Thanks alot Newsweek...  ::)

remember Dan Rather....Sources  are the focus here...
The first NEWSWEEK writing said source(S) The apology mentions A SOURCE...

What ARE they hiding?

Other reporters are claiming England had PLANNED the Iraq war before Bush entered the picture....we'll see if anyone gets into THIS story..

Hey about that George Lucas taking jabs at Bush in the new STAR WARS???
What a CROCK...Bush wasn't even involved in the leading of the country at the time of the inception so Lucas can play mind games all he wants...His force won't get any of my money! 

What a CROCK...Bush wasn't even involved in the leading of the country at the time of the inception so Lucas can play mind games all he wants... 


Inception? of what?

Hey about that George Lucas taking jabs at Bush in the new STAR WARS???
What a CROCK...Bush wasn't even involved in the leading of the country at the time of the inception so Lucas can play mind games all he wants...His force won't get any of my money! 


oooh... I'm sure he'll notice that too!!

To me, this is just another witch-hunt.

And no, I do not mean anything about a Government cover-up.  I simply look at the number of retractions that the press has had to give in the last year or so, and it is rather obvious.  Tailwind, Memogate, the Houston Bond Scandal, HMS Splendid, Jayson Blair and the NY Times, Jack Kelly and USA Today, and now this.  It is not hard to see that there is a pattern here of shoddy and even decietful reporting going on.

The difference though is that this time, people died.  A lot of people scream and rant when somebody dies in Iraq and blames Bush for those deaths.  Yet why are people willing to still blame Bush in this case, and not the people who wrote what basically amounts to lies?  Trust me, the press in this country does not casually print retractions.  In fact, if the administration tried to pressure them to quash a story, do you think they would quietly stand back and do it, even though their reputation would suffer?  I don't think so.

I applaud Newsweek for "comming clean".  Unlike some papers like the NY Times, they quickly realized they made a mistake and tried to correct it.  I am sure that in comming years, we will still be talking about Memogate and the attempts to make it look real, while this will fade into the background.  People forgive honest mistakes more then they do the "cover your ass" mentality.

I hope this makes other hournalists pause and think about the consequences before they rush out and report a story.  I mean that they should double and tripple check stories, not that they should quash them because of fear of the actions they cause.  Journalism can have huge affects on this world, and that responsibility should be taken seriously.  Reporters should not "rush" out a story just to make headlines.

IF they lied and people died from it, I think it's wrong...nothing else.

IF they lied and people died from it, I think it's wrong...nothing else.


Does that go for Dubya too? He lied that Iraq had WMD and many people died because of that.





Cat

To me, this is just another witch-hunt.

agreed


And no, I do not mean anything about a Government cover-up.  I simply look at the number of retractions that the press has had to give in the last year or so, and it is rather obvious.  Tailwind, Memogate, the Houston Bond Scandal, HMS Splendid, Jayson Blair and the NY Times, Jack Kelly and USA Today, and now this.  It is not hard to see that there is a pattern here of shoddy and even decietful reporting going on.


disagree.  There are FIFTEEN other sources that have reported the same fact.  Newsweek had a source that recanted their story, and they reported that.  Hardly a retraction.


The difference though is that this time, people died.  A lot of people scream and rant when somebody dies in Iraq and blames Bush for those deaths.  Yet why are people willing to still blame Bush in this case, and not the people who wrote what basically amounts to lies?  Trust me, the press in this country does not casually print retractions.  In fact, if the administration tried to pressure them to quash a story, do you think they would quietly stand back and do it, even though their reputation would suffer?  I don't think so.


The administration you refer to shapes it's reports to fit it's mission by ignoring data that contridicts it's goals.  Bush is directly responsible for those deaths.  He's also responsible for the deaths the wingnuts want to blame on Newsweek.  If the detainees at this base were properly monitored, abuses such as this wouldn't occur. If the base wasn't beyond the reach of American law, we wouldn't be having this debate at all.  You can cry that this abuse didn't happen, but it's pretty clear that it did, no matter what Limbaugh, Coulter, O'Reilly and the rest of the rabid right want to claim.


