posted May 07, 2005 02:12 AM              

ISLAMABAD, April 30 (Online): Pakistan strongly denied on Friday giving information about North Korea's nuclear program to Pyongyang's rival Tokyo. The spokesman said Pakistan fully supported a nuclear-free Korean peninsula and reduction of tension in the Far East.
"This has nothing to do with reality," Foreign Office Spokesman Jalil Abbas Jillani told IRNA in reaction to reports, suggesting that Pakistan passed on some information of its alleged nuclear cooperation with North Korea in a bid to get resumed Japan aid and loan facility.

The spokesman said Pakistan fully supported a nuclear-free Korean peninsula and reduction of tension in the Far East. Quoting Japan's Islamabad-based envoy, local press reports said on Wednesday that his country would raise the matter with Pakistan during Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's Pakistan visit, starting on Saturday.

The envoy had reportedly said that Premier Koizumi would be discussing the matter with Pakistani leadership and expected to get more information thereon. Japan, Nobuaka Tanaka said, expects Islamabad to give them more information on Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan's network and Pakistan's alleged links with North Korea.

Following the visit of Japan's foreign minister to Islamabad last month to attend a regional meeting, speculation has been rife that he linked Tokyo's aid and loan resumption to information from Pakistan on nuclear cooperation with North Korea. Japan had suspended aid and loan facility after Islamabad conducted nuclear tests in May 1998.

The aid, when approved, will include construction of water purification project in Faisalabad and building of a barrage for which three agreements would be signed during the visit, the spokesman added. Jillani termed Japanese premier's visit "very significant" adding that Koizumi will hold talks with President General Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz. "Bilateral ties, regional developments, and international issues will be discussed during the visit," he added.

posted May 07, 2005 10:06 PM              

Intelligence officials who have been questioning Abu Faraj al-Libbi, the senior al-Qa'eda suspect arrested last week, have cast doubt over claims by the Pakistani prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, that the interrogation is "proceeding well".

The officials say that al-Libbi, who is believed to be al-Qaeda's number three, has defied efforts to make him reveal valuable intelligence about its senior hierarchy, despite coming under "physical pressure" to do so.

More than a dozen low-key al-Qa'eda targets were arrested in Pakistan last week thanks to information stored on al-Libbi's satellite telephone. Yet early hopes among both American and Pakistani intelligence officials that he would tell them the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawihiri, were dashed.

One senior intelligence official told The Telegraph: "So far he has not told us anything solid that could lead to the high-value targets. It is too early to judge whether he is a hard nut to crack, or simply that he doesn't know more than he has told us."

Al-Libbi had been beaten and injected with the so-called "truth drug", sodium pentothal, said the official. "They have tried all possible methods, from the 'third degree' to injecting him with a truth serum but it is hard to break him," he said.

In time, the officials hope that al-Libbi, 28, will tell them about forthcoming attacks, al-Qaeda's funding and its sophisticated coded communications network.

Mr Aziz said yesterday: "Certainly al-Libbi is a senior member of al-Qaeda, and we were on the look-out for him for a while."

The Pakistanis believe that al-Libbi was behind attempts to assassinate their country's president, Pervez Musharraf, as well as Mr Aziz.

He is also believed to have been in charge of running al-Qa'eda"sleeper cells" in America and Britain. At least three UK-based militants are believed to have travelled from London to Pakistan for talks with al-Libbi about future attacks in Britain.

He was on the run for more than three years before he was captured in Pakistan's north-west frontier province after trying to flee security forces on a motorbike.

His choice of hideouts had become increasingly limited. He suffers from the skin condition vitiligo, which results in the loss of skin colour and which can become chronic in hot weather.

Although al-Libbi preferred to hide in big cities such as Karachi, where he could live in relative anonymity, the heat and humidity forced him to return to the tribal areas where a large number of security forces are concentrated.

Pakistan has ruled out his immediate extradition to the United States, and denies that American agents are present at his questioning.

A government minister, however, told The Telegraph last night that British intelligence officials may be allowed to join the interrogation.

"This would be done once we exhaust him completely and are satisfied that he is not preparing to commit a terror act in our country," the minister said.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/05/08/walq08.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/05/08/ixworld.html

posted May 07, 2005 10:27 PM              

Captured Al-Qaeda kingpin is case of ‘mistaken identity’
Christina Lamb and Mohammad Shehzad Islamabad
THE capture of a supposed Al-Qaeda kingpin by Pakistani agents last week was hailed by President George W Bush as “a critical victory in the war on terror”. According to European intelligence experts, however, Abu Faraj al-Libbi was not the terrorists’ third in command, as claimed, but a middle-ranker derided by one source as “among the flotsam and jetsam” of the organisation.

Al-Libbi’s arrest in Pakistan, announced last Wednesday, was described in the United States as “a major breakthrough” in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden.

Bush called him a “top general” and “a major facilitator and chief planner for the Al- Qaeda network”. Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, said he was “a very important figure”. Yet the backslapping in Washington and Islamabad has astonished European terrorism experts, who point out that the Libyan was neither on the FBI’s most wanted list, nor on that of the State Department “rewards for justice” programme.

Another Libyan is on the FBI list — Anas al-Liby, who is wanted over the 1998 East African embassy bombings — and some believe the Americans may have initially confused the two. When The Sunday Times contacted a senior FBI counter-terrorism official for information about the importance of the detained man, he sent material on al-Liby, the wrong man.

“Al-Libbi is just a ‘middle-level’ leader,” said Jean-Charles Brisard, a French intelligence investigator and leading expert on terrorism finance. “Pakistan and US authorities have completely overestimated his role and importance. He was never more than a regional facilitator between Al-Qaeda and local Pakistani Islamic groups.”

According to Brisard, the arrested man lacks the global reach of Al-Qaeda leaders such as Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s number two, Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, or Anas al-Liby.

Although British intelligence has evidence of telephone calls between al-Libbi and operatives in the UK, he is not believed to be Al-Qaeda’s commander of operations in Europe, as reported.

The only operations in which he is known to have been involved are two attempts to assassinate Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, in 2003. Last year he was named Pakistan’s most wanted man with a $350,000 (£185,000) price on his head.

No European or American intelligence expert contacted last week had heard of al-Libbi until a Pakistani intelligence report last year claimed he had taken over as head of operations after Khalid Shaikh Mohammad’s arrest. A former close associate of Bin Laden now living in London laughed: “What I remember of him is he used to make the coffee and do the photocopying.”

What is known is that al-Libbi moved from Libya to Pakistan in the mid-1980s before joining the jihad in Afghanistan. He married a Pakistani woman and is said to specialise in maps and diagrams. He is thought to have joined Bin Laden in Sudan with other Libyan nationals in about 1992 and to have become Al-Qaeda’s co-ordinator with home-grown Pakistani terrorist groups after 9/11.

