Does anyone know what the deal is with this story Newsweek reported about the Koran being placed on toilets and, in one instance, being flushed down the toilet by American interrogators in Guatanomo Bay? This story has really exploded in the Middle East and there is no proof or corroboration that it actually occurred. Of course, the entire Arab world believes it because a.) it's against the US and b.) if it involves the Koran...it must have happened and c.) it's an American news organization who printed it. So, now you have protests everywhere and 300 muslim clerics have threated Holy War in Afghanistan all over this single news story that the Arab world has taken and run with. They want the interrogators turned over to the Arabs for prosecution. Well...we all know that if the stories are true...then this will never happen that we turn over Americans to them. One thing I believe is Newsweek is a piece of sh*t. I think they should be extinguished from American culture. They have a printed a news story that may not even be true. They knew full well that the reaction this would provoke would cost lives and start a new situation after the prison scandals. They are obviously not on America's side. They should join up with Al Jazeera. Is this what one calls responsible journalism...printing a news story to evoke reactions that kill more people? I also think that Arab reaction to this against what they preach Islam is all about. What happened to tolerance and peace? The response is nothing short of extreme and plays into the hands of Al Qaeda. One thing for sure...if Al Qaeda needed another boost in recruitment...then they just got it from Newsweek. Regardless of whether this is true or not, then the damage has been done. It is accepted as the truth in the Arab world already. What do you think about Newsweek? the story? the reaction?
ummm, there's about 177 replies on this topic about 5 threads down http://bbs2.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?threadid=96136
Oh...maybe if the title was more appropriate...one would have seen it. I did scan the thread titles. Edit: I see...it was thrown in an existing thread on interrogations. Hmm. So, ignore my thread or choose to reply to my specific thread so I can see reactions just to this rather than wading through all that crap in the other thread. The choice is yours.
Yeah I agree that it's very irresponsible (criminal, in fact) that Newsweek publish a story that cannot be corroborated, which could lead to people's deaths. Absolutely disgusting. yeah the arab reaction is pretty predictable. Their culture over there must be 400-500 years behind the rest of the world. Threating "holy war"? What is this, the medieval times? Those clowns over there have really driven islam's reputation in the western world down the tubes with their violence and rabble rousing antics.
They have a printed a news story that may not even be true. They knew full well that the reaction this would provoke would cost lives and start a new situation after the prison scandals. They are obviously not on America's side. Are you suggesting that if Newsweek had tripled sourced this or similar article and knew that it is was true to their best of their ability that they should weigh the consequences before publishing, which could mean that they just on the story?
Like Bill Maher said, Halliburton must make a pretty strong toilet. He said he couldn't even flush "The Watchtower" down his toilet.
Newsweek says may have erred in Koran report http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...nm/20050515/ts_nm/religion_afghan_newsweek_dc 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. ADVERTISEMENT 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. The May 9 report quoted unnamed sources as saying that military investigators probing abuse at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, found that interrogators had placed copies of the Koran on toilets and "in at least one case, flushed a holy book down the toilet." Newsweek said a Pentagon spokesman told the magazine late last week that the story was wrong and that the military has found no credible evidence to support separate allegations of Koran desecration made by released detainees. The U.S. military opened an investigation into the charges while top U.S. officials urged Muslims to resist calls for violence, stating disrespect for the holy book would not be tolerated. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is what I'm talking about. Irresponsible journalism...people. It's too late. The damage is done. Congrats Newsweek! You just got a bunch of Muslims in an uproar and damaged the war on terror. Good going.
