Rove's fingerprints???

Atrios reports that the right is having a field day over Newsweek's so-called retraction of its story about an FBI report describing the flushing of a copy of the Qu'ran down a toilet at Guantanamo Bay. However, The Sideshow looks a bit more closely at this so-called "retraction":

In the wake of the riots in Afghanistan, there have been a flurry of accusations that Newsweek is responsible for the violence, and now, suddenly, fitting a curious pattern, the sources - and the reporter - are being questions.

Last Friday, a top Pentagon spokesman told us that a review of the probe cited in our story showed that it was never meant to look into charges of Qur'an desecration. The spokesman also said the Pentagon had investigated other desecration charges by detainees and found them "not credible." Our original source later said he couldn't be certain about reading of the alleged Qur'an incident in the report we cited, and said it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts. Top administration officials have promised to continue looking into the charges, and so will we.

Note that nowhere does Newsweek actually retract the story, and none of their sources are actually denying it.

The similarities to the infamous CBS memos are remarkable: documents containing inflammatory material, fed to a journalist who's been critical of the Administration, that later turn out to be questionable.

Now, there's no proof that Karl Rove was behind the CBS memos. But when you consider that the so-called "blogger" who supposedly debunked them as forgeries was not a blogger at all, but a poster at the Free Republic messageboard who is a Republican operative with ties to Rove, combined with the documented incident years ago of Rove bugging his own office and claiming the campaign of the opponent of the candidate for whom he was working did it, it's consistent with the Rove modus operandi.

It would be ironic indeed if Isikoff's career were ruined, à la Dan Rather's, because he fell for reports that were fed him by Rove operatives, because it was Isikoff who was at the forefront of the mainstream media's participation in the Clinton witch hunt in the 1990's. Perhaps Isikoff felt he was immune because he's now been tough on both a Democratic and a Republican president. If this is the case, then he's a fool, because if I know that these people not only play to win, they play to crush their opposition into smithereens, how come he doesn't?

But the more important issue is whether the reports are, in fact true. I think this is still an open question. As much as the Administration is trying to paint Lynndie England and Charles Graner as loose cannons who committed the Abu Ghraib atrocities on their own, with absolutely no authorozation from higher-ups, that "theory" defies logic. Torture techniques that involve offense to detainees' faith are well-known to be an important part of the so-called "interrogations" of detainees. Why would they stop at desecration of the detainees' holy book?

If the reports are NOT true, and if the Administration fed erroneous information deliberately to Newsweek solely for the purpose of embarrassing or destroying the credibility of a reporter they perceive to have been too tough on the president, then the reprehensible conduct is on the part of the Administration, not of Newsweek for simply reporting information from a source. Of course, this Administration always finds political benefit in everything they do, and perhaps inflaming riots in Afghanistan and Pakistan helps draw media and the public's attention away from the now known fact that the entire Iraq war was based on Administration lies.

UPDATE: The Light of Reason notes (in a post that's worth reading in its entirety) that allegations of desecration of the Qu'ran at Guantanamo have been around since as early as July 2004. Here's a relevant passage from a Human Rights Watch report from last October:

Detainees also complained about the interference with their ability to pray and the lack of respect given to their religion. For example, the British detainees state that they were never given prayer mats and initially were not provided Korans. They also complained that when the Korans were provided, the guards “would kick the Koran, throw it into the toilet and generally disrespect it.”

Meanwhile, while the right is salivating over the opportunity to polish up the "Bush-hating liberal media" meme, please note that this, which should qualify as "high crimes and misdemeanors" by anyone with a brain, is still going largely uncovered in the mainstream press.