Some believe al-Libbi’s significance has been cynically hyped by two countries that want to distract attention from their lack of progress in capturing Bin Laden, who has now been on the run for almost four years.

Even a senior FBI official admitted that al-Libbi’s “influence and position have been overstated”. But this weekend the Pakistani government was sticking to the line that al-Libbi was the third most important person in the Al-Qaeda network.

One American official tried to explain the absence of al-Libbi’s name on the wanted list by saying: “We did not want him to know he was wanted.”

Whatever his importance, al-Libbi is the sixth Al-Qaeda figure to have been caught in Pakistan, suggesting that the country is now the organisation’s centre of operations. The interior minister, Aftab Khan Sherpao, conceded that Bin Laden and his deputy might be hiding in a Pakistani city.

“But the capture of al-Libbi will have made them very apprehensive. Whether big fry or small fry, they’re on the run, I can tell you that.” http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1602568,00.html

posted May 12, 2005 09:33 PM              

It says that US personnel on one occasion flushed a copy of Islam's most holy book "down the toilet".

Pakistan, a conservative Muslim nation, is also a key US ally in its war against terrorism.

'Highly objectionable'

Pakistani foreign office spokesman, Jalil Abbas Jilani, told the AFP news agency Pakistan was also concerned about "the highly objectionable and regrettable treatment meted out to the detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre".

Freed Guantanamo prisoners have complained of ill-treatment

Mr Jilani said the reported act of sacrilege had shocked people of every faith around the world.

"The government of Pakistan condemns the incident and demands that an inquiry should be conducted to bring to justice the perpetrators of this shameful act," he said.

Insulting the Koran and Islam's Prophet Mohammed is regarded as blasphemy and punishable by death in Pakistan.

In an interview last week with the BBC's Haroon Rashid, Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, an Afghan prisoner recently released from the Cuban detention centre, said a number of Arab prisoners had still not spoken to their investigators after three years to protest at the desecration of the Koran by guards.

Mr Dost also said inmates' beards were shaved and the prisoners were shouted at during interrogations.

The US is holding about 520 inmates at Guantanamo Bay, many of them al-Qaeda and Taleban suspects captured in Pakistan and Afghanistan following the 11 September 2001 attacks in the US.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4525941.stm

posted May 13, 2005 06:43 PM              

By CARLOTTA GALL
Published: May 12, 2005
KABUL, Afghanistan, May 12 -Anti-American violence spread across Afghanistan and into Pakistan today in the third day of demonstrations and clashes with the police. A provincial office of CARE International was ransacked and four protesters were killed in a continuation of the most widespread protests against the American presence since the fall of the Taliban regime more than three years ago.

In the bloodiest single incident, the police fired on hundreds of tribesmen from Khogiani, a district in eastern Afghanistan, who were attempting to march in protest on Jalalabad, the town where 4 died and 60 were wounded on Wednesday. The police had blocked the tribesmen, many of whom were armed, 20 miles from the city and were ordered to fire into the air to disperse the crowd, said Fazel Muhammad Ibrahimi, the director of health in the province.

The Afghan authorities, the United States military and local residents laid the violence to outsiders seeking to capitalize on student protests stirred up by a brief report, published in the May 9 issue of Newsweek, that Americans had desecrated the Koran during interrogations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

posted May 15, 2005 12:33 PM              

The warning on Sunday came after 16 Afghans were killed and more than 100 hurt last week in the worst anti-U.S. protests across the country since U.S. forces invaded in 2001 to oust the Taliban for sheltering Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network.

The clerics in the northeastern province of Badakhshan said they wanted U.S. President George W. Bush to handle the matter honestly "and hand the culprits over to an Islamic country for punishment."

"If that does not happen within three days, we will launch a jihad against America," said a statement issued by about 300 clerics, referring to Muslim holy war, after meeting in the main mosque in the provincial capital, Faizabad.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/asiapcf/05/15/afghan.protests.reut/

posted May 15, 2005 05:05 PM              

"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," Editor Mark Whitaker wrote in the magazine's latest issue, due to appear on U.S. newsstands on Monday.

Whitaker said the magazine inaccurately reported that U.S. military investigators had confirmed that personnel at the detention facility in Cuba had flushed the Koran down the toilet.

The report sparked angry and violent protests across the Muslim world from Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more than 100 injured, to Pakistan to Indonesia to Gaza. In the past week it was condemned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and by the Arab League. On Sunday, Afghan Muslim clerics threatened to call for a holy war against the United States.

The weekly news magazine said in its May 23 edition that the information had come from a "knowledgeable government source" who told Newsweek that a military report on abuse at Guantanamo Bay said interrogators flushed at least one copy of the Koran down a toilet in a bid to make detainees talk.

But Newsweek said the source later told the magazine he could not be certain he had seen an account of the Koran incident in the military report and that it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=8494517

posted May 19, 2005 12:43 AM            

Mark Whitaker, the magazine's editor, wrote in a follow-up issue that he regretted "we got any part of our story wrong," but not that his magazine had been caught spreading lies, distortions and anti-American propaganda in a story that was based on a solitary anonymous source.

Reuters reported that the magazine's managing editor, Jon Meacham, responded to the expose by saying, incredibly: "This was reported very carefully, with great sensitivity and concern, and we'll continue to report on it."

Right. Newsweek's definition of "very" careful reporting is an untrue story that was investigated with no care at all, and its definition of "sensitive" is a story that savages the American military and inflames an already incendiary part of the world.

Meacham went on to say that in terms of the bogus story, "we leave it to the readers to judge us."

Right again. The American public is judging Newsweek, just as it has judged – and condemned – other leftist outlets in the old media and found them not credible, not trustworthy, not fair, not balanced, not relevant.

Undisguised Partisanship

The president of the Media Research Center and founder of Cybercast News Service, Brent Bozell, said, "Newsweek is guilty of pushing a false story they knew was unconfirmed but wanted to believe was true, and this time the result was tragic."

It was the same kind of "gotcha" journalism, "only this time with riots and deaths. … This is the painful legacy of news organizations whose anti-Bush agenda predisposes them to running negative stories they want to believe are true, even if they have no evidence of their veracity."

Journalist Rich Lowry agrees. "How many stories has Newsweek magazine written about the Bush administration allegedly ‘skewing intelligence' by relying on raw, insufficiently sourced data? How many times has it lamented that these mistakes have hurt the U.S. abroad? Too many to count."

Lowry goes on to say that many of those stories were written by Isikoff and Barry – "the very duo that has itself dealt the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan a blow by stretching poorly sourced information into a false report. ..."

Aiding and Abetting the Enemy

In a recent article entitled "Is U.S. media a ‘partner' with Al-Jazeera?" journalist James P. Pinkerton asks, "Does showing bloody and violent video from Iraq encourage the killing of Americans, and increase the likelihood of American failure in that country?"

