IT'S 'NEWSWEEK'S' FAULT!!!
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Fuckin' Newsweek...
This is amazing. All that riot shit in Afghanistan last week, the one were some people were killed, thousands protested saying shit like, "Death to America!" and where there was much burning of flags wasn't America's fault but Newsweeks. Yup, apparently there was a small part of an article about all the bullshit the U.S. is doing down in Guantanamo where it mentions that they may have desicrated the Quran. Allegedly flushed a copy down the toilet...Now after Abu Graib that really doesn't suprise me.

Now the source is backpedaling saying that he couldn't remember if that tidbit was in the military report he saw or somewhere else. SO, it likely DID happen but because the source is questionable therefore it MIGHT NOT have happened (though it does appear that it did). So, once again, rather than face any form of justice, accountability or anything like that the Pentagon as well as the White House have officially blamed Newsweek for the freaking riots in Afghanistan. Not our unwanted, opium field burning presence in Afghanistan, not the murder and mayhem and chaos we have brought with our little 'war on terrah.' Oh NO...It's Newsweek...

I have never heard anything more ridiculous since...Oh wait this whole last four years...Check this out, I picked this out of Drudge/MyWay (emphasis added):

"Newsweek magazine said on Sunday it erred in a May 9 report that U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, and apologized to the victims of deadly Muslim protests sparked by the article.

Editor Mark Whitaker said the magazine inaccurately reported that U.S. military investigators had confirmed that personnel at the detention facility in Cuba had flushed the Muslim holy book down the toilet.

The report 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. In the past week it was condemned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and by the Arab League.

On Sunday, Afghan Muslim clerics threatened to call for a holy war against the United States.

"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," Whitaker wrote in the magazine's latest issue, due to appear on U.S. newsstands on Monday.

The weekly news magazine said in its May 23 edition that the information had come from a "knowledgeable government source" who told Newsweek that a military report on abuse at Guantanamo Bay said interrogators flushed at least one copy of the Koran down a toilet in a bid to make detainees talk.

But Newsweek said the source later told the magazine he could not be certain he had seen an account of the Koran incident in the military report and that it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts.

Whitaker told Reuters that Newsweek did not know if the reported toilet incident involving the Koran ever occurred. "As to whether anything like this happened, we just don't know," he said in an interview. "We're not saying it absolutely happened but we can't say that it absolutely didn't happen either."

So, the Afghan people get bent out of shape and have themselves a protest because they hate America and it's Newsweeks fault? Does anyone really believe that we never did anything like that down there in Guantanamo? Why is anyone believing this shit at all? Are any Muslims buying it? Also from Drudge/MyWay:

"Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan were skeptical Monday about an apparent retraction by Newsweek magazine of a report that U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran and said U.S. pressure was behind the climb-down.

"We will not be deceived by this," Islamic cleric Mullah Sadullah Abu Aman told Reuters in the northern Afghan province of Badakhshan, referring to the magazine's retraction.

"This is a decision by America to save itself. It comes because of American pressure. Even an ordinary illiterate peasant understands this and won't accept it."

How surprising...There is like five or six differnet quotes from different parts of the Muslim world (including the declaration of yet another holy war against us) and none of them are buying this horse shit, not even a little bit. Except President Karzai, of course. However, those people are brown and not American...What does our White House think?
(Reuters)

"The White House said on Monday that a Newsweek report based on an anonymous source had damaged the U.S. image overseas by alleging that U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran at Guantanamo Bay."

"It's puzzling that while Newsweek now acknowledges that they got the facts wrong, they refused to retract the story," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. "I think there's a certain journalistic standard that should be met and in this instance it was not."

This is absolutely AMAZING! So, I just love that the fact that we have a bunch of enemy combatants trapped indefinitely in Guantanamo Bay with no rights to speak of, we have stuck outr collecticve and vaguely oppressive nose up the Muslim world's ass for the last three or four years and yet this protest is somehow the fault of one, single article in fucking Newsweek?!

This is such a wanton buck passing that it makes me want to puke. If I were in the White House Press core and I had to sit and listen to McClellan spew this totall bullshit I would start vomiting all the way across the room and all over that fucking guy's face. It is really sad that anyone in this country takes this horse shit seriously. I first heard about this while flipping channels on CNN yesterday evening and I still can't believe it. Depsite the fact that I am fully aware that this Administration has been bullshitting me from day one but this is a new low. Passing the buck on to a single magazine article. Clearly Newsweek must've done something to deserve this shit from the Administration. This is highly offensive and disgusting and stupid.

Here's some other bloggers on this, first from "Blogenlust:"

Manufactured Outrage
While it's certainly a problem that Newsweek appears to have rushed the Koran story, it seems to me that the real problem, the problem much harder to fix and face up to, is the fact that the story was so believable in the first place.

It doesn't take a big stretch of the imagination to conclude that an Administration which would sanction this, would also condone desecrating the Koran. And while it might be easier for certain persons on the Right to blame Newsweek for "ruining" America's image in the Muslim world, it's absolutely ridiculous to pretend as though our image wasn't already ruined because of previously proven abuses of power and a demonstrated insensitivity towards Muslims.

I'd be more sympathetic of those complaining about Newsweek's "the press' Abu Ghraib" if these same people were as equally outraged and disgusted over being mislead into the Iraq War and the abuses of Abu Ghraib, both of which, in my opinion, have done far more long-term damage to our image in the world than an article in Newsweek.