I applaud Newsweek for "comming clean".  Unlike some papers like the NY Times, they quickly realized they made a mistake and tried to correct it.  I am sure that in comming years, we will still be talking about Memogate and the attempts to make it look real, while this will fade into the background.  People forgive honest mistakes more then they do the "cover your butt" mentality.


had they actually made a mistake, I'd appliuad it too.  Imagine if Drudge or Newsmax apologized for the lies they have directly spread for the past years, that list would fill hundreds of pages.


I hope this makes other hournalists pause and think about the consequences before they rush out and report a story.  I mean that they should double and tripple check stories, not that they should quash them because of fear of the actions they cause.  Journalism can have huge affects on this world, and that responsibility should be taken seriously.  Reporters should not "rush" out a story just to make headlines.


Really? We should hold the government to the same high standards.  How many sources did we have for the "yellowcake" story that Bush ranted about in his state of the union speech when banging the drum for the war?  There was only one source the Monica Lewinsky story when Drudge ran it, and I don't hear any complaints for that. 

This whole story is an attempt by the Bush administration to tar and feather the few sources of information that they can't control. Sad to watch the destruction of the media in action.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/5/17/104253/423

Here's a great summary of some of the sources to date.  Caution, it's a leftwing blog, so it has been researched further than a Stephen Glass "New Republic" piece would be.

The source is no longer sure that he read accounts of Qur'anic desecration in the Southern Command report. But he still remembers reading about Qur'anic desecration. It would be interesting to know whether the source read those `investigative reports' in other official government documents, or in the variety of newspapers and magazines that have reported on this issue since 2002.

It's not hard to find these accounts. A simple Google search will do.


But I took the extra step today of contacting an attorney that is representing over ten Guantánamo detainees. He works for a prominent, private, Washington, D.C. law firm, and has visited Guantánamo four times since late last year. All of his clients share the same nationality and, partly for this reason, all of his clients have been kept in complete isolation from each other.

...

He replied, "Yes, two detainees told me completely independently that they had witnessed a Qur'an being thrown in the toilet. Another told me that he had witnessed a Qur'an being stomped on. And another told me he had witnessed a Qur'an being urinated on."

and another source...

Ms. Foster's group is co-counsel for many of the Guantánamo detainees, and they have a `bird's eye view' of the allegations coming out of Gitmo. I asked her if she had heard of reports of Qur'anic desecration. She replied, "It's one of a panoply of abuses that have occurred at Guantánamo, reported over and over again, both to counsel and by releasees."



The riots didn't occur because Newsweek reported something that's been talked about for over a year. They happened because it was rumoured they would appear in a goverment report.  If the allegations were in that unreleased report, I bet they wouldn't be now when/if it was released. 

So we have a case where the right can rant on and on about something no one can verify one way or another now. 

Since Lucas began with the STAR WARS story..he had little jabs intended at Nixon-who was pres. then so now it's aimed at G. Bush..you'll hear it in Yoda's speech..'when you have fear..then you have..etc..'
Which can translate to the Iraq war.

Also to come more in War of The Worlds by Spielberg... 

Yes Newsweek needs to apologize if they can't answer to the public who said what...reiterating: Dan Rather errs and The NY paper writer who MADE UP STORIES.
Very irresponsible and without the apology, it hurts journalists of honor.

Since Lucas began with the STAR WARS story..he had little jabs intended at Nixon-who was pres. then so now it's aimed at G. Bush..you'll hear it in Yoda's speech..'when you have fear..then you have..etc..'
Which can translate to the Iraq war.


interesting, but Yoda's been talking about fear and anger ever since he appeared in Empire Strikes Back.


Yes Newsweek needs to apologize if they can't answer to the public who said what...reiterating: Dan Rather errs and The NY paper writer who MADE UP STORIES.
Very irresponsible and without the apology, it hurts journalists of honor.


but Newsweek did answer.  They said their source knows they read it in a government report, but maybe not the one that they claimed.  Hence the correction. 

There's evidence it happened, whether the government acknowledges it, well that's where the real story is.

