Newsweek Apologizes for Report of Koran Insult
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Newsweek apologized yesterday for printing a small item on May 9 about reported desecration of the Koran by American guards at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, an item linked to riots in Pakistan and Afghanistan that led to the deaths of at least 17 people. But the magazine, while acknowledging possible errors in the article, stopped short of retracting it.
The report that a Koran had been flushed down a toilet set off the most virulent, widespread anti-American protests in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban government more than three years ago.
"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," Mark Whitaker, Newsweek's editor, wrote in the issue of the magazine that goes on sale at newsstands today. In an accompanying article, the magazine wrote that its reporters had relied on an American government official, whom it has not identified, who had incomplete knowledge of the situation.
But Mr. Whitaker said in an interview later: "We're not retracting anything. We don't know what the ultimate facts are."
The information at issue is a sentence in a short "Periscope" item on May 9 about a planned United States Southern Command investigation into the abuse of prisoners at the detention facility in Guantánamo. It said that American military investigators had found evidence in an internal report that during the interrogation of detainees, American guards had flushed a Koran down a toilet as a way of trying to provoke the detainees into talking.
Pentagon officials said that no such information was included in the internal report and responded to Newsweek's apology with unusual anger.
In a statement, Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said: "Newsweek hid behind anonymous sources, which by their own admission do not withstand scrutiny. Unfortunately, they cannot retract the damage they have done to this nation or those that were viciously attacked by those false allegations."
The original account, he said, was "demonstrably false" and "was irresponsible and had significant consequences that reverberated throughout Muslim communities around the world."
Lawrence Di Rita, the top spokesman for the Pentagon, called the editor's note "very tepid and qualified." He added later, "They owe us all a lot more accountability than they took."
Newsweek's apology comes as the use of anonymous sources by news organizations around the country is under heightened scrutiny. Reader surveys have said that the use of unnamed officials is one of the biggest reasons their trust in the news media has eroded, and several news organizations, including The New York Times, have been tightening the rules on the use of unnamed officials.
Mr. Whitaker said yesterday that the magazine adhered as often as possible to a policy of identifying its sources of information. But, he said, "there are certain sources who will only talk to us on a not-for-attribution basis, particularly when it involves sensitive information, and who would be worried about retribution or other consequences if their identities were known."
He said that in this case, the magazine had followed careful and proper reporting techniques. The source had been reliable in the past, he said, and was in a position to know about the report he was describing.
In addition, the reporters, Michael Isikoff, a veteran investigative reporter, and John Barry, a national security correspondent, showed a draft of the article to the source and to a senior Pentagon official asking if it was correct. The source corrected one aspect of the article, which focused on the Southern Command's internal report on prisoner abuse.
"But he was silent about the rest of the item," Newsweek reported. "The official had not meant to mislead, but lacked detailed knowledge of the SouthCom report."
In its article published today, the magazine said that although the reference to the Koran was a side element in an article, it was worth printing because it had come from an American government official. Other news organizations had written that American guards had desecrated the Koran, Newsweek said, but those reports were based on testimony from former detainees who had been released from Guantánamo.
The magazine said that because of reports of other abuses of prisoners by guards at Guantánamo, the possibility that a Koran was flushed down the toilet did not seem that far-fetched. But it said that to Muslims, such an act was especially inflammatory.
In its reconstruction of what happened, Newsweek reported that a copy of the original news item was apparently waved at a news conference on May 6 in Pakistan (the articles are dated several days after their actual publication).
By Tuesday, students in the eastern city of Jalalabad in Afghanistan had started anti-American demonstrations, citing the Newsweek article. It is unclear exactly how the students and other protesters learned of the article, though many Afghans get information from radio programs broadcast in local languages by the Voice of America, BBC and Radio Liberty, which often broadcast foreign news reports.
Mr. Di Rita, the Pentagon spokesman, said that the Pentagon began to dig into the allegations in the Newsweek article last Tuesday, when the violence started in Afghanistan. The next day, the military's Southern Command said in a statement that the four-star commander, Gen. Bantz J. Craddock, had ordered an investigation into the report.
At a Pentagon news conference last Thursday, reporters asked Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about the incident. He played down the Newsweek connection to the violence, citing an assessment from the senior commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry of the Army.
General Myers said it was General Eikenberry's view that "the violence that we saw in Jalalabad was not necessarily the result of the allegations about disrespect for the Koran." He said General Eikenberry believed the violence stemmed from the country's reconciliation process.
"He thought it was not at all tied to the article in the magazine," General Myers added.
But some senior Pentagon civilians and military officers in Washington challenged General Eikenberry's assessment and said they saw a direct link between the violence and the Newsweek article.
President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, commenting on the reported desecration after returning home on Saturday from a trip to Europe, said he blamed "enemies of stability" for exploiting student anger about it to foment violence. Afghans in Ghazni, a city south of Kabul that suffered some of the worst violence, have also said that local "troublemakers" may have taken advantage of the anger to shoot at police.
At his news conference, General Myers said that military investigators at Guantánamo were searching their interrogation logs to find the case cited in the Newsweek article.
"They have looked through the logs, the interrogation logs, and they cannot confirm yet that there were ever the case of the toilet incident, except for one case, a log entry, which they still have to confirm, where a detainee was reported by a guard to be ripping pages out of a Koran and putting in the toilet to stop it up as a protest," he said. "But not where the U.S. did it."
This explanation had little or no effect on the demonstrations in Afghanistan, which spread throughout the week, leaving at least 17 civilians dead and many more wounded.
By the end of the week, the military had completed its internal inquiry and was convinced that the allegation as reported by Newsweek never happened and that the article had played a significant role in inciting the violence in Afghanistan, Mr. Di Rita said. He informed Newsweek that its report was wrong.
Newsweek said this prompted Mr. Isikoff to go back to his source to try to confirm the original account.
"But the official, still speaking anonymously, could no longer be sure that these concerns had surfaced in the SouthCom report," Newsweek wrote, suggesting that it had perhaps been in other investigative reports. "Told of what the Newsweek source said, Di Rita exploded," the magazine wrote. " 'How could he be credible now?' " it quoted him as saying.
On CNN yesterday, Stephen J. Hadley, President Bush's national security adviser, said the administration was looking into the report "vigorously," and that if it proved to be true, disciplinary action would be taken against those responsible. He also said that certain radical Islamic elements were using the report as an excuse to incite protests against the government.
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington for this article. |
