Why Newsweek Got It Right: Newsweek's Cowardly Retraction

CounterPunch
May 18, 2005

Why Newsweek Got It Right
Flushing the Koran
By JOSHUA FRANK


Newsweek should have never retracted their story. In fact, Newsweek wasn't the first media outlet to report on the trashing of the holy Islamic text by US military personal at Guantanamo.

Take the August 5, 2004 report by The Independent in London, which reported that ex-Guantanamo detainees "Asif Iqbal, Rhuhel Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul ... said one inmate was threatened after being shown a video in which hooded inmates were forced to sodomise each other. Guards allegedly threw prisoners' Korans into toilets, while others were injected with drugs, it was claimed."

On March 6, 2003, Marc Kaufman and April Witt, in an article entitled "Returning Afghans Talk of Guantanamo; Out of Legal Limbo, Some Tell of Mistreatment" in the Washington Post wrote, "The men, the largest single group of Afghans to be released after months of detainment at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, gave varying accounts of how American forces treated them during interrogation and detainment. Some displayed medical records showing extensive care by American military doctors, while others complained that American soldiers insulted Islam by sitting on the Koran or dumping their sacred text into a toilet to taunt them ... 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."

There is more. The Financial Times on June 28, 2004 also reported, "Former prisoner Airat Vakhitov told ORT about alleged mistreatment while he was at Guantanamo. 'They tore the Koran to pieces in front of us, threw it into the toilet,' Vakhitov said. 'When people were praying, they forced their way in and put their feet on people's heads and beat them.'"

So we shouldn't think much of Newsweek's cowardly retraction. They simply yanked their story after being pressured by the Bush administration. But as usual, it's the White House's tale that is choc full of deception and lies, not Newsweek's.

http://www.counterpunch.org/frank05182005.html

confirmed that abuse was going on (citing a senior official form the Pentagon)--as I understand it -and these other sources (I have read several but not all) --the allegations of abuse of the Koran comes from the detainees themselves.

This a major difference--and I am NOT saying that the detainees should not believe--just that this difference is seldom articulated in the press. Correct me if I am wrong




....Newsweek should have never retracted their story. In fact, Newsweek wasn't the first media outlet to report on the trashing of the holy Islamic text by US military personal at Guantanamo.