Newsweek
My first thought on hearing the news about Newsweek today was, “Oftentimes, the first draft is the most true, because this comes before the powers that be clamp down on it.”
More than likely, the detail from Newsweek — that the Quran has been flushed into the toilet before before the souls locked up in Guantanamo Bay — is true. Not the part that they were reporting — that the government was about to admit it in an official report — a story that strikes me as incredulous — but the part that had been reported and reverberated through the past few years from detainees and (I think, though I may be wrong) interrogators. (Some google searching brings me to this list.
That being said, and maybe this is just a sort of anti-religious bias on my part, but the idea that Interrogators trashed the Quaran into the toilet doesn’t terribly disturb me. Yes, I know we need to avoid the General Boykin worldview, and perceptions of how it plays in what too many want to be a True Religious War. But, you don’t have to get very far to find more disturbing acts Just go to the Newsweek article in question.
But what impresses me about this case is what is coming out of the Bush Administration. We have a flip-flop here!
The Bush Administration had earlier said that this article (more specifically, sentence) had nothing to do with fanning the flames for riots that occurred in Afghanistan and Pakistan, downplaying it in favour of — what, I was never exactly sure, though there is a measure to which they were probably correct. No fuel to the fire, despite the signs that were being waved, such as these signs. It went like this:
“It is the judgment of our commander in Afghanistan, General Eichenberry, that in fact the violence that we saw in Jalalabad was not necessarily the result of the allegations about disrespect for the Koran, but more tied up in the political process and the reconciliation process that President Karzai and his cabinet are conducting in Afghanistan. He thought it was not at all tied to the article in the magazine.” — General Myers
Now they’re all over Newsweek, saying they incited the violence with such a false story… Donald Rumsfeld even chiming in with a “People need to watch what they say and watch what they do.”
Make of it what you must.