He cites an article in The Wall St. Journal authored by Dorrance Smith – formerly of ABC News and the Bush 41 White House, and recently a media adviser to U.S. forces in Iraq. Smith said that the U.S. media are guilty of "aiding and abetting" the enemy.

Smith explained the process, saying that when Al-Jazeera – the anti-American Middle East TV station – receives "advance knowledge of actions against coalition forces," it doesn't tell authorities but rather sends a camera crew to the site to "wait for the attack, record it and rush it on the air," then make inflammatory footage available to the American media, who are "addicted" to it.

Pinkerton concludes, "This is exactly what Newsweek did in its fraudulent story about the desecration of the [Quran]."

Pundit Michelle Malkin minces no words: "Newsweek has blood on its hands [and] blood on its desks," a point reinforced by Gary R. Assell (Vipers Vietnam Veterans Page, A Vietnam Veteran and Proud) who wrote that Newsweek "lending credence to this rumor has only strengthened the hands of our enemies, fanatics, and those who would undermine U.S. efforts to build democracy. This behavior is criminal. People died."

Other Non-fatal but Egregious Errors

Recently, CBS-TV "news" quoted former prosecutor Ken Starr, saying that the plan of Republicans to ban judicial filibusters was a "radical, radical departure from our history and our traditions, and it amounts to an assault on the judicial branch of government."
In fact, Starr's statement referred to the Democrats who are obstructing President Bush's appellate-court nominees by questioning their judicial philosophies. In other words, CBS manipulated the quote to fit its by-now famous leftist agenda, proving that the ghastly ghost of Dan Rather – Mr. Forged Documents himself – is alive but not so well, given its devolving ratings.

In an article in the Boston Herald last month, writer Brett Arends reported that the editor of the Boston Globe, Marty Baron, "was forced to disavow a partially made-up story by a freelancer." Disavow – but stay on the job!

On CNN's "Reliable Sources," journalist Howard Kurtz interviewed Mitch Albom, who he described as a "multimedia personality" who hosts two radio shows for ABC, is a contributor to ESPN, wrote "Tuesdays with Morrie" that was on the New York Times best-seller list for four years, and writes a column for the Detroit Free Press.
But Albom also wrote a column, Kurtz said, "before the final four playoff game between Michigan State and North Carolina as if the game had already taken place." But it hadn't! Albom was suspended, along with his publisher, Carole Leigh Hutton. Suspended, but not fired!

Nevertheless, his friend Tony Kornheiser, a Washington Post columnist, said that he didn't think Albom had "any malice" in making up the story or that his "intent was to defraud people." And John Feinstein of National Public Radio agreed, saying that Albom's fiction wasn't "a speeding ticket" and added, "It happens often."

Aha! At last an admission from a liberal that, indeed, lying to the public "happens often" in the old media!

Barbara Stewart, a longtime reporter for the New York Times, which owns the Boston Globe, was fired from the newspaper this year because she made up part of the story she wrote about seals on the coast of Canada. It turned out that Stewart never attended the event, so her vivid description of "the ice and water turning red" as the seals were slaughtered never took place. Why? Because the entire event was canceled as a result of bad weather.

In FrontPageMag.com this month, journalist Debbie Schlussel wrote that reporter David Shepardson – "a primary reporter on the domestic war on terrorism in the heart of Islamic America" – wrote an article in the Detroit News alleging that a "former terrorist," Ahmed Hannan (who planned to blow up U.S. tourist sites and a U.S. Air Force Base in Turkey) had been deported. He was "forced to leave," the headline blared.
In fact, the deportation never happened and Hannan is still here! A fact, by the way, that Shepardson apparently didn't know because he relied solely on Hannan's lawyer for information. When USA Today reporter Jack Kelley lied in an article, he and many of the paper's top officials were fired by the newspaper's parent company, Gannett News Service. But in response to Shepardson's lies, Gannett awarded him First Place in investigative reporting!

Moral: If you lie about seal slaughter, you'll get fired. But if you lie about trashing the Quran, if you purposefully misquote a former prosecutor, or if you invent out of whole cloth a sympathetic story about a terrorist, no consequences will be forthcoming. And, as in Shepardson's case, you might even get an award!

Or maybe Jay Leno is right when he said that an appropriate punishment for these old-media dissemblers might well be to work for CBS News!

Kicking the Messenger

In April, New York Times writer Adam Nagourney wrote an article for the Washington Post in which he said, "The growing tide of personal attacks by bloggers and e-mailers can make you really paranoid."

Translated, this means that independent researchers who care deeply about accuracy in news reporting have made the old media something they have never been before – accountable!

Nagourney and his left-leaning ilk should hate bloggers. After all, they have scored three major knockout punches to the old media that resulted in more than the loss of their credibility and influence.

In fact, they resulted in the election of the 43rd president of the United States, George W. Bush.

The first knockout punch was the expose of CBS-TV's forged documents – a la liberal Dan Rather – that turned out to be so phony that they signaled the death knell and eternal ignominy of Rather and his producer Mary Mapes.

Bloggers also forced the resignation of liberal CNN chief Eason Jordan for his intemperate, partisan and inaccurate ranting about our country's military operations.

And the final blogger coup was forcing conservative, name-changing reporter Jeff Gannon out of commission and out of his privileged post in the White House press corps.

It Gets Worse

Writing in the New York Daily News in April, longtime columnist Jack Shafer exposed the New York Times for its egregious leftist bias. In reviewing the book "Buried in the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper" by Laurel Leff, Shafer says: "The crimes committed against humanity and journalism by the New York Times in the 20th century are so huge and numerous they fill three new volumes. …"

Shafer concentrated heavily on Leff's book, revealing that Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger kept the Nazis' atrocities against the Jews off Page One during World War II and failed to explain to its readers that "Hitler was killing Jews because they were Jews."

Shafer said that he counted 1,186 stories about the Jews of Europe in the paper between the war's start in 1939 and its conclusion in 1945. Only 26 of those stories were published on the front page, and only six of them stated explicitly that Jews were the primary target of the Nazis.

In other words, the greatest genocide in human history was deemed non-news by the paper "of record," just as major stories today that don't fit the paper's leftist bias are either slanted to the left or relegated to its back pages.

But they couldn't hide everything. After the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal, in which a middling journalist and pathological liar had been elevated to celebrity status by the Times, the very "gray old lady" – as the paper was once affectionately called – hired Daniel Okrent as its ombudsman.

Okrent took his 18-month job so seriously that he had the audacity to state publicly that – yes – the Times had a liberal slant! Of course, this is exactly what Accuracy in Media (www.aim.org), The Village Voice (http://www.villagevoice.com.) and The Media Research Center (http://www.mediaresearch.org), among other critics, have been saying for decades.

