Did US guards deserate the holy Quran?

[Urbanangel]

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From CNN news:

(CNN) -- The White House on Monday pushed Newsweek to fully retract a story reporting that U.S. investigators had determined American guards at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base had desecrated the Quran.

Newsweek published that item in its May 9 issue; in the May 23 issue, it reported that its senior government source had backed away from his initial story. Editor Mark Whitaker wrote in that issue that "we regret" that any part of the story was wrong. (Full story)

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said it was "puzzling" that Newsweek had not retracted the story and said the damage done was "serious."

"The bottom line is that Newsweek itself admits the story they reported is based on facts that are wrong," McClellan said, repeating the word "puzzling" several times in reference to Newsweek not retracting the story.

Violent protests broke out in Afghanistan last week after the magazine cited sources saying investigators looking into abuses at the military prison found interrogators "had placed Qurans on toilets, and in at least one case flushed a holy book down the toilet."

At least 15 people were killed and dozens injured when thousands of demonstrators marched in Afghanistan and other parts of the Muslim world in reaction to Newsweek's initial report, officials and eyewitnesses said.

"Desecrating the Quran is a death-penalty offense" in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan, said Peter Bergen, a CNN terrorism analyst.

"There is clearly a lot of anti-American sentiment in Pakistan, less so in Afghanistan, but I think that this will feed into it," Bergen said.

Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita blamed Newsweek's report for the protests -- which occurred in Jalalabad, Afghanistan; Pakistan and other Muslim countries.

"People are dying. They are burning American flags. Our forces are in danger," he told CNN.

The U.S. military on Monday said it must reach out to angry Afghans to ease tensions.

"We want to redouble our efforts to communicate with the Afghan people," Col. Gary Cheek with the U.S. Army in Kabul said Monday. "We want to ensure there is trust and confidence in the U.S."

The Pentagon said last week it was unable to corroborate any case in which interrogators at the U.S. Naval Station in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, defiled the Muslim holy book, as Newsweek reported.

"Top administration officials have promised to continue looking into the charges, and so will we," Whitaker wrote in the May 23 issue, released Sunday. "But 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."

Despite Newsweek's partial retraction, Cheek promised to re-evaluate U.S. military tactics being used in Afghanistan that have drawn criticism from Afghan officials, including President Hamid Karzai.

"We continually review our tactics and certainly as the sovereignty of the Afghan government grows they will want more control, and that is correct and proper," Cheek said.

U.S. forces have been criticized for breaking into homes unannounced and for taking people into custody, sometimes on faulty intelligence.

"It does us no good to detain someone and make 100 enemies," according to Cheek. "We want to be very balanced in our operations. You can't do that through heavy-handed tactics."

Cheek also said the United States wants to engage Afghan religious leaders "to make sure they understand our true values."

Newsweek said anger about the story spread after it was cited at a May 6 press conference in Islamabad, Pakistan, by Imran Khan, a Pakistani cricket legend and a critic of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf.

Newsweek's Washington bureau chief, Dan Klaidman, said the apparent error was "terribly unfortunate," and he offered the magazine's sympathies to the victims.

But he said "different forces" were at work that helped spark the riots.

"It's clear that people seized on the Newsweek report to advance their own agendas, and that that was part of it," he said.

"But I also think that there's an enormous amount of pent-up and not-so-pent-up anti-American rage and sentiment in that region."

"There are a lot of people who think that our war on terror and our war in Iraq is a much wider war against Islam," he said.

At a Pentagon news conference Thursday, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cited U.S. commanders as saying the protests in Jalalabad, at least, were more about local politics than anti-American sentiment stirred by the Newsweek report.