Just Making It Up
Tom Maguire has another possible oopsie by that famed journalistic dynamic duo The Washington Post and Newsweek.
The Washington Post’s Anne Applebaum whistles past the graveyard:
Now, it is possible that no interrogator at Guantanamo Bay ever flushed pages of the Koran down the toilet, as the now-retracted Newsweek story reported — although several former Guantanamo detainees have alleged just that. It is also possible that Newsweek reporters relied too much on an uncertain source, or that the magazine confused the story with (confirmed) reports that prisoners themselves used Korans to block toilets as a form of protest.
Confirmed she claims.
However, we have Pentagon Spokesman Larry Di Rita saying on May 17 (emphasis added):
MR. DI RITA: We’ve found nothing that would substantiate precisely — anything that you just said about the treatment of a Koran. We have — other than what we’ve seen, that it’s possible detainees themselves have done with pages of the Koran — and I don’t want to overstate that either because it’s based on log entries that have to be corroborated.
Tom Maguire reasonably asks for Ms. Applebaum’s confirmation.
Now, Ms. Appelbaum may have updated her info, or done some fine reportorial work to advance this story by contacting the Pentagon. Or Google-News may have betrayed me.
But my confidence in the WaPo is not at its peak just now, and since she does not even hint at a source for the news that this report is now confirmed, I would love to see some reassurance on this point.
I think the Legacy Media are so lost as their Empire crumbles (OK, tis the season), but really, are they fiction writers or journalists or, perish the thought, reporters?