Congratulations. :dubious:
Congratulations to the Pentagon and White House spokes folks.
Congratulations select Guantanamo guards and interrogators.
Congratulations Newsweek lawyers and execs for towering cowardice and staggering lack of convictions.
Congratulations all who serve to undermine and destroy the reputation of honorable and ethical military personel.
Thanks for your unwaveringly creative leadership in a race for new lows.
:mad:… witless fucktards. :rolleyes:
WTF? No wonder our reputation is shit. We can’t control our media, we can’t control out military, and we can’t count on jack-fucking-shit our government releases in memos. I’m truly embarassed by our government’s behavior over the last 5 years.
Sam
As far as I know the WH never outright denied it.
I thought they were pissed because NW brought attention to it.
From article:
C’mon, after “Iraq has huge stockpiles of WMDs,” did anyone honestly believe that “reports of Koran desecration are demonstrably false”?
I don’t see what’s new here. This is the testimony of one of the detainees. Hasn’t it been clear all along that one or more detainees have made the claim about flushing the Koran? Am I missing something? I guess it all comes down to what a “credible witness” is.
Well, to be fair, the newly released memo just records a detainee’s allegation of the Qur’an-flushing.
So far, we still haven’t had any US official state outright and unretracted, from his/her own experience or from reliable evidence, that there actually was such an incident. I guess that still permits official deniability.
However, given that these allegations have been reported from as far back as 2002, and that the New York Times reported a senior Gitmo officer actually having to apologize to the whole camp for Qur’an abuse (though not necessarily flushing), the flat denial “it isn’t true, it never happened” is looking less and less plausible.
At this point, if somebody does know that it happened, ISTM we’d be better off just frankly admitting it and having the President apologize for it. At this point, everybody believes it anyway, and unless it actually is a false allegation, I don’t see any percentage in continuing to refuse to confirm it.
(In preview: John beat me to it, at least partly.)
Koran flushing aside, I find this pretty disturbing…
Yeah, I saw a TV interview last week with former Gitmo interpreter Eric Saar, who described seeing an incident where a female interrogator did a similar thing. (In that case, Saar said, she smeared the prisoner’s face with red ink but told him it was menstrual blood. He freaked so bad he actually pulled out of one of his restraining chains. Ouch.)
I suppose as a committed feminist I ought to feel proud that women are apparently proving themselves just as capable of abusing prisoners as men are, but I confess I just find it deeply, deeply oogy.
And the humiliation-via-sexual-contact thing is just siiiiiiiiiick. I know there are probably some American guys who would be inspired by such stories to denounce themselves to the CIA in order to get a shot at being interrogated at Gitmo—and worse, there are probably some porn videos out there already capitalizing on that theme—but this isn’t some fraternity prank. I fear that this stuff and its outcome is not going to be amusing for any of us, in the long run.
This also pisses me off - Reuters stating the link between the riots and the Newsweek article as a given or proven thing:
Ugh.
And I have lost respect for Newsweek for caving into and saying that they got the story wrong–whatever happened to sticking by your journalists (if the story is indeed true?).
Perhaps the mainstream media and TPTB are in a cabal together…I am not a parnoid person, but truly the past few years have shaken my faith in the press.
I never had much faith in politicians. 
Uhhh, it wasn’t? What do you suppose started the riots, then?
Once more, with feeling:
The only reason for perpetuating the “Newsweek incited riots” meme is to play up the “evil liberal media conspiracy” bogeyman myth. A story that’s very popular with certain right-wing nutjobs, but without any basis in reality.
Hamid Karzai has also said the riots didn’t start the article. As someone in GD said, how many people in Afghanistan do you think read fucking Newsweek?
In addition to that, he said the article didn’t start the riots. :smack:
You exaggerate and over-simplify.
One general believes that the riots were caused mostly by other factors. The catalyst, however, appeared to be the Newsweek story.
According to Newsweek:
" Mobs shouting “Protect our Holy Book!” burned down government buildings and ransacked the offices of relief organizations in several Afghan provinces. The violence cost at least 15 lives, injured scores of people…
The spark was apparently lit at a press conference held on Friday, May 6, by Imran Khan, a Pakistani cricket legend and strident critic of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. Brandishing a copy of that week’s NEWSWEEK (dated May 9), Khan read a report that U.S. interrogators at Guantánamo prison had placed the Qur’an on toilet seats and even flushed one. “This is what the U.S. is doing,” exclaimed Khan, “desecrating the Qur’an.” His remarks, as well as the outraged comments of Muslim clerics and Pakistani government officials, were picked up on local radio and played throughout neighboring Afghanistan. Radical Islamic foes of the U.S.-friendly regime of Hamid Karzai quickly exploited local discontent with a poor economy and the continued presence of U.S. forces, and riots began breaking out last week."
Not to put too fine a point on it, but we discussed this in this thread, which rjung participated in.
Considering that reports of US interrogators desecrating the Koran have been floating around the Middle East since mid-2002 (from various sources, up to and including the Red Cross), it’s hard to swallow the idea of the Newsweek article being any sort of surprise revelation or shocking catalyst.
But did they? From what I’ve read, they said they were wrong for running an articles with allegations from a single uncorroberated (and rather shaky) source. They were wrong for not living up to basic journalistic standards and getting corroberation first. They themselves never said they got the facts wrong.
rjung: […] it’s hard to swallow the idea of the Newsweek article being any sort of surprise revelation or shocking catalyst.
As I said in some related thread, though, once I read that Pak cricket god/politician Imran Khan had talked about the article in a press conference, I could easily believe that that gave the story a lot of attention it wouldn’t otherwise have received.
Khan is quite a popular guy. It would be kind of like if Paris Hilton, Oprah, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jerry Rice, and Barry Bonds* all suddenly started talking about the Downing Street memo: it would get a lot of buzz among many people who might otherwise not notice.
Now, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Afghani opposition had actually orchestrated preparations for the protests in advance, and just picked the Newsweek article as a convenient spark to the tinder. But I think it would still be fair to describe the article itself as the, or at least a, “catalyst” (although I don’t think that that implies that the article is responsible for the riots, or that there’s anything wrong with printing such a story if it’s suitably backed up by the facts).
*Did I pick reasonable-sounding sports superstars there? I’m really clueless about pro sports.
That depends on what sports you had in mind. 