The Newsweek Riots

While going to a koshary restaurant over the weekend with an Egyptian friend, the Newsweek story about flushing a Qur'an came up. "If you want to know why we all hate America and Americans," my friend told me, "this one story explains everything."

Indeed. This one small story tells everything you need to know about the politics of the Muslim world, America, and the War on Terror. Nobody looks good - the murdering Muslim Afghani rioters, the regional public opinion that doesn't condemn their reactions, the obscene torturers in Guantanamo, the craven Pentagon bureaucrats who control them, the American pundits and bloggers who rave about Newsweek while ignoring the Guantanamo abuse, and finally the spineless Newsweek editors themselves.

Let me start with Afghanistan, where there were 17 deaths as a result of the angry riots. This is deplorable and barbaric - much more deplorable and barbaric than flushing a Qur'an. The direct moral responsibility for these deaths lies with the murderers themselves. To so otherwise - that any who inform Afghans or Muslims about Qur'anic desecration must expect murderous riots - is racist nonsense, denying whole peoples rationality and morality.

Let's move back a little to the story that prompted these riots. Newsweek reported on May 9th that DoD investigators have confirmed that some particular instances of abuse occured at Guantanamo, including leading a detainee around with a collar and dog leash, and flushing a Qur'an down the toilet. Here's the key part of that story:

Investigators probing interrogation abuses at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay have confirmed some infractions alleged in internal FBI e-mails that surfaced late last year. Among the previously unreported cases, sources tell NEWSWEEK: interrogators, in an attempt to rattle suspects, flushed a Qur'an down a toilet and led a detainee around with a collar and dog leash.

After the riots, many pundits and bloggers started to blame Newsweek for its irresponsibility in publishing the story. The Pentagon, of course, denied the report, claiming that these allegations - made by Guantanamo detainees - had need been satisfactorily confirmed. The blogosphere, as well as many print columnists, went crazy; Slate has a nice summary of the general tenor of the reaction. It's not pretty.

Giving in to the uproar rather quickly, Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker issed this statement on Sunday before retracting the article completely yesterday. Here's a taste of the statement:

Our original source later said he couldn't be certain about reading of the alleged Qur'an incident in the report we cited, and said it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts. Top administration officials have promised to continue looking into the charges, and so will we.

Now was that original story completely off? Only in the sense that the Pentagon source no longer stood by his story that an official report was to be published finding those allegations credible. But it's still possible that such a report was in the wings, and the minute Afghanistan blew up the relevent section was immediately excised. Even if the report wasn't in the wings, it's not particularly important. Whether that abuse makes it into a Pentagon report or not may be important for those of us interested in honesty and a reforming Pentagon, but says very little about whether or not the abuse - and the Qur'an flushing - actually occured.

As Susan Hu has found, this story was already out in the public sphere, in the Philadelphia Inquirer in January, and in a Human Rights Watch report on Guantanamo detention conditions. The source for these reports were Guantanamo detainees themselves. Are they trustworthy? Here's Andrew Sullivan in response:

we cannot know for sure - yet - if these allegations are real, or propaganda. But we do know for certain that other "techniques" designed to use religion as an interrogative tool have been deployed, including the smearing of fake menstrual blood on detainees' faces. This religious warfare was also deployed at Abu Ghraib. I wrote in my review of the official records of the torture:

One Muslim inmate was allegedly forced to eat pork, had liquor forced down his throat and told to thank Jesus that he was alive. He recounted in broken English: "They stripped me naked, they asked me, 'Do you pray to Allah?' I said, 'Yes.' They said 'Fuck you' and 'Fuck him.'" Later, this inmate recounts: ''Someone else asked me, 'Do you believe in anything?' I said to him, 'I believe in Allah.' So he said, 'But I believe in torture and I will torture you.'"

The man cited, Charles Graner, was found guilty of detainee abuse. So we have evidence of the abuse of Islam by U.S. interrogators; we have four citations of the Koran incident; Newsweek has not retracted the story; and more will no doubt come out. One thing worth reiterating: the notion that this obscenity simply couldn't have happened in the U.S. military (something I believed two years ago) is no longer an operative assumption. We know that incidents like this have happened. And even now, the administration is not denying it outright.

After all that we've learned about Abu Ghraib and the Bush administration's care-free relationship with torture, I think we - at the very least - owe the benefit of the doubt to the detainees' allegations.

So let's say that this Qur'an flushing actually occured. Newsweek's original article - or the main point about the abuse occuring - becomes absolutely essential. To the extent that the US is a democracy with a free press that acts as a check to prevent (illegal) abuses of power in the government, articles like the seem to be the definition of what the press ought to be doing. If this article has done grave damage to the American PR campaign in the Muslim world, then the blame lies entirely at the Pentagon (or perhaps even the White House). As the Pentagon has shown, it's enormously reluctant to do anything about the torture issue, and is reluctant to even give up its prerogative to torture in the future. So the press ought to be throwing every violation of the Geneva conventions into the headlines - because this may be the only thing that may convince this administration to act morally (and legally). Even if these detainee allegations are false, because administration policy has relied so much on torture, it changes nothing. It's completely responsible for the press to give the detainees the benefit of the doubt and air the allegations publicly.

But Newsweek caved, and the rabid blogosphere is still insisting that it repent even more. My Egyptian friend is right. This situation is all you need to know to understand the current situation of the war on terror - and nobody comes out looking good.