But self-delusion, not to omit grandiosity, dies hard. In a panel discussion of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) in April, journalists were questioned about any bias they detected in news coverage. The panel included, among others, liberal columnist Eric Alterman, who remarked: "I'm not so crazy about objectivity, or what is defined as objectivity. It seems to me that blue-state journalism tries to be objective. There is very little liberal journalism."

Thank you, Eric, for affirming why you and so many like-minded journalists are so clueless and why 60 million voters – for whom you have such contempt – rejected your brand of so-called journalism in the last election.

Polls Don't Always Lie

A recent Carnegie Corp. poll found that journalists who were surveyed picked Democrat John Kerry over George Bush in the 2004 election by a margin of over 2-to-1. And a recent University of Connecticut poll found that media professionals are frequently out of touch with an overwhelming number of Americans. For instance:

43 percent of the public say the press has too much freedom, but only 3 percent of journalists feel that way.

70 percent of journalists say the media do a good or excellent job when it comes to accuracy, while just 40 percent of the public agree.

Only 14 percent of the public can cite "freedom of the press" as a guarantee in the First Amendment.

60 percent of the public believe the media are biased in reporting the news.

22 percent of the public say the government should be allowed to censor the press.

53 percent of the public think journalists should not run stories with unnamed sources.

80 percent of journalists read blogs but fewer than 10 percent of non-journalists do.

posted May 19, 2005 12:47 AM            

Only this time the repercussions abroad have caused Muslims to riot in the streets of Kabul, leading to the deaths of about 15 people, and resulted in strained relationships with the Afghan government, not to mention millions of Muslims that follow Al-Jazeera.

Playing into the hands of Islamist fanatics and anti-Americans around the world, Newsweek has not only tipped its hand at its own agenda, but also set back the cause of U.S. foreign policy, which is attempting to make the case for democracy in countries that have never known it.
Like Dan Rather and his producers at "60 Minutes," Newsweek's reporters were trying to mine whatever unsavory pickings they might be able to glean from U.S. treatment of Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo, in the spirit of the Abu Ghraib scandals.

With no real attempt made either to find credible sources or to vet whatever gossip they stumbled across, Isikoff and Barry lurched into print with the inflammatory suggestion that a Koran was unceremoniously cast into a commode by U.S. interrogators to break the spirit of a detainee.

With the rising tide of furious Afghans, and angry denials by the Department of Defense and Condoleezza Rice, Newsweek's editors had to issue an apology of sorts, feeling sanctimoniously sorry for getting "any part of our story wrong," and extending their superfluous sympathies "to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst."

Again, like CBS, the principal motivation for the story seemed to be to discredit President Bush and American foreign policy under his administration. Anything that would give credence to Islamist and anti-American claims that the U.S. is either torturing or otherwise humiliating Muslim prisoners is fair game, according to this crowd.

With Abu Ghraib the poster boy for impropriety, jumping on the attack bandwagon is the preferred method of the liberal media – blaming misbehavior of lower-level military personnel as merely a surrogate for the sanctioned military policy of higher-ups. As former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger unhappily concluded in a recent column in the Wall Street Journal, today's press wants to make a "judgment first, [and find] evidence later."

One wonders why the liberal media tiptoe around the sensitivities of Muslims, whose every religious belief has to be respected, yet they regularly denigrate devout Christian beliefs as self-deceptions by the less intelligent or dogmatic, and in the case of fundamentalists, simply superstitions held by inflexible rubes and Bible-thumpers.

One also wonders why, a few years back, liberals were very much in support of the right of dissenters to burn the flag, or to wear it as underwear or use it as toilet paper. "It's only a piece of colored cloth," they declared. "Who cares what a person does with a piece of cloth?"

Blinded to the spiritual dimension of the U.S. flag, liberals routinely ridiculed the patriotic impulses of Americans who did not wish to see their country's symbol – and the thousands of soldiers who died for it – thus desecrated.

Yet when an alleged copy of the Koran is similarly violated, liberals fall all over themselves to expose this outrage, how deep-seated beliefs of millions of Muslims are being regularly debased and traduced by the ignorant Americans who support President Bush.

That's the message and it's sheer hypocrisy, if not treasonous. The liberal media don't care any more about the Koran than they do about the Bible. It's simply a sleazy way for them to inflame any group that is demonstrably anti-Bush and against current U.S. foreign policy, thus mirroring their own attitudes. Is this not "aiding and comforting the enemy"?

Doesn't anyone question why thousands of Muslims would take to the streets, anyway, only to vent their anger about a book being destroyed, instead of marching against human beings being mistreated at a prison? Would Americans take to the streets if an Imam on our shores flushed a Bible down the hopper? Would the media take up the cudgels?

posted May 19, 2005 12:51 AM            

That's what Newsweek's highly respected investigative reporter Mike Isikoff told the New York Times Monday, adding, "We obviously blame ourselves for not understanding the potential ramifications." And for anybody with even a smidgen of knowledge about the history of Muslim sensitivity to even the slightest hint of disrespect to their sacred symbols, that statement boggles the mind.

Especially when it concerns Newsweek, whose oleaginous editor John Meachem, author of "Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship," poses as a knowledgeable and dispassionate historian – a pretension disputed by his growing record of either misstating the facts, simply ignoring them or being completely ignorant of them (more about that later).
In this case, there is no excuse for anyone with the familiarity with history that Meachem claims to enjoy to have ignored one of the clearest examples of the explosive nature of Muslims and to what it can lead when confronted with what they regard as a sacrilege demeaning their religion, such as the desecration of their sacred Koran alleged in a Newsweek story.

Is not Meachem aware that in 1857, one of the most most infamous uprisings in history took place during the British colonization of India? The Sepoy rebellion, a mutiny of the native troops recruited by the British and known as "sepoys," was ignited by nothing more than a cartridge and the consequences surrounding the introduction of the new breech-loading Enfield rifle.

To load these weapons soldiers had to bite off the end of a greased cartridge, which the sepoys believed was greased with either cow or pig fat – both unholy to Hindu sepoys or Muslim sepoys, pig fat being from an animal deemed unclean by Muslims and beef fat from an animal sacred to the Hindus.

They were enraged by the report of the sacrilege, and the mutiny began on Sunday, May 10, 1857. It came as a complete surprise to the British, many of whom had ignored the unrest created mostly by the rapid imposition of direct British rule over two-thirds of India

It began at the garrison in Meerut, where the mutineers murdered every European they found. They then advanced on Delhi, and the rebellion spread rapidly through the Ganges valley, the Rajputna, Central India and parts of Bengal, and British men women and children were routinely executed along the way. In Cawnpore alone, 200 European men, women and children were slaughtered.

Surely a skilled journalist with a penchant for the study of history should have been aware of that incident and informed on the volatile nature of Muslims when faced with what they regard as an assault on their faith.