His force won't get any of my money! 


Same here!

Pretty interesting. I never realized that Lucas had Nixon and Vietnam and the like in mind while writing the original Trilogy.

He didn't really say it was a direct commentary on that, but that part of the inspiration for the story was the direction international politics had taken on during that era.

If a published story with the impact of this one (15 childish moslems dead), and it is found to be unsbstantiated, it should be retracted and an apology issued.

On the other hand, what kind of people are these moslems who throw tantrums anyway?  I mean, if somebody desecrated my catholic prayer book, sure I'd be PO'd, but I woild not rant and rave and throw tantrums and blow myself up.  Something very strange about these moslems who do these things.  Methinks they have nothing but time on their hands.

If a published story with the impact of this one (15 childish moslems dead), and it is found to be unsbstantiated, it should be retracted and an apology issued.

On the other hand, what kind of people are these moslems who throw tantrums anyway?  I mean, if somebody desecrated my catholic prayer book, sure I'd be PO'd, but I woild not rant and rave and throw tantrums and blow myself up.  Something very strange about these moslems who do these things.  Methinks they have nothing but time on their hands.

This is a point too many people are afraid to make.  I object to binding up one's values in material symbols.  If one Koran is toileted are the words of the Koran negated?  And yet the Muslims have imbued every copy of the text with the holiness of the prophet himself.  That seems like a mistake to me.  I would treat a Koran with respect as I would treat a Bible or a Vedic text with respect.  I believe, regardless of my convictions, these texts are inherently worthy of respect.  But when you declare the text so holy its physical destruction drives you to a murderous rage, you have defeated the purpose of spirituality. 
What is a bigger affront to God, a Koran down the can or seventeen of your Muslim brethren dead?

I do think some of this rage among Muslims in Afghanistan might be a projection of pent up rage about other issues afflicting that benighted country.  I can understand that.  It doesn't justify deadly rioting, but I understand the rage.

Now, Christians, before we get all supercilious about Muslims and their symbols, let's not forget the wrath inspired by--oh, for instance--Andres Serrano's P*ss Christ among your more pious fellows! 

http://www.usc.edu/schools/annenberg/asc/projects/comm544/library/images/502tn.jpg
Serrano, that jerk!  Let 'im git 'is own wall, and 'is own Cray-awn!*
Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC)

What about that painting of the Virgin Mary using a certain medium--elephant dung?  Granted nobody ended up dead in the aftermath, but the temper of America is not as volatile as that of Afghanistan, not yet anyway.

For a most mordant critique of religious symbol-worship, see Monty Python's The Life of Brian.  "Fellow the Sandal!"
"No! Cast off the sandals, and follow the gourd!"

As for George Lucas, I fell out of love with Lucasfilms and the Star Wars series when I saw the Phantom Menace in 1999.  Not only was the story crummy, the Lucas magic had turned into mediocre special effects in this age of The Matrix.  If Lucas had released six more, completed the original cycle of nine films, and put out the final sequel in 1999, the series would have stood a fighting chance.  Now it's a joke after two decades, and with the final film being a PREQUEL, we already know how the entire story ends, so it sucks!  I'll go see the latest Adam Sandler instead.  If Lucas is ranking on Bush, God bless him, but it doesn't mean his movies are worth seeing!
:P

And as for Newsweek, Chucky made the points I was going to make, so I don't have to make 'em!  Besides, Sean Hannity sez the only reason these prisoners had a Koran (for the guards to shove in the cr*pper) is because the U.S. soldiers gave it to them!  So they really should thank us, shouldn't they!
;)

*Unca Jesse used P.Christ as a grudge symbol in his attacks upon federal funding of the arts.

interesting, but Yoda's been talking about fear and anger ever since he appeared in Empire Strikes Back.


Exactly!  And that particular speech was made in "The Phantom Menace", which was released in 1999 when Clinton was President.  I guess that some people think that Lucas used The Force to look into the future, and wrote an "Anti-Bush" well before he was President or 9/11.

