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Just
who is the 'son of a bitch'?
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON
- Here's a question for international news hounds:
Who is the "son of a bitch" referred to in this
comment by a US Defense Department spokesman?
"People are dead because of what this son
of a bitch said. How could he be credible now?"
Is he an unnamed Defense Department source
who told Newsweek magazine that he had read a
government document detailing an incident where US
military personnel at the detention camp at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, allegedly flushed a copy of
the Koran down a toilet?
After
all, that report, which
was printed in a small item in last week's "Periscope"
section of the magazine, spurred violent
protests across the Muslim world, particularly in
Afghanistan, where at least 15 people were
killed and the government of President Hamid Karzai
was badly shaken just a week before he was
due to travel to Washington.
Or is the "son of
a bitch" US President George W Bush, whose
administration began fixing intelligence at least
eight months before invading Iraq in order to make
the public believe that Baghdad posed a serious
threat to the United States and its allies?
After all, the war and its bloody
aftermath have taken a toll of at least 30,000
lives, according to the most conservative
estimates, and ongoing conflict continues to kill
scores more every week with no end in sight.
Readers of the British press might be
inclined to choose the second option based on the
sensational leak to the London Times two weeks ago
of the minutes of a July 23, 2002, meeting between
Prime Minister Tony Blair and his closest advisers
during which the head of the intelligence agency
MI6, just back from Washington, reported that Bush
had decided on war and that "the intelligence and
facts were being fixed around the policy".
While that was big news in Britain, it was
hard to find any trace of it in the US press.
So
consumers of US media would choose option
number one, because the Koran story has been
the nation's top news story since the magazine
published a qualified apology for it on
Sunday before making a vague retraction on Monday.
Indeed, the "son of a bitch" statement was
made by Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita, a Bush
loyalist who, like his right-wing backers, has
been in high dudgeon over the "irresponsibility"
of one of the nation's most influential purveyors
of news.
DiRita was responding to the
news that an unnamed but "longtime reliable"
Defense Department source had told Newsweek he was no
longer certain which documents that had crossed
his desk had recounted how Guantanamo guards had
desecrated the Koran in order to rattle detainees.
The source, a "senior US government
official", had originally told Newsweek
investigative reporter Michael Isikoff that he had
read the account in a forthcoming report by the US
Southern Command (SouthCom) on the treatment of
detainees at Guantanamo. Newsweek cited the
incident as one of a large number of
already-reported abuses - many confirmed by photos
- designed to humiliate and provoke detainees.
Although former detainees and their
lawyers had reported similar toilet-flushing
incidents in the past, the brief mention in
Newsweek apparently lent the story greater
credibility, setting off anti-US protests from
North Africa to Indonesia.
DiRita insisted
that the SouthCom probe cited in the Newsweek
story never looked at charges of Koran desecration
and thus, in the words of another spokesman, was
"demonstrably false". He did not address the fact
that the story had been submitted in advance by
Newsweek to another senior Pentagon official who
did not object to the controversial allegation.
In the face of the violence, Pentagon
outrage, and the source's admission that he was
now unsure about where he had read of the
toilet-flushing incident, however, Newsweek
expressed regret for the violence and apologized.
Its apology, the latest in a series of media
mea culpas that has seen a sharp plunge in the
credibility of mainstream press outlets over the
past year, according to recent opinion polls, was
front-page news in most of the nation's newspapers
on Monday, although Newsweek initially
declined to retract the story.
"We're not
retracting anything. We don't know for certain
what we got wrong," Newsweek's editor, Mark
Whitaker, told the New York Times in an
explanation that seemed only to fuel the
administration's righteous indignation.
"The report has had serious consequences,"
White House spokesman Scott McClellan told
reporters. "People have lost their lives. The
image of the United States has been damaged
abroad."
Wilting under pressure, Newsweek finally
issued a broader, although still somewhat ambiguous,
retraction on Monday evening. "Based on
what we know now, we are retracting our original
story that an internal military investigation had
uncovered [Koran] abuse at Guantanamo Bay," said
Whitaker, leaving open the possibility that
Newsweek's source had indeed read about the
incident in another document.
While the
administration claimed vindication over the latest
retraction, it has yet to comment on the London
Times story, in part because no member of the
White House press corps has bothered to ask about
it.
So far, in fact, the only request for
a reaction has come in the form of a letter sent
last week by 89 Democratic lawmakers, another
development that has received virtually no press
attention.
"If the disclosure is accurate,"
noted the letter authored by Representative John
Conyers of the state of Michigan, "it raises
troubling new questions regarding the legal
justifications for the war as well as the
integrity of our own administration."
Indeed, the minutes of the meeting on
which the London Times story was based make it
clear not only that Bush had already decided to go
to war, but that the main justifications it would
use for doing so were bogus.
"(T)he case was
thin," according to the minutes, which were finally
published for the first time in the US on
Monday by the small-circulation New York Review of
Books. "Saddam was not threatening his neighbors,
and his WMD [weapons of mass destruction] capacity
was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."
Of the US media, only the New York Times
and the Knight Ridder wire service reported the
news of the Blair minutes before last week, when
the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post,
under pressure from bloggers and media watchdogs,
published stories about it, albeit on their inside
pages.
"Bush wanted to remove Saddam,
through military action, justified by the
conjunction of terrorism and WMD," the most
explosive part of the minutes - now cited by Bush
critics as the "smoking gun" memo - stated. "But
the intelligence and the facts were being fixed
around the policy."
Even
the Washington Post's ombudsman,
Michael Getler, complained about the lack
of press interest in the story, saying he was "amazed"
that it took his paper two weeks to cover the
issue and that, given its apparent authenticity
and the support it obviously gave to critics'
charges that Bush was determined to go to war as
of July 2002 and that the intelligence was being
"fixed" accordingly - an issue that has still not
been forthrightly addressed by any of the
commissions chosen by Congress or the Defense
Department.
"Are Americans so jaded about
the deceptions perpetrated by our own government
to lead us into war in Iraq that we are no longer
interested in fresh and damning evidence of those
lies?" asked Joe Conason in Salon.com. "Or are the
editors and producers who oversee the American
news industry simply too timid to report that
proof on the evening broadcasts and front pages?"
After all, there are sometimes
lethal consequences to publishing or
propagating incorrect or inaccurate information, as
Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld reflected on Monday
afternoon before the final Newsweek retraction.
"People lost their lives. People are
dead," he said. "People need to be very careful
about what they say, just as they need to be
careful about what they do."
If they are
not, they become sons of bitches and lose all
their credibility, according to Rumsfeld's
spokesman.
(Inter Press
Service) |
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