Newsweek again

I want to share one more article with you about the Newsweek incident. This one is an editorial from the Boulder Daily Camera entitled, "Misplaced Outrage: Newsweek is not the Issue; Abuse of Detainees Is". Here's how it ends:

And while Newsweek was wrong to claim that military investigators had confirmed the incident, numerous other sources have reported over the past two years that guards at Gitmo have flushed, kicked, and otherwise conveyed disrespect for the Quran. Official records from Abu Ghraib and other locations indicate that the abuse of Islam is nothing new for American interrogators, who have forced inmates to eat pork, poured liquor down their throats and heaped obscenities and abuse on their religious beliefs, among other tactics.

No one has stepped forward to declare that the Quran incident is a fiction. More generally, no one can pretend any longer that the U.S. military simply would not engage in abuse and torture — not after the conviction of several participants in the Abu Ghraib atrocities, at least two dozen deaths attributed to torture, and plain evidence that the White House condones tactics prohibited by the Geneva Conventions when dealing with "unlawful combatants."

After all that, do Bush administration officials and their allies really believe that a magazine has damaged America's standing in the world? The Newsweek report could provoke such fierce reaction only because the past actions of the United States had made the allegations credible.

The American government diminishes this country's standing in the world, and its capacity to wage war against terrorism, when it resorts to physical and mental cruelty against detainees. That's an outrage. Don't blame the media for trying, however imperfectly, to shine a light on it.