Should not an editor with the pretension of being more knowledgeable about historical events than most of us have been aware of the precedent set by the Sepoys and thus warned that publishing a story about the alleged desecration of the Koran, as minor an offense as it might be to the Western mind, could have the most dire consequences?

In that light, even had the story been accurate, which it is now known not to have been, history proves it was the journalistic equivalent of throwing a match into a gasoline-soaked pile of rags. Under any circumstances, Newsweek has no excuse for airing the allegation. None.

Like much of the elitist liberal media, Newsweek holds a simmering grudge against George Bush the Republican Party, the Iraq war and the military. Anything seen as unfavorable to these entities is seen as a plus by Newsweek, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the L.A. Times, ABC, NBC, CBS and their ilk.

They take delight in airing any incident that, in their diseased minds, justifies their jaundiced view that the U.S. under George Bush is a mindless tyrannical threat to world peace and the advancement of mankind. And the consequences be damned.

Given that circumstance, publishing a story seeming to prove their point was in their view entirely justified, regardless of the consequences that might – and did – ensue.

What could be a plus in this whole thing is the exposure of Newsweek as nothing other than an irresponsible liberal outlet of anti-Iraq war propaganda, and of their widely acclaimed John Meachem as anything but the credible historian Don Imus and his other admirers consider him to be.

To wit: Appearing on "Imus in the Morning" recently, vaunted historian Meachem opined that the rape of Eastern Europe perpetrated at Yalta by Churchill, Stalin and FDR was merely an unseen consequence of the World War II conference, which, he said, to FDR's and Churchill's eyes was merely the door to peace in the region. They had no idea that in the agreement they signed they were handing an entire region over to Stalin on a silver platter.

As Meachem told it, the Yalta conference really had little to do with the fall of the Iron Curtain over the Eastern European nations taken captive by Stalin. It all somehow happened mysteriously afterward. The three conferees had a rollicking good time at Yalta, Meachem said, ignoring the fact that the badly incapacitated Roosevelt was hardly in a condition to party and would be dead within 12 days.

Meachem completely ignored the fact that most of the Yalta agreement, carefully crafted by its authors to result in the enslavement of Eastern Europe by its Soviet masters, was written by a Soviet agent, Alger Hiss, who then went to Moscow to be feted by his Soviet hosts for his services to his Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU) masters.

Meachem's failure to so much as mention Hiss' role, or even his presence at Yalta, was apparently too much for even Tim Russert, who spoke to Imus on a later show, noting that he held in his hand a photo of FDR at Yalta with Alger Hiss sitting beside him.

This is the same John Meachem who, in a December 2004 Newsweek cover story, examined the biblical account of the birth of Jesus and gave legitimacy to the views of dissenting scholars, raising doubts about the Virgin birth, even to the point of suggesting that Jesus was the illegitimate spawn of a Roman soldier and his mother, Mary, who was tossed out by her husband, Joseph, because of her adulterous relationship.

Wrote Meachem: "In later years Christians had to contend with charges that their Lord was illegitimate, perhaps the illicit offspring of Mary and a Roman soldier. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, some scholars treat the Christmas narratives as first-century inventions designed to strengthen the seemingly tenuous claim [my italics] that Jesus was the Messiah."

The action of Newsweek in publishing this incendiary report was inexcusable. Newsweek ignored the lessons of the history of the Sepoy Rebellion, and at least 17 people are dead because they did.

posted May 19, 2005 01:02 AM            

'Newsweek dissembled, Muslims dismembered!'
Ann Coulter
Posted: May 18, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

When ace reporter Michael Isikoff had the scoop of the decade, a thoroughly sourced story about the president of the United States having an affair with an intern and then pressuring her to lie about it under oath, Newsweek decided not to run the story. Matt Drudge scooped Newsweek, followed by the Washington Post.

When Isikoff had a detailed account of Kathleen Willey's nasty sexual encounter with the president in the Oval Office, backed up with eyewitness and documentary evidence, Newsweek decided not to run it. Again, Matt Drudge got the story.

When Isikoff was the first with detailed reporting on Paula Jones' accusations against a sitting president, Isikoff's then-employer, the Washington Post – which owns Newsweek – decided not to run it. The American Spectator got the story, followed by the Los Angeles Times.

So apparently it's possible for Michael Isikoff to have a story that actually is true, but for his editors not to run it.

Why no pause for reflection when Isikoff had a story about American interrogators at Guantanamo flushing the Quran down the toilet? Why not sit on this story for, say, even half as long as NBC News sat on Lisa Meyers' highly credible account of Bill Clinton raping Juanita Broaddrick?

Newsweek seems to have very different responses to the same reporter's scoops. Who's deciding which of Isikoff's stories to run and which to hold? I note that the ones that Matt Drudge runs have turned out to be more accurate – and interesting! – than the ones Newsweek runs. Maybe Newsweek should start running everything past Matt Drudge.

Somehow Newsweek missed the story a few weeks ago about Saudi Arabia arresting 40 Christians for "trying to spread their poisonous religious beliefs." But give the American media a story about American interrogators defacing the Quran, and journalists are so appalled there's no time for fact-checking – before they dash off to see the latest exhibition of "**** Christ."

Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas justified Newsweek's decision to run the incendiary anti-U.S. story about the Quran, saying that "similar reports from released detainees" had already run in the foreign press – "and in the Arab news agency al-Jazeera."

Is there an adult on the editorial board of Newsweek? Al-Jazeera also broadcast a TV miniseries last year based on the "Protocols of the Elders Of Zion." (I didn't see it, but I hear James Brolin was great!) Al-Jazeera has run programs on the intriguing question, "Is Zionism worse than Nazism?" (Take a wild guess where the consensus was on this one.) It runs viewer comments about Jews being descended from pigs and apes. How about that for a Newsweek cover story, Evan? You're covered – al-Jazeera has already run similar reports!

Ironically, among the reasons Newsweek gave for killing Isikoff's Lewinsky bombshell was that Evan Thomas was worried someone might get hurt. It seems that Lewinsky could be heard on tape saying that if the story came out, "I'll (expletive) kill myself."

But Newsweek couldn't wait a moment to run a story that predictably ginned up Islamic savages into murderous riots in Afghanistan, leaving hundreds injured and 16 dead. Who could have seen that coming? These are people who stone rape victims to death because the family "honor" has been violated and who fly planes into American skyscrapers because – wait, why did they do that again?

Come to think of it, I'm not sure it's entirely fair to hold Newsweek responsible for inciting violence among people who view ancient Buddhist statues as outrageous provocation – though I was really looking forward to finally agreeing with Islamic loonies about something. (Bumper sticker idea for liberals: News magazines don't kill people, Muslims do.) But then I wouldn't have sat on the story of the decade because of the empty threats of a drama queen gas-bagging with her friend on the telephone between spoonfuls of Haagen-Dazs.

