Eating Crow

Two weeks ago, it was Newsweek that was in the dog house over its retracted story about Koran abuse at Guantanamo Bay. Now, it's everyone who put Newsweek in the dog house. From the Washington Post on Friday, in a piece headlined "Pentagon Confirms Koran Incidents":

Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, said investigators have looked into 13 specific allegations of Koran desecration at the prison dating to early 2002 and have determined eight of them to be unfounded, lacking credibility or the result of accidental touching of the holy book. Of the five cases of mishandling, three were "very likely" deliberate and two were "very likely accidental," he said. But Hood declined to provide details, citing an ongoing investigation.

The reaction on the right has been mostly to ignore this story, or to simply assert that all the detainee reports are lies. But there are two things to keep in mind here:

1. Detainee reports of Koran abuse disappeared after military put in place guidelines on the proper handling of the Koran in the wake of reports from the Red Cross. This sounds much more like cause and effect than mere coincidence, and it enhances the credibility of the detainee reports.
2. Scott McClellan and Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita come out of this episode looking like the huge liars that they are. The administration has been working overtime and going to absurd lengths to completely discredit the notion of Koran abuse, and yet they obviously knew that the allegations had merit the entire time.

Does any of this prove that a Koran was actually flushed down a toilet? No, and we may never know for sure if that particular incident ever happened. But those people who want to focus on that one detail and ignore the rest of the story are just fooling themselves at this point, because the rest of us have the bigger picture.