Lucas himself has said many times that the only politics that he wrote about was the fear of totalitarianism.  Even the politics of the Empire changed sharply from the beginning of the series until the current time.  In the original story, the Emperor was a puppet for the Military, which by the end changed till he was in total control.

But the current movies in many ways trace Hitler, showing how somebody can go from being Democratically ellected, then becomming a dictator through "the will of the people".

But the current movies in many ways trace Hitler, showing how somebody can go from being Democratically ellected, then becomming a dictator through "the will of the people".


hmm... no wonder the Republicans think he's talking about Bush.

>grin< sorry, couldn't resist the cheap shot.

This was an editorial in our local paper today.



Diverting attention

May 18, 2005

Newsweek is not the issue.

Newsweek has issued a retraction in connection with a story it wrote claiming that an internal Pentagon report found that U.S. personnel at the Guantanamo prison had flushed pages of the Quran down the toilet. The story is said to have set off riots in Afghanistan and unrest elsewhere.

The unfortunate effect of Newsweek's error is to divert attention from the important story: American abuse of Muslims and disrespect for their religion.

Officials in the government are only too happy to change the story from one of torture and cruelty to one of journalistic malfeasance. Thus, the misstatements of a journalist's source loom larger in importance than the kind of abusive behavior occurring at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and elsewhere. The same thing happened during the election campaign to the CBS story on President Bush's record of service in the National Guard: Phony charges from a dubious source obscured actual issues about Bush's service.

The administration has used Newsweek's mistake to issue the usual denunciation of the press's use of unnamed sources, even though it routinely uses unnamed sources to spin the news.

Newsweek's mistake was a rather ordinary one involving a source who was wrong. A source, previously reliable, told Newsweek that an internal Pentagon report had described desecration of the Quran. This was not a particularly surprising revelation, given the other ways that U.S. interrogators have sought to exploit their captives' religious sensitivities, including sexual taunting by American service women. In any event, the Pentagon cleared the report before it was published and did not object till after rioting erupted in Afghanistan.

Now it turns out the internal report did not make the claim about the Quran that the source had described. The result: a journalistic error about what a Pentagon report did or did not say. But what about the real issue � desecration of the Quran? A number of other sources, including former captives and a former Army interrogator, say it happened. Numerous sources, including the International Red Cross have described the torture that has occurred at Guantanamo. But Newsweek's mistake has had the effect of shifting responsibility away from President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for creating an atmosphere that led Americans to believe they could abuse prisoners with impunity.

The riots in Afghanistan are a reminder that, no matter what Newsweek did or did not say, there is only so long the Afghan people are going to put up with our abusive treatment of prisoners. Abused prisoners are eventually released (except those who are murdered), and they return to their villages with lurid tales of impious, disrespectful behavior that play into the hands of religious extremists. As word gets around, people forget that we helped drive out the Taliban, for which they are grateful, and remember the way we have abused their countrymen.

The United States cannot act with impunity forever. There is a limit to how long we can remain in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Uzbekistan. This is not about Newsweek. This is about arrogant and foolish behavior by Americans who have only made the struggle for peace and democracy all the more difficult to achieve.


http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050518/NEWS/505180305/1018/OPINION




Cat

Yes, an excellant editorial.  Not to sound conspiratorial, but could Newsweek have been set up?

Diverting attention?
Maybe..but no one died from the mistake of the female soldier in the pic with the prison on a leash.

Diverting attention?
Maybe..but no one died from the mistake of the female soldier in the pic with the prison on a leash.


Whos to say? The incident might have motivated more people to join the insurgency.

More to join...THEY ALREADY HATE US!

If a picture set them off to fight us..there had to be somehate festering as it was..but to kill over a Holy book to them shows you their thinking....
Catholics here have stated how they would just go on the other way if someone took a Bible and flushed it..Something is up with these people who are soooo fanatical...

More to join...THEY ALREADY HATE US!

If a picture set them off to fight us..there had to be somehate festering as it was..but to kill over a Holy book to them shows you their thinking....
Catholics here have stated how they would just go on the other way if someone took a Bible and flushed it..Something is up with these people who are soooo fanatical...




Religion is all they have, really.

