Never mind …

Newsweek has resorted to the Emily Litella defense in its reporting of the Koran desecration scandal at Gitmo. "We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst."

In this morning's Washington Post (Newsweek's sister publication) Howard Kurtz reports:

Editor Mark Whitaker expressed regret over the item in the magazine's "Periscope" section, saying it was based on a confidential source—a "senior U.S. government official"—who now says he is not sure whether the story is true ….

"Just as citizens," Whitaker said, "we feel badly about the fact that there's been a rash of violence …. Clearly, that was not our intent in publishing what we thought was a solid news item …."

The fallout here is starting to build, and Dan Klaidman, Newsweek's Washington bureau chief, was doing cable news interviews yesterday, describing the story as "an honest mistake."

Said Whitaker: "I suppose you could say we should have foreseen the consequences of the report, but we didn't."

But, as Richard Weaver once put it, ideas do have consequences—even (and maybe especially) the paranoid fantasies of irresponsible journalists. And, pace Mr. Whitaker, those consequences are usually quite predictable, as they were in this instance. An item in an internationally-read news magazine isn't the flap of a butterfly's wings in Tahiti setting off tornadoes in Texas.

And the butterflies of Newsweek continue to flap their wings furiously.

Under the leadership of assistant managing editor Evan Thomas (with help from Sami Yousafzai in Peshawar, Ron Moreau and Zahid Hussain in Islamabad and Eve Conant and Andrew Horesh in Washington), the magazine is going all out to justify its shoddy reporting—and further fan the flames of anti-Americanism across the Islamic world.

To wit:

Given all that has been reported about the treatment of detainees—including allegations that a female interrogator pretended to wipe her own menstrual blood on one prisoner—the reports of Qur'an desecration seemed shocking but not incredible ….

Newsweek was not the first to report allegations of desecrating the Qur'an. As early as last spring and summer, similar reports from released detainees started surfacing in British and Russian news reports, and in the Arab news agency Al-Jazeera; claims by other released detainees have been covered in other media since then ….

More allegations, credible or not, are sure to come. Bader Zaman Bader, a 35-year-old former editor of a fundamentalist English-language magazine in Peshawar, was released from more than two years' lockup in Guantánamo seven months ago. Arrested by Pakistani security as a suspected Qaeda militant in November 2001, he was handed over to the U.S. military and held at a tent at the Kandahar airfield. One day, Bader claims, as the inmates' latrines were being emptied, a U.S. soldier threw in a Qur'an. After the inmates screamed and protested, a U.S. commander apologized. Bader says he still has nightmares about the incident.

Newsweek's "apology," then, consists in setting its own inacccurate story in the context of similar stories of questionable pedigree. The British, the Russians, Al-Jazeera … hey, they're all doing it, right?

The aforementioned Richard Weaver once wrote (quite presciently in this instance):

It is the nature of arguments based on testimony and authority to have no intrinsic force; whatever persuasive power they carry is derived from the credit of the testifier of the weight of the authority. People who have been taught to venerate the Bible will be moved by a Biblical proposition; a proposition from the Koran would have little if any power to move them, though it would carry weight with a Moslem. In using such arguments it is accordingly essential to keep in mind the credit of the source of testimony and the status of the authority. Testimony is usually well regarded if the one offering it is in a position to know the facts and if he is disinterested with reference to the outcome of the argument.

Whether their source was "in a position to know the facts" or "disinterested with reference to the outcome of the argument" seem to be matters of scant concern, however, for the journalists at Newsweek.