Investigators probing interrogation abuses at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay have confirmed some infractions alleged in internal FBI e-mails that surfaced late last year. Among the previously unreported cases, sources tell NEWSWEEK: interrogators, in an attempt to rattle suspects, flushed a Qur'an down a toilet and led a detainee around with a collar and dog leash. (Michael Isikoff & John Barry, "Gitmo: SouthCom showdown," Newsweek, 5/9/05)

Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Qur'an abuse at Guantanamo Bay. (Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker, 5/16/05)

Our original source later said he couldn't be certain about reading of the alleged Qur'an incident in the report we cited, and said it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts. (Whitaker, 5/23/05)

People are dead, and that‘s unfortunate. And people need to be very careful about what they say. (Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, 5/16/05)

We at PoliAnna are not in the business of defending the so-called "mainstream media." We are media critics, and we know from the Clinton-Gore years through the run-up to the Iraq war to today that the Washington press corps is facing a crisis in reporting, as it is overrun with government propaganda and imbued with what Josh Marshall has described as a right-leaning dinner-party centrism, an apolitical careerism that goes against the public interest in truth.

Newsweek made a mistake: instead of "sources," there was just one source who told them that the Qur'an-flushing allegation would appear in a report on Guantanamo abuses. Apparently it won't be in that report. Instead of asking the Pentagon to confirm that particular allegation, they ran the whole story (all of two paragraphs long) by a senior official, who didn't select that part as questionable.

As journalism prof Jay Rosen wrote, the error was one of sourcing -- too many anonymous sources reporting on other anonymous sources and so on. It's a serious problem among the corporate media, made worse by a certain administration's excessively secretive nature.

But please note: the desecration of the Qu'ran by interrogators is not a new allegation. The Red Cross reported the abuse to the Pentagon many times in 2002 and 2003, and the organization believes the military took action, because such allegations didn't resurface. These charges, like many others, were reported before.

A Nexis search reveals multiple mentions of similar allegations, including a March 14, 2004 report in the London Observer that "copies of the Koran would be trampled on by soldiers and, on one occasion, thrown into a toilet bucket"; an August 5, 2004 report in the London Independent that "guards allegedly threw prisoners' Korans into toilets;" and January 2005 reports in the Denver Post and Hartford Courant that some prisoners "were forced to watch copies of the Koran being flushed down toilets." Given that none of these previous reports sparked protest, much less riots, it's unrealistic to expect the magazine's editors to have seen the protests coming -- after all, they thought the detail was insignificant enough to be confined to one sentence in a short report tucked away in the front of the magazine. (CJR Daily, 5/16/05)

The newsworthiness of Newsweek's story was that the charge was coming from a Pentagon report, rather than interviews with detainees.

Apparently that nuance -- an anonymous source said the previously-known allegation would likely appear in the future document -- was the straw that broke the camel's back, and Newsweek has been squarely blamed for anti-American riots in Afghanistan and elsewhere which left 15 dead. Strongarming by the White House and the Pentagon led to Newsweek's retraction of their apparent error, leaving most Americans with the distinct impression that the Qu'ran-flushing incident never occurred.

Which leaves our valuable right-wing bloviators in the enviable position of repeating what they always say about "liberal media."

MYTH: Liberal Newsweek printed a false allegation in order to undermine the war on terror

The more consequential question here, it seems to us, is why Newsweek was so ready to believe the story was true. The allegation after all repudiated explicit U.S. and Army policy to treat Muslim detainees with religious respect, including time to pray, honoring dietary preferences and access to the Koran. Yet the magazine readily printed a story suggesting that what our enemies claim about Guantanamo is essentially true. (Editorial, "Journalists and the military," Wall Street Journal, 5/17/05)

The truth is that some news agencies can't wait to get dirt on the military so they can embarrass the Bush administration. Ideological reporting is rampant in this country and it is getting people killed. (Bill O'Reilly, O'Reilly Factor, 5/17/05)

The media collectively want to believe the worst about the military, and in light of Abu Ghraib, they have panted after every possible prison abuse. (Rich Lowry, "The Newsweek riots," National Review, 5/17/05)

This is the National Guard story all over again, the exact same M.O. of the CBS National Guard story. It‘s disgraceful. They never should have done this, but they‘re so blinded by their hostility to the United States‘ position in Iraq, they simply run with these because they simply believe they have to be true. (Brent Bozell, Media Research Center, Scarborough Country, 5/16/05)

