This philosophically enigmatic observation, rivaling any profundity that Schopenhauer or Niebhur may have thought up in their time, was oracularly proferred by Donald Rumsfeld last week. “People need to be careful what they say,” he claimed, wagging a chastising finger at reporters, “just as people need to be careful what they do.”
That’s the man whose right-hand man, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, not long ago went around churches whipping up congregations’ frenzy with the irresponsible, not to mention incendiary, declaration that their Christian God was “the real god,” and that of Islam’s was “an idol.”
Not to be outdone by the Pentagon, the White House, via its press secretary, Scott McClellan, resorted to politically correct pieties about how the United States military personnel are trained to “go out of their way” to show respect for the religious sensibility of Muslims — the very personnel whose sexually suggestive maltreatment of detainees at the Abu Ghraib detention center in Iraq was guaranteed to induce stress based on religious norms.
And the State Department, again via its spokesman, Richard Boucher, asserted that the “story” was egregious and harmful to the US image abroad because “the facts in it were not substantiated.” This is a man speaking for a government department whose former secretary, Colin Powel, told the world at the Security Council, in the most emphatic of terms, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
The “story,” of course, is well known by now — a brief item in Newsweek magazine’s Periscope column reporting that guards at Guantanamo Bay had desecrated the Qur’an in a particularly offensive fashion.
Never mind that the editors of the magazine later contritely retracted the news item. The damage had already been done: Close to twenty people were killed and scores injured in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world by rioting, sparked in part by the irresponsible manner in which Newsweek opted to rely for a provocative story like that on one source — “credible and trusted” — instead of double-checking it by going to a second source for confirmation.
Moreover, it now turns out that Newsweek’s editors, by letting slide its reporter’s claim that “sources tell us” — in grammar, that’s plural, my dear — was misleading its readers. The journalist in question, incidentally, was Michael Isikoff, the well-known investigative reporter who broke the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Sloppy journalism by a quality magazine? No question. But perhaps, as Michael Getler, the Washington Post’s ombudsman, suggested, there was another reason, a “cultural disconnect in which American reporters and editors simply do not understand the place of the Qur’an, above all other things, in Muslim life.”
Whatever it is, the administration has no right to get on its high horse, and brazenly pass the buck to Newsweek, as it did last week, scapegoating it for the riots in Afghanistan and elsewhere and for contributing to the hemorrhaging of trust between the US and the Muslim world.
There has been much officially documented and much publicized evidence not only of abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo, but also widely reported incidents over the last two years by American and international media of similar desecrations, including one at Guantanamo that goes as far back as March, 2002 when the guards’ mishandling and mistreatment of the Holy Book led the prisoners to go on a hunger strike, which ended only when the American military there issued an apology to the prison inmates over the camp loudspeaker.
Those of us who want to trust our media, who believe that the overwhelming majority of those engaged in the journalistic enterprise are professionals motivated by the ethical guidelines of their craft, have had a hard time of it over the last couple of years or so, with serious journalistic lapses and other scandals exposed at august publications like the New York Times, USA Today, the Boston Globe and the LA Times.
The errant, now retracted 10-sentence Periscope item was particularly distressing. But what is even more distressing and, yes, hypocritical, are the vehement denunciations of Newsweek by the administration because the magazine did not “double-check its sources.”
Well, my, my, Golly, aren’t the American people in the middle of waging a war in Iraq — a war that it now turns out is unnecessary and unwinnable, that is costing them a billion dollars, and the lives on average of ten of their soldiers, a week — because their leaders in the White House, the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency did not double-check their own sources about those weapons of mass destruction?
When the Pentagon attacks Newsweek, as Bryan Whitman, one of the agency’s spokesmen did, for “hiding behind anonymous sources,” should we turn around and remind the Pentagon of how it clumsily hid behind anonymous sources itself — an Iraqi defector known as Curveball (introduced to it by the now discredited Ahmad Chalabi) who fed American officials all that baloney about WMD, the putative casus belli of the American invasion of Iraq?
Does that mean that we now can ask our government for an apology and a retraction for going to war under false pretenses?
As for those rioters in Afghanistan, where it all started, clearly they did not need an excuse, such as the Newsweek story, to go on the rampage.
The Taguba report on abuses at Abu Ghraib, testimony from detainee review tribunals, and documentation by Amnesty International issued over the last two years and reported widely in the media, coupled with an undercurrent of discontent at being occupied by a foreign army, will have given any potential rioters cause to riot, much in the manner, say, that in 1875 Muslim and Hindu soldiers revolted against their British colonizers — and came close to driving them out of India — when rumor spread that their ammunition was coated with grease from pigs and cows.
Those riots in Afghanistan were not then triggered exclusively by a questionable sentence in Newsweek, but dormant resentments harbored against a US that commits human rights abuses while it advances itself as the messenger of human rights to less endowed societies. This administration, made up of neoconservatives and neoimperialists, whose outlandishly hyperbolic moralizing has alienated not just Muslims and Arabs but Europeans as well, has saddled the United States and the American people, essentially decent folk who genuinely believe in social justice and freedom, with an image problem.
To refurbish that image, here’s a piece of advice for said administration: Lose the attitude, and we’ll take from there.
