NEWSWEEK’S RESPONSIBILITY … AND BUSH’S

I wrote yesterday that “Newsweek bears complete responsibility for any errors it has made; and, depending on what we now find, should not be let off the hook.” Retracting a story whose single anonymous source has now said he can’t be sure is the right thing to do. Continuing to report on the question is the other right thing to do. This is not about a minor issue to do with a president’s long-forgotten National Guard service. It is a huge issue with great ramifications for the war on terror. It gets to a very important question: Are we undermining our cause by unnecessary and inflammatory tactics in detainee treatment? And that is where the responsibility of the Bush administration comes in. No one in the administration has flatly denied that desecration of the Koran has taken place at Guantanamo. There are credible reports that mistreatment of the book led to a hunger strike among inmates; and many other such instances of interrogative abuse of Islam reported in official military and Congressional reports. Now that Newsweek has accepted its responsibility, the White House has to accept theirs’: did such a toilet-flushing occur? And if we had not decreed that the Geneva Conventions need not apply to all our terrorist detainees, would this even be a question in the first place?