Newsweek Retracts
Guantánamo Abuse Story
By Bill Van Auken
17 May 2005
World
Socialist Website
Caving
in to pressure from the Pentagon and the White House, Newsweek magazine
Monday retracted a story on anti-Muslim abuse of detainees held in the
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, detention camp. The article sparked anti-US
upheavals that swept Afghanistan last week claiming at least 17 lives
and spreading to other parts of the Muslim world.
The retraction represents
an act of journalistic cowardice and expresses the ever-closer integration
of every section of the American media into the state apparatus. This
is only the latest in a series of incidents in which major news outlets
have backed away from reporting because of administration pressure.
The offending article
was published in the May 9 issue of Newsweek. It cited an unnamed US
senior official as saying that an upcoming report by the Pentagons
US Southern Command on abuses at Guantánamo included a case in
which interrogators, in an attempt to rattle suspects, flushed
a Koran down a toilet. The account was picked up by Afghan and
Pakistani news outlets, triggering outrage among Muslims.
A Defense Department
spokesman, Brian Whitman, denounced the Newsweek report Sunday as irresponsible
and demonstratively false. He said the magazine hid
behind anonymous sources, which by their own admission do not stand
scrutiny. Unfortunately, they cannot retract the damage that they have
done to this nation or those who were viciously attacked by these false
allegations.
The Pentagons
chief spokesman Lawrence Di Rita went further, declaring, They
printed a story based on an erroneous source or sources that was demonstrably
wrong and that resulted in riots in which people were killed.
The White House
weighed in as well on Monday. The report has had serious consequences,
spokesman Scott McClellan said. People have lost their lives.
The image of the United States abroad has been damaged.
He went on to criticize
the magazine for failing to retract the story and failing to live up
to a certain journalistic standard. This from an administration
whose standards include relentlessly planting false stories
in the media, covertly paying columnists to promote its policies and
passing off government-funded propaganda as news.
Among the most ominous
comments came from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who warned, you
must be careful what you say, as well as what you do, clearly
suggesting that speech opposed to the government may be criminal.
The assault on Newsweek
was encouraged by an apology published in the magazines
May 23 issue. Under intense pressure from the Pentagon, Newsweek felt
compelled to acknowledge that its source for the story, the unnamed
senior official, was no longer sure whether he read of the Koran being
thrown into the toilet in the US Southern Command report or another
official document.
In a revealing glimpse
into the relations between the corporate media and the government, Newsweek
editor Mark Whitaker said the magazine showed the report to Pentagon
officials before it was published and made it clear that it would have
agreed not to publish the item had they so requested.
Whatever the confusion
of the government source about where the Pentagon report had originated,
there was no question as to the articles substantive charges concerning
the treatment of detainees.
Yet Newsweeks
cowardly retreat was answered by a revolting wave of reports on television
news Monday night clearly suggesting that the discrepancy about which
government document had verified the criminal actions at Guantánamo
somehow meant that the actions themselves were a fabrication. It seemed
that those who control the mass media decided that the best way to insulate
themselves from government criticism was to join in the right-wing attacks
on the magazines story.
The report on the
deliberate desecration of the Koranwhich amounted to half of a
sentence in a two-paragraph article published in Newsweeks May
9 issuewas hardly a scoop for the magazine. There have been numerous
news reports going back more than two years of military guards and interrogators
using attacks on Muslim detainees religion as a means of breaking
them.
Dumping the Koran in a toilet
On March 26, 2003,
the Washington Post reported that a group of 18 Afghans released from
Guantánamo the day before complained that American soldiers
insulted Islam by sitting on the Koran or dumping their sacred text
into a toilet to taunt them.
One of the men recounted
US soldiers using the same tactic in a prison in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
It was a very bad situation for us, he said. We cried
so much and shouted, Please do not do that to the holy Koran.
Further confirmation
of these psychological torture methods targeting the detainees
religious beliefs came a year later with the March 2004 release of three
Britons who had been held by the US for more than two years in Afghanistan
and Guantánamo.
The three menShafiq
Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmedissued a joint statement charging
that the guards in Guantánamo routinely attacked their religion.
Asif stated: The
behavior of the guards towards our religious practices as well as the
Koran was also, in my view, designed to cause us as much distress as
possible. They would kick the Koran, throw it into the toilet and generally
disrespect it. It is clear to me that the conditions in our cells and
our general treatment were designed by the officers in charge of the
interrogation process to soften us up.
He also said that
the US military guards interfered with the call to prayer. The
Americans would respond by either silencing the person who was doing
it, or, more frequently, play loud rock music to drown them out. They
would also go into the persons cage and shackle them, leaving
them for four or five hours.
The other released
Britons described similar instances, including guards throwing copies
of the Koran on the floor and kicking them.