No matter how I look at it, I can't grasp the editorial judgment that kills Isikoff's stories about a sitting president molesting the help and obstructing justice, while running Isikoff's not particularly newsworthy (or well-sourced) story about Americans desecrating a Quran at Guantanamo.

Even if it were true, why not sit on it? There are a lot of reasons the media withhold even true facts from readers. These include:

A drama queen nitwit exclaimed she'd kill herself. (Evan Thomas' reason for holding the Lewinsky story.)

The need for "more independent reporting." (Newsweek President Richard Smith explaining why Newsweek sat on the Lewinsky story even though the magazine had Lewinsky on tape describing the affair.)

"We were in Havana." (ABC president David Westin explaining why "Nightline" held the Lewinsky story.)

Unavailable for comment. (Michael Oreskes, New York Times Washington bureau chief, in response to why, the day the Washington Post ran the Lewinsky story, the Times ran a staged photo of Clinton meeting with the Israeli president on its front page.)

Protecting the privacy of an alleged rape victim even when the accusation turns out to be false.

Protecting an accused rapist even when the accusation turns out to be true if the perp is a Democratic president most journalists voted for.

Protecting a reporter's source.

posted May 19, 2005 01:14 AM              

I would like to see what your point is from your own thoughts ,I don't follow the individuals point when they are just news articles . .

posted May 20, 2005 01:40 PM            

Toilet flushing is for anonymous sources
Plain Talk By Al Neuharth
USA TODAY Founder

Now Newsweek magazine is the latest media biggie with egg on its face. All because a star reporter and his editors didn't realize you can't flush a book down a toilet.

If the Newsweek dud hadn't turned so deadly, it would be funny. But the rioting, deaths and destruction in the Muslim world caused by the phony report of the U.S. military desecrating the holy book Koran is so serious it might make more of us finally understand what should be these basic tenets of journalism:

•Anonymous sources generally are cowards, who often tell more than they know.

•Reporters who use them without verification also sometimes write or broadcast more than they hear.

•Editors or news directors who permit their use are violating their trust.

This week it was Newsweek and star reporter Michael Isikoff. Last year, CBS and anchor Dan Rather. Also last year, USA TODAY and reporter Jack Kelley. The year before, The New York Times and Jayson Blair. Twenty-five years ago, The Washington Post and Janet Cooke.

Some who have been burned by anonymous sources have learned a little from it. The New York Times has under study a tougher new policy. USA TODAY has greatly tightened its control. But no major news outlet has a firm ban.

The arrogance that use of anonymous sources breeds was exemplified again this week when Bob Woodward of Watergate fame and now an assistant managing editor of The Washington Post was quoted in The Wall Street Journal as saying, “I think there's not enough use of unnamed sources, frankly.”

posted May 21, 2005 12:15 AM              

There were threats of "another 9/11" from militants angry at reports of the desecration of the Koran by US troops in Iraq.

Some among the crowd burned an effigy of Tony Blair on a crucifix and then set fire to a Union flag and a Stars and Stripes.

Led by a man on a megaphone, they chanted, "USA watch your back, Osama is coming back" and "Kill, kill USA, kill, kill George Bush". A small detail of police watched as they shouted: "Bomb, bomb New York" and "George Bush, you will pay, with your blood, with your head."

Demonstrators in Grosvenor Square, some with their faces covered with scarves, waved placards which included the message: "Desecrate today and see another 9/11 tomorrow."

The protest was organised by groups including the Muslim Council for Britain and the Muslim Parliamentary Association of the UK. Their protest follows fury in the Islamic world over the claims in a Newsweek magazine that US soldiers at Guantanamo Bay had abused the Koran.

The magazine later withdrew the article and apologised but not before it triggered riots in Afghanistan in which 17 people died and 100 people were injured.

Former Guantanamo Bay detainee Martin Mubanga told the crowd he had seen a copy of the Koran "desecrated" during his time at Camp Delta.

He said: "This was one of the methods they used, throwing the Koran, my Koran, on the floor in my cell."

One of the protesters called for the release of radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza. He shouted: "Your so-called democracy will fall under the sword of Allah. The day of judgment is coming."

The demonstration coincided with protests across the world. On the West Bank 2,500 Palestinians streamed out of mosques shouting "Death to America". In Calcutta, India, protesters burned, spat and urinated on the US flag. And in Somalia thousands chanted anti-US slogans.

http://www.thisislondon.com/news/articles/18759971?source=PA&ct=5

posted May 21, 2005 12:16 AM              

Graphite has many peaceful uses, including steel manufacture, but also can be used as a casing for molten weapons-grade uranium to fit it to nuclear warheads or to shield the cones of conventional missiles from heat.

With most countries adhering to international agreements banning the sale of such "dual-use" materials to Tehran, Iran has been forced to buy it on the black market, Iranian exile Alireza Jafarzadeh told The Associated Press - allegations confirmed by a senior diplomat familiar with Iran's covert nuclear activities.

Phone calls to Iranian diplomats seeking comment were not answered.

While with the National Coalition of Resistance of Iran, Jafarzadeh disclosed information about two hidden nuclear sites in Iran in 2002 that helped uncover nearly two decades of covert Iranian atomic activity - and sparked present fears Tehran wants to build the bomb.

Much of the equipment - including centrifuges for uranium enrichment and other technology with possible weapons applications - was acquired on the nuclear black market.

Those implicated include Dutch businessman Henk Slebos, who is awaiting trial in the Netherlands on charges of importing banned material - including 100 pieces of graphite - as part of disgraced Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan's clandestine smuggling network.

Jafarzadeh, whose organization was banned in the United States for alleged terrorist activity and who now runs the Washington-based Strategic Policy Consulting think tank, said Iran was additionally smuggling and trying to manufacture a graphite-based substance called ceramic matrix composite. The highly heat resistance compound is also used in missile technology.

He said he learned this from sources of information within Iran.

The diplomat, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of his position, said Iran also may be interested in acquiring specially heat-resistant "nuclear-grade graphite" that can be used as moderators to slow down the fission process in reactors generating energy.

While Iran does not now have reactors using such moderators, it insists it has the future right to all aspects of peaceful nuclear technology.

Neither Jafarzadeh nor the diplomat could say how much graphite Iran had imported and over what period of time.

But the diplomat said a graphite-moderated nuclear plant would require a "huge amount" of graphite - as many as 1,000 tons for a 250-megawatt reactor.

Crucibles to hold molten uranium metal would need much less graphite - no more than about 2.2 pounds per nuclear weapon, the diplomat said. He said investigations by the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency revealed laboratory experiments by Iran aimed at making nuclear-grade graphite, which later were abandoned.

