Appearing Soon in a Memory Hole near You
Mood:  don't ask
Now Playing: "Maps" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs
In an obvious cave-in to pressure applied by Chimpy McHalliburton's Rethuglikkkan $torm Troopers, Newsweek magazine is now reporting that they were wrong about the story from Gitmo that our guys are, among other things, flushing the "Holy Koran" down the toilet in order to offend their Muslim prisoners.

I don't care whether that part of the story is true or not. It's not like our personnel would be doing this to rare or valuable copies of the damned thing ---with old annotations or some special provenance--- so what the hell? These things just get replaced.

But the important part of this story of anti-war propaganda is that it's actually caused rioting in the streets of Afghanistan ---leaving more than a dozen dead. That's bad PR ---and something we don't need.

Oh, and can you feel the heat from the usually mild-mannered Glenn Reynolds? He writes of Newsweek:

Two points: (1) If they had wrongly reported the race of a criminal and produced a lynching, they'd feel much worse -- which is why they generally don't report such things, a degree of sensitivity they don't extend to reporting on, you know, minor topics like wars; and (2) If a blogger had made a similar mistake, with similar consequences, we'd be hearing about Big Media's superior fact-checking and layers of editors.

People died, and U.S. military and diplomatic efforts were damaged, because -- let's be clear here -- Newsweek was too anxious to get out a story that would make the Bush Administration and the military look bad.

Yes, but they do regret the violence their lie has occasioned.