Last January, lawyers
for Kuwaiti detainees at Guantánamo said their clients had made
similar complaints. Several of our clients did tell us that the
guards had desecrated the Koran, Kristine Huskey, of the lawyers
told AFP. At least two stated that the Koran had been thrown in
a toilet, another said it had been stepped on and I believe another
said it had been thrown by a guard and/or spat on.
A New York-based
attorney representing 13 Yemeni prisoners at Guantánamo also
recounted systematic religious abuse against his clients.
The attorney, Marc Falkoff, told BBC News, The government is trying
to use religion to humiliate them. He too quoted his clients as
saying that American interrogators threw copies of the Koran on the
ground and stepped on them.
Falkoff has subsequently
told Newsweek that a guards stomping on a Koran promoted a mass
suicide attempt at Guantánamo in August 2003, with 23 detainees
trying to hang or strangle themselves.
Then there is Brahim
Benchecrún, a 26-year-old Moroccan, who gave an interview to
the Spanish daily Diario de León after spending more than two
years in Guantánamo.
He charged that
the anti-Muslim intimidation began when he was first held at the Bagram
prison camp in Afghanistan.
They grabbed
the holy Koran, threw it on the floor, ripped it up, urinated on it
and then threw it into the latrines, he said. They stopped
us from praying, he added. When there was a call to prayer,
the Americans would laugh, sing and dance.
The New York Times
on May 1 of this year published a story headlined Inquiry Finds
Abuses at Guantánamo Bay. The story reported on the militarys
investigation into the abuses, which was prompted by memoranda issued
by FBI agents who questioned the treatment of detainees after visiting
the detention camp in Cuba.
It also quoted a
recently released detainee, who reported that after guards threw copies
of the Koran into a pile and stepped on them, the detainees launched
a hunger strike. The action, according to the Times, ended only after
a senior US officer issued an apology over the camps public address
system. The paper cited a former Guantánamo interrogator who
confirmed the account of the hunger strike and the apology over the
desecration of the Korans.
A tactic devised at the top
The sheer volume
of these reports and the number of different sources reporting similar
incidents leave no doubt that the desecration of the Koran described
by Newsweek took place. Moreover, the fact that precisely the same kind
of abuse was witnessed at different US detention facilities in both
Afghanistan and Cuba makes clear that this was not a matter of unauthorized
brutality by individual soldiers. Rather, senior officials in US military
intelligence and in the Pentagon leadership devised and ordered a tactic
of religious-based abuse aimed at destroying the will of the detainees.
Confronting the
intimidation campaign of the administrationwhich has been widely
echoed by the mass mediaNewsweek issued a mealy-mouthed apology.
We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend
our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the US soldiers caught
in its midst, wrote Whitaker in the magazines May 23 issue.
Together with the
Pentagons attempts to blame Newsweek for the biggest anti-American
uprising in Afghanistan since the US invaded the country have come the
solemn proclamations of US officials from Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice on down about their unqualified respect for the Holy Koran.
Who are they kidding?
From Afghanistan to Iraq and Guantánamo, the US military has
tortured and sodomized prisoners, beating not a few of them to death,
but it would never lay a finger on their sacred texts.
If half a sentence
in Newsweek could bring thousands into the streets across Afghanistan
and much of the Muslim world, it is because US imperialisms acts
of aggression in the regioncarried out on the pretext of fighting
terrorismhave fueled a popular rage that can boil over at any
time.
In Afghanistan,
three-and-a-half years of occupation have created immense resentment.
US troops still routinely raid homes and detain Afghans without charges
and on the flimsiest of suspicions. They simply disappear into the detention
camps run by the American military.
With its blistering
attacks on Newsweek, the government has succeeded once again in intimidating
the media and issuing a warning to anyone who dares question the official
story about US military operations abroad.
The clear implication
of the tirades from the Pentagon and the White House is that the use
of unnamed government sources is itself impermissible. These are virtually
the only kind of sources that can be used to pry loose information about
criminality within the government. When it comes to Guantánamo
Bay and the global network of US detention camps, the Bush administration,
with the complicity of Congress, has attempted to maintain an impenetrable
veil of secrecy behind which it detains innocent individuals indefinitely
and employs methods of torture outlawed by the Geneva Conventions.
These practices
are well known and deeply hated all around the world. Washingtons
concern is to conceal them as much as possible from the American people
and to blame anyone within the media who exposes them for the inevitable
resistance that these ugly methods of US imperialism provoke.
Newsweeks
capitulation in the face of White House pressure is one more confirmation
that there exists no significant constituency for democratic rights
or institutions within the US ruling elite. The days when the mission
of the press was seen as that of Fourth Estate, acting as
an independent power whose purpose was to scrutinize, expose and criticize
the actions of the state, are over. Now, what is acceptable as news
is to be determined by state policy.
The outcome of this
latest affair is to conceal the criminal actions of the US government.
What the Newsweek episode makes clear is that the job of the major news
outletsall owned by giant conglomeratesis not to inform
the people, but to defend corporate and state interests by suppressing
inconvenient information and promoting government-sponsored lies.