Domestically manufactured Iranian conventional missiles would require dozens of pounds of graphite per missile cone, he said.

Jafarzadeh also said a plant now being built near the central town of Ardekan for what Iranian officials say is steel manufacturing will actually be a cover for mastering graphite technology.

The revelations came as Iran's top nuclear negotiators prepared to meet early next week with the foreign ministers of France, Britain and Germany, acting on behalf of the 25-nation European Union, for what could be a last-ditch attempt to convince Tehran to agree to a long-term freeze of uranium enrichment activities.

French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier said Friday the talks were "very fragile." He said the talks range over issues including economic, technical and commercial cooperation, Iran's wish to join the World Trade Organization, and political dialogue.

posted May 21, 2005 01:26 PM              

Karzai condemns US Afghan 'abuse'
(Filed: 21/05/2005)

Hamid Karzai, the Afghanistan president, has said he is shocked by reports the US Army abused prisoners in the country and has called on the American government to take "strong action".

Hamid Karzai has called on the US to take action
The report, leaked to the New York Times, detailed abuse in 2002 at the Bagram detention center in Afghanistan, including the deaths of two inmates.

It said one prisoner was chained by his wrists to the top of his cell for days and had his legs pummeled by guards before he died.

Mr Karzai, who was on his way to visit George W Bush, the US president, at the White House, said: "It has shocked me thoroughly and we condemn it.

"We want the US government to take very, very strong action, to take away people like that."

posted May 23, 2005 11:17 PM            

Now, it seems perfectly within journalistic standards to go with a story IF the allegations are not beyond the realm of possibility. Forget whether the allegations are actually true or not. Wow, neat.

Bill Clinton murdered Vince Foster...not beyond the realm of possibility either but don't hold your breath waiting to see that in Newsweek.

I think they've been getting away with this for a very long time. Problem is that now they're getting caught.

Media Rallys Round Newsweek
Fr. Mike Reilly
Tuesday, May 24, 2005

While Newsweek magazine continues to face some tough criticism from talk radio and the Internet for its bogus Quran-flushing report, it wasn't long before the old media guard began to circle the wagons.

Analysts at ABC, CNN and MSNBC repeatedly argued last week that the erroneous story was at least believable, whether true or not.

Some even charged that the Bush administration was behind the scandal.
According to the Media Research Center:

• CNN's Anderson Cooper wondered aloud during one cablecast: "Is it beyond the realm of possibility that a tactic like [flushing the Quran] was used?" He noted that in a recent "'60 Minutes'" report, one interrogator alleged that U.S.officials "routinely seem to sort of use religion against some of these prisoners."

• ABC's "Nightline" host Chris Bury sounded a particularly cynical note during one broadcast, saying, "Do you think the volume of the protests [from Bush administration officials] is, perhaps, a bit calculated to deflect some attention away from the policies at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo?"

• Nightline's Dan Donovan added: "And two parties to this mess are now learning the consequences of lost credibility. One of them is Newsweek. The other is America, in the Muslim world."

• MSNBC's Keith Olberman positively outdid himself, speculating that the Bush administration "set up" Newsweek with the story. He was joined by CBS's Craig Crawford who suggested that the dots of Olberman's Bush conspiracy theory connect.

posted May 24, 2005 12:25 AM              

i also think the "senior government official" who provided this information should be identified.....

posted May 24, 2005 11:08 AM            

A publication runs a bogus story, gets caught and then justifies it by blaming another party who did not confirm the allegation but didn't deny it. Now that's proof, isn't it Petron.

So, who is this senior Pentagon official who did not deny the allegation? Is it the Sergeant Major of the Quarter Master Corp., an aide to an Air Force General...neither of whom would be in any position to know whether the allegation is true or not but would be considered a senior Pentagon official. Is it a high civilian official working in the Pentagon who could be considered a senior Pentagon official? In fact, we don't know if anyone in a position to know was ever consulted or if anyone at the Pentagon was ever spoken to about the allegation. We have only Newsweek's statement that it happened. We also have Newsweek's bogus story from an unnamed source that the alleged incident(s) occurred so the credibility of Newsweek is totally open to question in everything they say.

This kind of yellow dog journalism is akin to Newsweek's brand of reporting.

"We have learned a large loan was made by Bank of America to a high government official. That's not unusual but what is unusual is this loan was made outside the guidelines of lending practices of the bank and defaulted upon by the government official. It was also learned not only was the loan defaulted but no payments were ever made and Bank of America never sought repayment nor did the bank take any collection action against the official. The bank has concealed this loan from bank regulators of the Treasury Department and auditors through 3 audit cycles by carrying it on their books as an active loan."

BTW, don't look for this BOA story, I just wrote it.

Well, let's see here. BOA may have as many as 300,000 employees and bank officers. May have as many as 4000 branch offices spread around the world. May have as many as 4000 loan officers in branch offices around the world, any of whom could have made that loan. The senior BOA officer could be from a division having nothing to do with consumer loans....say for instance, the securities division of BOA who would have no idea what goes on in the lending departments, may be on his/her way to Chase Manhattan Bank and wish to give BOA a nice black eye. But we can't know anything relevant from what was reported.

"When confronted with this information, a senior Bank of America officer did not deny the truth of the allegation." This reporter takes the failure of the bank officer to deny the allegation as confirmation the allegation is true.

"Newsweek also said it ran the entire item by a senior Pentagon official, who did not deny it. The magazine took that to be de facto confirmation.

Notice Petron, Newsweek said it ran the entire item by the Pentagon official...not the article as you claimed. In fact, there isn't anything to suggest this senior Pentagon official knew there was already an article ready for publication.

posted May 24, 2005 11:17 AM            

FLUSH TO JUDGMENT
Newsweek put U.S. flag
in trash on foreign cover
New allegations of anti-Americanism hit mag reeling from Quran scandal
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

With Newsweek still reeling from its forced retraction of the Quran-in-the-toilet story, the magazine is now under fire for publishing what some see as staunchly anti-American covers in foreign editions.

International edition of Feb. 2 Newsweek

For instance, while a Japanese edition of Newsweek dated Feb. 2 published a cover story featuring an American flag in a trash can under the headline, "The day America died," and the international edition featured a photo of President Bush with the headline, "America Leads ... But Is Anyone Following?," the U.S. edition cover story was an "Oscar Confidential" featuring Hilary Swank, Jamie Foxx and Leonardo DiCaprio.

The cover story in the foreign editions, titled, "Dream on, America," about what Newsweek characterized as "the world's rejection of the American way of life," did not run in the U.S. edition of the magazine.

Japanese edition of Feb. 2 Newsweek

The Japanese edition of the magazine is raising the ire of bloggers for its illustration of a dirtied American flag, its staff broken and discarded in a trash can.

"I think they have crossed the line into outright treason," wrote one blogger yesterday. "It's time to see some of these enemy propagandists hanging from the end of a rope."

