How on earth could they have possibly printed something like this without making absolutely sure that it was the truth? How? Of all of the accusations of torture to come out over the past year, this by far had the greatest potential to cause an international incident. I know that most Americans are ignorant when it comes to other religions, but the people at Newsweek? How could they have not known what would come of this?
The worst part is that now that the falsehood is out in the world, its going to be very, VERY difficult to combat it. Given all of the various muslim-centric methods of torture American forces have already been proven to have used, there's quite literally no reason to give us the benefit of the doubt on something like this. None. So good luck trying to convince people that this wasn't true.
Sometimes this whole thing is just so depressing its hard to know what to do. Ugh.
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