Newsweek is sorry but the GWB WH may not be ... Torture's Dirty Secret: It Works By Naomi Klein, The Nation. Posted May 14, 2005. Torture's true purpose is to terrorize. It may not work as an interrogation tool, but as an intimidation tactic, its success is clear. I recently caught a glimpse of the effects of torture in action at an event honoring Maher Arar. The Syrian-born Canadian is the world's most famous victim of "rendition," the process by which US officials outsource torture to foreign countries. Arar was switching planes in New York when U.S. interrogators detained him and "rendered" him to Syria, where he was held for ten months in a cell slightly larger than a grave and taken out periodically for beatings. Arar was being honored for his courage by the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations, a mainstream advocacy organization. The audience gave him a heartfelt standing ovation, but there was fear mixed in with the celebration. Many of the prominent community leaders kept their distance from Arar, responding to him only tentatively. Some speakers were unable even to mention the honored guest by name, as if he had something they could catch. And perhaps they were right: The tenuous "evidence"--later discredited--that landed Arar in a rat-infested cell was guilt by association. And if that could happen to Arar, a successful software engineer and family man, who is safe? In a rare public speech, Arar addressed this fear directly. He told the audience that an independent commissioner has been trying to gather evidence of law-enforcement officials breaking the rules when investigating Muslim Canadians. The commissioner has heard dozens of stories of threats, harassment and inappropriate home visits. But, Arar said, "not a single person made a public complaint. Fear prevented them from doing so." Fear of being the next Maher Arar. The fear is even thicker among Muslims in the United States, where the Patriot Act gives police the power to seize the records of any mosque, school, library or community group on mere suspicion of terrorist links. When this intense surveillance is paired with the ever-present threat of torture, the message is clear: You are being watched, your neighbor may be a spy, the government can find out anything about you. If you misstep, you could disappear onto a plane bound for Syria, or into "the deep dark hole that is Guantánamo Bay," to borrow a phrase from Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. But this fear has to be finely calibrated. The people being intimidated need to know enough to be afraid but not so much that they demand justice. This helps explain why the Defense Department will release certain kinds of seemingly incriminating information about Guantánamo--pictures of men in cages, for instance--at the same time that it acts to suppress photographs on a par with what escaped from Abu Ghraib. And it might also explain why the Pentagon approved the new book by a former military translator, including the passages about prisoners being sexually humiliated, but prevented him from writing about the widespread use of attack dogs. This strategic leaking of information, combined with official denials, induces a state of mind that Argentines describe as "knowing/not knowing," a vestige of their "dirty war." "Obviously, intelligence agents have an incentive to hide the use of unlawful methods," says the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer. "On the other hand, when they use rendition and torture as a threat, it's undeniable that they benefit, in some sense, from the fact that people know that intelligence agents are willing to act unlawfully. They benefit from the fact that people understand the threat and believe it to be credible." And the threats have been received. In an affidavit filed with an ACLU court challenge to Section 215 of the Patriot Act, Nazih Hassan, president of the Muslim Community Association of Ann Arbor, Mich., describes this new climate. Membership and attendance are down, donations are way down, board members have resigned--Hassan says his members fear doing anything that could get their names on lists. One member testified anonymously that he has "stopped speaking out on political and social issues" because he doesn't want to draw attention to himself. This is torture's true purpose: to terrorize--not only the people in Guantánamo's cages and Syria's isolation cells but also, and more important, the broader community that hears about these abuses. Torture is a machine designed to break the will to resist--the individual prisoner's will and the collective will. This is not a controversial claim. In 2001 the US NGO Physicians for Human Rights published a manual on treating torture survivors that noted: "perpetrators often attempt to justify their acts of torture and ill treatment by the need to gather information. Such conceptualizations obscure the purpose of torture....The aim of torture is to dehumanize the victim, break his/her will, and at the same time, set horrific examples for those who come in contact with the victim. In this way, torture can break or damage the will and coherence of entire communities." Yet despite this body of knowledge, torture continues to be debated in the United States as if it were merely a morally questionable way to extract information, not an instrument of state terror. But there's a problem: No one claims that torture is an effective interrogation tool--least of all the people who practice it. Torture "doesn't work. There are better ways to deal with captives," CIA director Porter Goss told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Feb. 16. And a recently declassified memo written by an FBI official in Guantánamo states that extreme coercion produced "nothing more than what FBI got using simple investigative techniques." The army's own interrogation field manual states that force "can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear." And yet the abuses keep on coming--Uzbekistan as the new hot spot for renditions; the "El Salvador model" imported to Iraq. And the only sensible explanation for torture's persistent popularity comes from a most unlikely source. Lynndie England, the fall girl for Abu Ghraib, was asked during her botched trial why she and her colleagues had forced naked prisoners into a human pyramid. "As a way to control them," she replied. Exactly. As an interrogation tool, torture is a bust. But when it comes to social control, nothing works quite like torture.
"Of course, the entire Arab world believes it because a.) it's against the US and b.) if it involves the Koran...it must have happened and c.) it's an American news organization who printed it. They knew full well that the reaction this would provoke would cost lives and start a new situation after the prison scandals." ___________________________ Well said. I agree the Arab reaction is par for the course ~ holy war... Um yeah, right.
So it's not considered terrorism or a violation of the Geneva Convention, but everyone can agree that torture is inhuman? Kind of odd since torture predates both of them. Is it such a valuable tool that no country is willing to give it up with a formalized treaty?
That's exactly what I was saying in the other torture thread that torture isn't effective gathering intelligence but I didn't consider it being used as societal control.