Yes, an excellant editorial.  Not to sound conspiratorial, but could Newsweek have been set up?


An excellent editorial? Not really.
Here's a good one (Editorial/Op-Ed)...


NYTimes.com
Op-Ed Columnist
Outrage and Silence

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: May 18, 2005

It is hard not to notice two contrasting stories that have run side by side during the past week. One is the story about the violent protests in the Muslim world triggered by a report in Newsweek (which the magazine has now retracted) that U.S. interrogators at Guantánamo Bay desecrated a Koran by throwing it into a toilet. In Afghanistan alone, at least 16 people were killed and more than 100 wounded in anti-American rioting that has been linked to that report. I certainly hope that Newsweek story is incorrect, because it would be outrageous if U.S. interrogators behaved that way.

That said, though, in the same newspapers one can read the latest reports from Iraq, where Baathist and jihadist suicide bombers have killed 400 Iraqi Muslims in the past month - most of them Shiite and Kurdish civilians shopping in markets, walking in funerals, going to mosques or volunteering to join the police.

Yet these mass murders - this desecration and dismemberment of real Muslims by other Muslims - have not prompted a single protest march anywhere in the Muslim world. And I have not read of a single fatwa issued by any Muslim cleric outside Iraq condemning these indiscriminate mass murders of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds by these jihadist suicide bombers, many of whom, according to a Washington Post report, are coming from Saudi Arabia.

The Muslim world's silence about the real desecration of Iraqis, coupled with its outrage over the alleged desecration of a Koran, highlights what we are up against in trying to stabilize Iraq - as well as the only workable strategy going forward.

The challenge we face in Iraq is so steep precisely because the power shift the U.S. and its allies are trying to engineer there is so profound - in both religious and political terms.

Religiously, if you want to know how the Sunni Arab world views a Shiite's being elected leader of Iraq, for the first time ever, think about how whites in Alabama would have felt about a black governor's being installed there in 1920. Some Sunnis do not think Shiites are authentic Muslims, and are indifferent to their brutalization.

At the same time, politically speaking, some Arab regimes prefer to see the pot boiling in Iraq so the democratization process can never spread to their countries. That's why their official newspapers rarely describe the murders of civilians in Iraq as a massacre or acts of terror. Such crimes are usually sanitized as "resistance" to occupation.

Salama Na'mat, the Washington bureau chief for the London-based Arabic daily Al Hayat, wrote the other day: "What is the responsibility of the regimes and the official and semiofficial media in the countries bordering Iraq in legitimizing the operations that murder Iraqis? ... Isn't their goal to thwart the newborn democracy in Iraq so that it won't spread in the region?" (Translation by Memri.)

In identifying the problem, though, Mr. Na'mat also identifies the solution. If you want to stop a wave of suicide bombings, the likes of which we are seeing in Iraq, it takes a village. I am a big believer that the greatest restraint on human behavior is not laws and police, but culture and religious authority. It is what the community, what the village, deems shameful. That is what restrains people. So how do we get the Sunni Arab village to delegitimize suicide bombers?

Inside Iraq, obviously, credible Sunnis have to be brought into the political process and constitution-drafting, as long as they do not have blood on their hands from Saddam's days. And outside Iraq, the Bush team needs to be forcefully demanding that Saudi Arabia and other key Arab allies use their media, government and religious systems to denounce and delegitimize the despicable murder of Muslims by Muslims in Iraq.

If the Arab world, its media and its spiritual leaders, came out and forcefully and repeatedly condemned those who mount these suicide attacks, and if credible Sunnis were given their fair share in the Iraqi government, I am certain a lot of this suicide bombing would stop, as happened with the Palestinians. Iraqi Sunnis would pass on the intelligence needed to prevent these attacks, and they would deny the suicide bombers the safe houses they need to succeed.

That is the only way it stops, because we don't know who is who. It takes the village - and right now the Sunni Arab village needs to be pressured and induced to restrain those among them who are engaging in these suicidal murders of innocents.

The best way to honor the Koran is to live by the values of mercy and compassion that it propagates.

http://www.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/thomaslfriedman/index.html