Unfortunately, that's not the case, and it's actually quite the opposite. Those who most ardently defended the deceptions which led us into war and our torture policy are now the loudest detractors of Newsweek. That tells me they're more concerned about covering their own ass, and deflecting their culpability on to someone else, than really dealing with the fact that our image in the Middle East, and really the world, is much worse than it was four years ago. And for these people to suggest that the press is solely at fault for this, while projecting an air of sanctimonius patriotism, is downright disgusting.

UPDATE: Scott McClellan really said this:

McClellan complained that the story was "based on a single anonymous source who could not personally substantiate the allegation that was made." "The report has had serious consequences," he said. "People have lost their lives. The image of the United States abroad has been damaged."

Here is one from the other point of view:
(Patrick Ruffini)

"They Don't Learn, Do They?
Newsweek has now retracted its anonymously-sourced story about U.S. personnel at Guantanamo Bay desecrating the Koran. File this one under "Actions Have Consequences": 15 people died because of this story. I wonder if the Peshawar daily will bother to run a blurb on their corrections page? You don't need to answer that question. The damage that's been done is irreversible.

What kind of subculture generates these kinds of mistakes -- mistakes that conveniently tend always to fall in one direction? The same news media that was willing to believe this about U.S. troops was also willing to believe that they were deliberately targeting journalists. Had these reporters spent even one day in their formative years around the active-duty military, would we be seeing the slanted coverage we do today?

Apparently, this subculture is content to live and breed in a handful of closed-minded Eastern company towns, never interacting with the military they must cover so closely."

Unbelievable, then there is this from RAW STORY:

Newsweek report on Quran matches many earlier accounts
RAW STORY

Contrary to White House assertions, the allegations of religious desecration at Guantanamo published by Newsweek May 6 are common among ex-prisoners and have been widely reported outside the United States, RAW STORY has learned.
Advertisement
Several former detainees at the Guantanamo and Bagram airbase prisons have reported instances of their handlers sitting or standing on the Quran, throwing or kicking it in toilets, and urinating on it.

Where the Newsweek report likely erred was in saying that the U.S. was slated to acknowledge desecrating the Quran in internal investigations, and in relying on a single anonymous source to make grave allegations. But reports of desecration are manifold.

One such incident?during which the Koran allegedly was thrown in a pile and stepped on?prompted a hunger strike among Guantanamo detainees in Mar. 2002, which led to an apology. The New York Times interviewed former detainee Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi May 1, who said the protest ended with a senior officer delivering an apology to the entire camp.

"A former interrogator at Guantanamo, in an interview with the Times, confirmed the accounts of the hunger strikes, including the public expression of regret over the treatment of the Korans," Times reporters Neil A. Lewis and Eric Schmitt wrote in "Inquiry Finds Abuses at Guantanamo Bay."

The hunger strike and apology story was also confirmed by another former detainee, Shafiq Rasul, interviewed by the UK Guardian in 2003 (James Meek, "The people the law forgot," Guardian, Dec. 3, 2003) It was also confirmed by former prisoner Jamal al-Harith in an interview with the Daily Mirror (Rosa Prince and Gary Jones, "My Hell in Camp X-ray World Exclusive," Daily Mirror, Mar. 12, 2004).

The toilet incident was reported in the Washington Post in a 2003 interview with a former detainee from Afghanistan:

"Ehsannullah, 29, said American soldiers who initially questioned him in Kandahar before shipping him to Guantanamo hit him and taunted him by dumping the Koran in a toilet. ?It was a very bad situation for us,? said Ehsannullah, who comes from the home region of the Taliban leader, Mohammad Omar. ?We cried so much and shouted, Please do not do that to the Holy Koran.? (Marc Kaufman and April Witt, "Out of Legal Limbo, Some Tell of Mistreatment," Washington Post, Mar. 26, 2003.)

Also citing the toilet incident is testimony by Asif Iqbal, a former Guatanamo detainee who was released to British custody in Mar. 2004 and subsequently freed without charge:

"The behaviour of the guards towards our religious practices as well as the Koran was also, in my view, designed to cause us as much distress as possible. They would kick the Koran, throw it into the toilet and generally disrespect it." (Center for Constitution Rights, Detention in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, (Aug. 4, 2004, deposition available here.)

The claim that US troops at Bagram airbase prison in Afghanistan urinated on the Koran was made by former detainee Mohamed Mazouz, a Moroccan, as reported in the Moroccan newspaper, La Gazette du Maroc. (Abdelhak Najib, "Les Americains pissaient sur le Coran et abusaient de nous sexuellement", Apr. 11, 2005). An English translation is available on the Cage Prisoners web site (which describes itself as a "non-sectarian Islamic human rights website"): http://www.cageprisoners.com/print.php?id=6862

Tarek Derghoul, another of the British detainees, similarly cites instances of Koran desecration in an interview with Cageprisoners.com, available at: http://www.cageprisoners.com/articles.php?id=1611

Desecration of the Koran was also mentioned by former Guantanamo detainee Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost and reported by the BBC in early May 2005. (Haroon Rashid, "Ex-inmates share Guantanamo ordeal," May 2, 2005).

UUUUUUUUUUUU

SSSSSSSSSSSS

AAAAAAAAAAAA