On the main topic of this thread I gotta agree its pretty troubling about major news services getting stories wrong. This is one that should've gone back to a rule the NYTimes started over the Plame affair about not using anonymous sources. At the same time there still seems to be a lot of questionable stuff here and I'm not about to completely say that Newsweek was wrong. They seem to mainly be backtracking on their story based upon the Military's own investigation.
Even so, without independent corroborating sources, it makes Newsweek as credible as another blog or a forum poster.
Here's the link to Newsweek's own story on this issue: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7857407/site/newsweek/ From this article it looks like there are several pieces of evidence suggesting that US guards at Guantanomo and elsewhere might have desecrated Qu'rans. The question is whether such evidence is credible. Newsweek is primarily relying on the military's own report dismissing these reports further reinforced by Newsweek's own anonymous source backing off from his original claim. The military clearly has reason to deny this and the anonymous source didn't outrightly retract his claim just that he wasn't sure about the Southcom report. Newsweek's problem seems to be jumping too quickly on this story and also relying too much on an anonymous source. Those are problems but don't necessarily rule out any of the other evidence regarding desecration of the Qu'ran.
Man, what would americans have thought if cnn, time and foxnews had said that Iraq had wmd's. We might have invaded them, if Americans had believed as such. I'm just thankful we have responsible journalists like them.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...nm/20050516/ts_nm/religion_afghan_pakistan_dc Muslims skeptical over Newsweek back-track on Koran By Sayed Salahuddin 17 minutes ago KABUL (Reuters) - 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. ADVERTISEMENT The report in Newsweek's May 9 issue sparked protests across the Muslim world from Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more than 100 injured, to Pakistan, India, Indonesia and Gaza. Newsweek said Sunday the report might not be true. "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." Aman was the leader of a group of clerics who Sunday vowed to call for a holy war against the United States in three days unless it handed over the military interrogators reported to have desecrated the Koran. That call for a jihad, or holy war, still stood, he said. Newsweek originally said investigators probing abuses at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay found that interrogators "had placed Korans on toilets, and in at least one case flushed a holy book down the toilet." Muslims consider the Koran the literal word of God and treat each book with deep reverence. Last week's bloody anti-American protests across Afghanistan were the worst since U.S. forces invaded in 2001 to oust the Taliban for sheltering Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network. "NOT CERTAIN" Newsweek said Sunday its information had come from a "knowledgeable government source" who told the magazine 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 said he could not be certain he had seen an account of the incident in the military report and that it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts. Afghans were unconvinced. "It's not acceptable now that the magazine says it's made a mistake," said Hafizullah Torab, 42, a writer and journalist in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, where the protests began last Tuesday. "No one will accept it." "Possibly, the American government put pressure on the magazine to issue the retraction to avoid the anger of Muslims," said Sayed Elyas Sedaqat, who heads a cultural group in the city. In neighboring Pakistan, a religious party said it was going ahead with a call for protests on May 27. "Newsweek is back-tracking but it's not just their report," said Ghaffar Aziz, a top official of the Jamaat-e-Islami party. "All innocent people released from U.S. custody have said on the record that there was desecration of the Koran. A spokesman for the Taliban, who denied any involvement in last week's Afghan protests, said the original report was true. "Newsweek is changing its story because of pressure from the U.S. government," Abdul Latif Hakimi said by telephone. In Kabul, a U.S. military spokesman told a news briefing the Newsweek retraction had no bearing on the U.S. position. "Any disrespect to the Koran and any other religion is not tolerated by our culture and our values," said Colonel Jim Yonts. Kabul University student Abdul Khaliq said Newsweek should be held accountable. "If this was a mistake by Newsweek it should be banned," he said. At the weekend, President Hamid Karzai urged Washington to punish anyone found guilty of desecration. The government had no immediate comment on the Newsweek clarification. In Pakistan, where a November edition of Newsweek was banned for publishing a photograph of a woman's body painted with inscriptions from the Koran, the government last week expressed deep concern about the Guantanamo report and said perpetrators of the reported desecration should be held accountable. (Reporting by Qurban Ali Hamzi in BADAKHSHAN, Dawood Wafa in JALALABAD, Saeed Ali Achakzai in SPIN BOLDAK, Tahir Ikram in ISLAMABAD, Robert Birsel in KABUL)
This is ridiculous, this could have been avoided if they checked out their sources and were not in such a hurry to break the next "big story". This puts more lives in danger, both Americans and Muslims. Which side are they on?
