The Other Charlotte has posted today on the Mike Isikoff story for Newsweek that falsely reported that U.S. interrogators were flushing copies of the Koran down toilets to get Iraqi detainees to talk. The result, as we all know, was a riot in Afghanistan that killed 17 people. Newsweek has since said: Oops! Bad information from our sources! And that’s about it, TOC notes (see her Why Are They So Arrogant?).
And now our friends on the left have taken Korangate a step further: The flushing story was “fake but accurate.” In other words, the 17 deaths are all America’s fault, ’cuz if we’d only thought of flushing Islamic holy books, we would have. Here are some samples today from Arianna Huffington’s Huffington Post, the blog where the celebrities of media and film reveal that they are indeed the liberal airheads that we think they are:
“Let’s ask why the Koran story was credible in the first place. Might it have something to do with the accurately reported (in words and pictures) horrible actions that took place at Abu Ghraib, and allegedly at Guantanamo Bay? Might those events be the source of ’lasting damage’ to our reputation abroad, especially among Muslim people?
“And what’s with the notion that an independent media has an obligation to ’help repair the damage?’ That obligation is our government’s.”
“Newsweek relied on faulty intelligence to write a magazine article. George W. Bush relied on faulty intelligence to start a war which has cost over $200 billion, and which has taken the lives of over 1600 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis.
“Here’s the difference. Newsweek didn’t know its intelligence was phony. And Newsweek apologized.”
Mark Green in something called “W’s Retraction”:
“My Fellow Americans, In the past few days, the White House asked for and got an apology and retraction from Newsweek for reporting that our military had defamed the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, a falsehood that has damaged our reputation and led to 17 deaths in the Arab world. But in the spirit of consistency and in a personality transformation as radical as when I kicked the habit at 40 — not to mention the petition I received yesterday from MoveOn signed by 3.6 billion people world-wide — I am today apologizing for the falsehoods that led to an invasion of Iraq that has led not to 17 but approximately 1600 American deaths, over 10,000 wounded, 100,000+ Iraqi deaths and to the collapse of esteem worldwide just when we needed help in responding to the terrorist threat that I exploited for reelection.”
Kristen Breitweiser:
“Anybody who has looked into some of the allegations floating around about the torture and homicides being carried out by our interrogators must realize that it is a possibility that something like flushing a Koran down a toilet could happen. What do you expect when you have interrogators basically given carte blanche to do whatever they want to detainees.”
Yes, and those Microsoft Word memos that Dan Rather waved around on “60 Minutes” could really have been produced on an IBM Selectric typewriter back in 1971.