U.S. edition of Feb. 2 Newsweek

Some Newsweek international readers noticed that the story didn't run in the U.S.

"Why didn't this fine story run in my U.S. edition?" wrote one letter writer in the March 14 edition.

The Japanese cover story was noted on the blogsite Riding Sun, produced by "a New Yorker living in Tokyo."

"Newsweek's false, retracted story about American guards flushing the Quran down a toilet at Guantanamo doesn't necessarily mean the magazine's staff hates America or Bush, or wants us to lose in Iraq," wrote Riding Sun. "To be charitable, let's just chalk that one up to sloppy journalism. But I'm at a loss to explain this."

Both the Japanese and international editions featured cover stories by Andrew Moravcsik. But that piece did not run in the U.S. edition.

"It's one thing for Newsweek to actively promote the notion that America is a 'dead,' 'rotting' country overseas," wrote Riding Sun. "But it's quite another thing indeed to hide those efforts from its American readers. If Newsweek really think America is dead, and our flag belongs in the trash, why won't it tell us?"
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=44397

posted May 24, 2005 07:34 PM              

well jwhop newsweek calls its source a "senior government official" and says they gave the article to a "senior defense official" at the pentagon and asked if the piece was accurate....

posted May 24, 2005 10:58 PM              

"It's appalling that this story got out there," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on her way back from Iraq.

What's not appalling to Condi is that the US is holding prisoners at Guantanamo under conditions termed "torture" by the Red Cross. What's not appalling to Condi is that prisoners of the Afghan war are held in violation of international law after that conflict has supposedly ended. What is not appalling to Condi is that prisoner witnesses have reported several instances of the Koran's desecration.

What is appalling to her is that these things were reported. So to Condi goes to the Joseph Goebbels Ministry of Propaganda Iron Cross.

But I don't want to leave out our President. His aides report that George Bush is "angry" about the report -- not the desecration of the Koran, but the reporting of it.

And so long as George is angry and Condi appalled, Newsweek knows what to do: swiftly grab its corporate ankles and ask the White House for mercy.

But there was no mercy. Donald Rumsfeld pointed the finger at Newsweek and said, "People lost their lives. People are dead." Maybe Rumsfeld was upset that Newsweek was taking away his job. After all, it's hard to beat Rummy when it comes to making people dead.

And just for the record: Newsweek, unlike Rumsfeld, did not kill anyone -- nor did its report cause killings. Afghans protested when they heard the Koran desecration story (as Christians have protested crucifix desecrations). The Muslim demonstrators were gunned down by the Afghan military police -- who operate under Rumsfeld's command.

Our Secretary of Defense, in his darkest Big Brother voice, added a warning for journalists and citizens alike, "People need to be very careful about what they say."

And Newsweek has now promised to be very, very good, and very, very careful not to offend Rumsfeld, appall Condi or anger George.

For their good behavior, I'm giving Newsweek and its owner, the Washington Post, this week's Yellow Streak Award for Craven Cowardice in Journalism.

As always, the competition is fierce, but Newsweek takes the honors by backing down on Mike Isikoff's exposé of cruelity, racism and just plain bone-headed incompetence by the US military at the Guantanamo prison camp.

Isikoff cited a reliable source that among the neat little "interrogation" techniques used to break down Muslim prisoners was putting a copy of the Koran into a toilet.

In the old days, Isikoff's discovery would have led to Congressional investigations of the perpetrators of such official offence. The Koran-flushers would have been flushed from the military, panels would have been impaneled and Isikoff would have collected his Pulitzer.

No more. Instead of nailing the wrong-doers, the Bush Administration went after the guy who reported the crime, Isikoff.

Was there a problem with the story? Certainly. If you want to split hairs, the inside-government source of the Koran desecration story now says he can't confirm which military report it appeared in. But he saw it in one report and a witness has confirmed that the Koran was defiled.

Of course, there's an easy way to get at the truth. RELEASE THE REPORTS NOW. Hand them over, Mr. Rumsfeld, and let's see for ourselves what's in them.

But Newsweek and the Post are too polite to ask Rumsfeld to make the investigative reports public. Rather, the corporate babysitter for Newsweek, editor Mark Whitaker, said, "Top administration officials have promised to continue looking into the charges and so will we." In other words, we'll take the Bush Administration's word that there is no evidence of Koran-dunking in the draft reports on Guantanamo.

It used to be that the Washington Post permitted journalism in its newsrooms. No more. But, frankly, that's an old story.

Every time I say investigative reporting is dead or barely breathing in the USA, some little smartass will challenge me, "What about Watergate? Huh?" Hey, buddy, the Watergate investigation was 32 years ago -- that means it's been nearly a third of a century since the Washington Post has printed a big investigative scoop.

The Post today would never run the Watergate story: a hidden source versus official denial. Let's face it, Bob Woodward, now managing editor at the Post, has gone from "All the President's Men" to becoming the President's Man -- "Bush at War." Ugh!

And now the Post company is considering further restrictions on the use of confidential sources -- no more "Deep Throats."

Despite its supposed new concern for hidden sources, let's note that Newsweek and the Post have no trouble providing, even in the midst of this story, cover for secret Administration sources that are FAVORABLE to Bush. Editor Whitaker's retraction relies on "Administration officials" whose names he kindly withholds.

In other words, unnamed sources are OK if they defend Bush, unacceptable if they expose the Administration's mendacity or evil.

A lot of my readers don't like the Koran-story reporter Mike Isikoff because of his goofy fixation with Monica Lewinsky and Mr. Clinton's cigar. Have some sympathy for Isikoff: Mike's one darn good reporter, but as an inmate at the Post/Newsweek facilities, his ability to send out serious communications to the rest of the world are limited.

A few years ago, while I was tracking the influence of the power industry on Washington, Isikoff gave me some hard, hot stuff on Bill Clinton -- not the cheap intern-under-the-desk gossip -- but an FBI report for me to publish in The Guardian in England.

I asked Isikoff why he didn't put it in Newsweek or in the Post.

He said, when it comes to issues of substance, "No one gives a sh--" -- not the readers, and especially not the editors who assume that their US target audience is small-minded, ignorant and wants to stay that way.

That doesn't leave a lot of time, money or courage for real reporting. And woe to those who practice real journalism. As with CBS's retraction of Dan Rather's report on Bush's draft-dodging, Newsweek's diving to the mat on Guantanamo acts as a warning to all journalists who step out of line.

Newsweek has now publicly committed to having its reports vetted by Rumsfeld's Defense Department before publication. Why not just print Rumsfeld's press releases and eliminate the middleman, the reporter?

However, not all of us poor scribblers will adhere to this New News Order. In the meantime, however, for my future security and comfort, I'm having myself measured for a custom-made orange suit.