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NEW YORK - Newsweek magazine, under fire for publishing a story that led to deadly protests in Afghanistan, said Monday it was retracting its report that a military probe had found evidence of desecration of the Quran by U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay.

Earlier Monday, Bush administration officials had brushed off an apology that Newsweek's editor Mark Whitaker had made in an editor's note and criticized the magazine's handling of the story.

Protests broke out across much of the Muslim world last week after Newsweek reported that U.S. investigators found evidence that interrogators had flushed a copy of Muslim's holy book down a toilet in an attempt to rattle detainees. The violence left about 15 dead and scores injured in Afghanistan.

"It's appalling that this story got out there," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said as she traveled home from Iraq.

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Muslims in Afghanistan were skeptical yesterday about the retraction. “We will not be deceived by this,” Islamic cleric Mulla Sadullah Abu Aman said in the northern Afghan province of Badakhshan. “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 on Sunday vowed to call for jihad against the United States in three days unless it handed over the military interrogators reported to have desecrated the Qur'an.

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Originally posted by Renae

*sniffs the air*

Something smells.

Smells kinda like the CBS/Dan Rather fake memo set up.

Wouldn't surprise me if Karl Rove cooked the whole thing up and fed Newsweek a flimsy story. Gotta undermine the credibility of any media source that doesn't march lock-step with the right-wing propaganda machine.

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LONDON - Several Britons who had been held at US military prisons in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba alleged Monday that they had seen their US guards desecrate the Koran.

Former prisoners Moazzam Begg, Feroz Abbasi and Jamal al-Harith alleged on the Islamic human rights website Cageprisoners.com that the Muslim holy book had been profaned.

Their statements appeared after clashes erupted in Muslim countries over a Newsweek magazine report that US interrogators at Guantanamo had defiled copies of the Koran by leaving them in toilet cubicles and flushing one down a toilet.

Newsweek, while acknowledging parts of its May 2 article could be wrong, has not issued a retraction.

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In its follow-up story, Newsweek quotes Col. Brad Blackner, Gitmo stooge, who says, "If you read the Al Qaeda training manual, they are trained to make allegations against the infidels." The Rude Pundit's actually read the Al-Qaeda training manual (readily available for your persual at the Smoking Gun), and it actually says nothing about making allegations against infidels. It does say that Allah disapproves of rumors. Oh, and the other thing about that? Many previously published and aired reports that talk about the desecration of the Koran are based on interviews with released Gitmo detainees. In other words, by definition they were not Al-Qaeda operatives. Unless, of course, now the military is saying Camp X-Ray is an Al-Qaeda training facility.

To wit (some of these and others are posted at Raw Story):
From ABC Radio in Australia, on August 5, 2004, said that David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib, released from Gitmo, claim that "guards would throw detainees' Korans down the toilet and shave them, to try to get them to abandon their Muslim faith." It was denied by Australia's Secretary of the Navy.

From ABC News, John Berman reporting on August 3, 2004 quoted a British citizen released from Gitmo: "Asif Iqbal says guards would 'kick the Koran, throw it in the toilet, and generally disrespect it.'" Indeed, this allegation was made in an October 2004 lawsuit filed by the four Britons wrongly detained by the U.S.

In March 2003, the Houston Chronicle reported on 18 released Afghan men who claimed that "American soldiers insulted Islam by sitting on the Koran or dumping their sacred text into a toilet." The Washington Post that same week had this quote: "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. 'It was a very bad situation for us,' said Ehsannullah, who comes from the home region of the Taliban leader, Mohammad Omar. 'We cried so much and shouted, "Please do not do that to the Holy Koran."'"

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Oh, and the other thing about that? Many previously published and aired reports that talk about the desecration of the Koran are based on interviews with released Gitmo detainees. In other words, by definition they were not Al-Qaeda operatives. Unless, of course, now the military is saying Camp X-Ray is an Al-Qaeda training facility.

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"It should be understood that governing the people's affairs is one of the greatest religious obligations. In fact, without it, religion and world [affairs] could not be established."

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that would not be done except through force and lording. Likewise, the rest of what he [God] obligated [us with] would not be accomplished except by force and lordship, be it Jihad [holy war], justice, pilgrimage, assembly, holidays, support of the oppressed, or the establishment of boundaries. That is why it has been said, "the sultan is Allah's shadow on earth.

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Originally posted by beskeptigal

BP, I am impressed you would have read the "Al Queda manual". (I don't think Queda is spelled with a 'u' though.) So where did you get this manual and how were you sure it was real?

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