The liberal media don't care any more about the Koran than they do about the Bible. It's simply a sleazy way for them to inflame any group that is demonstrably anti-Bush and against current U.S. foreign policy, thus mirroring their own attitudes. Is this not "aiding and comforting the enemy"? Doesn't anyone question why thousands of Muslims would take to the streets, anyway, only to vent their anger about a book being destroyed, instead of marching against human beings being mistreated at a prison? (Barrett Kalellis, "Newsweek wallows in the same mire as CBS," NewsMax, 5/16/05)

REALITY

It's incredible, really, the level of denial that conservatives have managed to maintain about U.S. torture tactics. The Red Cross, Human Rights Watch, and other groups have been trying to call attention to inhumane treatment in our military prisons for years, but, with the exception of the made-for-TV photographic evidence from Abu Ghraib, humanitarians have largely been ignored.

The Red Cross is hardly a political organization, and they are credible in their claim that allegations by detainees of Qu'ran-abuse dropped off after a couple years of them lobbying the Pentagon. That suggests two things: first, it was happening, and second, it is worthwhile to look into this stuff.

If allegations of abuse or torture are true, should the media report it? Absolutely. While Americans are largely sheltered from the ugliness of war, our newfound friends in the Muslim world are not. Many of the prisoners who complain to the Red Cross will be released, and will no doubt complain in their home countries. Rumors will spread with or without Newsweek. But it is only American media who can pressure the military to come clean about what has happened and to ensure any abuse doesn't happen again -- publicly, so that eyes around the world can see our good intentions.

But Newsweek screwed up. Why did they do it? Did they have some kind of "liberal bias," or bias against the military? Hardly -- their sourcing blunder is a showcase for modern media incompetence, not ideologically-motivated mendacity.

As for charges of liberal bias, notice the senior author of Newsweek's two paragraphs: Michael Isikoff, the reporter who obsessed over Paula Jones and later broke the Lewinsky story. His dogged persecution of Clinton earned him the praise of conservatives back then, so why should we believe them when they say today he represents some kind of liberal-media boogieman?

What's truly sad about this whole affair is that Newsweek's poor reporting skills have made it the perfect smokescreen. Instead of taking another look at American torture -- a blight on our reputation that may outlive the war itself -- we are instead treated to an object lesson in media compliance from Scott McClellan and Donald Rumsfeld. The fact that these charges are probably true is lost, thanks to Newsweek's lousy, insiderish reporting and an effective witch-hunt from the commentariat on the right.

As Brian Montopoli puts it:

Bozell is all too right when he says that the Newsweek dustup is the Memogate scandal all over again -- but not in the way he imagines. Once again, the media have allowed the White House to parlay a journalistic sin into an opportunity to shift attention away from what ought to be central public issues. (CJR Daily, 5/18/05)

In fact, at the very same time that this scandal over a two-paragraph throwaway spot is dominating the media, we are all but ignoring a much, much deeper report on abuse, torture, and homicide at one of our prisons in Afghanistan.

Tim Golden, writing in the New York Times, reports: "Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him."

The story of Mr. Dilawar's brutal death at the Bagram Collection Point - and that of another detainee, Habibullah, who died there six days earlier in December 2002 - emerge from a nearly 2,000-page confidential file of the Army's criminal investigation into the case, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.

Like a narrative counterpart to the digital images from Abu Ghraib, the Bagram file depicts young, poorly trained soldiers in repeated incidents of abuse. The harsh treatment, which has resulted in criminal charges against seven soldiers, went well beyond the two deaths. In some instances, testimony shows, it was directed or carried out by interrogators to extract information. In others, it was punishment meted out by military police guards. Sometimes, the torment seems to have been driven by little more than boredom or cruelty, or both.

The second part of Golden's report, printed Sunday, examined the trouble the Pentagon has investigating itself without outside motivation.

While the recommendation to close the case was ultimately rejected by senior officials, documents show that the inquiry was at a virtual standstill when an article in The New York Times on March 4, 2003, reported that at least one of the prisoner's deaths had been ruled a homicide, contradicting the military's earlier assertions that both had died of natural causes. Activity in the case quickly resumed.

And from the same article:

"I would acknowledge that a lot of these investigations appear to have taken excessively long," the Defense Department's chief spokesman, Larry Di Rita, said in an interview on Friday. "There's no other way to describe an investigation that takes two years. People are being held accountable, but it's taking too long." Mr. Di Rita said the Pentagon was examining ways to speed up such investigations, "because justice delayed is justice denied."

We would hope that that spirit of justice is carried when nobody is looking -- but frankly, we know better.