In all the stories flying around about desecration of the Qu’ran and identity politics, there seems to be a general acceptance of the White House line that there’s reason to believe the Newsweek story caused riots in Afghanistan.

This is demonstrably not proven, and failure to keep pointing that out will enable the regime to continue to blame everything on Newsweek, the media, and liberals generally. Josh@TPM spotted this in the NYTimes days ago, and Media Matters posted a link to what I’m about to quote, but the other, flashier, faker story — Newsweek Kills 15 — makes a better headline, I guess.

Here’s what General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had to say at a press briefing on Thursday, May 12 (last question, near the bottom of the page):

Q: Do either one of you have anything about the demonstrations in Afghanistan, which were apparently sparked by reports that there was a lack of respect by some interrogators at Guantanamo for the Koran.  Do either one of you have anything to say about that?

GENERAL MYERS: It’s the — it’s a judgment of our commander in Afghanistan, General Eikenberry, that in fact the violence that we saw in Jalalabad was not necessarily the result of the allegations about disrespect for the Koran — and I’ll get to that in just a minute — but more tied up in the political process and the reconciliation process that President Karzai and his Cabinet is conducting in Afghanistan.  So that’s — that was his judgment today in an after-action of that violence.  He didn’t — he thought it was not at all tied to the article in the magazine.

Not.

At.

All.

Good thing the regime’s press secretaries and the bunch of stenographers we call the national media know the situation in Afghanistan better than the military commander in Afghanistan, huh?
Either unconcerned with or totally unaware of (I’m not sure which is worse) the total lack of evidence other than the White House’s assertion, the corporate media has almost universally emphasized the Blame Newsweek story. Various outlets ponder the effectiveness of the retraction at quelling Muslim anger, while Thomas Friedman quails that there seems to be more outrage in the Muslim world over desecration of the Qu’ran than there is over the slaughter of innocents — all skipping over the probability that the riots have more to do with the actions of the US-backed Afghani government than a piece in Newsweek.

Also lost in all the conventional wisdom is the fact that, though given the opportunity, the government didn’t even bother to deny the Qu’ran story until the $#!+ started to fly, as Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker pointed out to NewsHour:

We gave the Pentagon the opportunity to respond. As I said, we went to the quite extraordinary lengths of actually showing a top official every sentence of the story. That official challenged other aspects of the story but not the Quran detail. And then after we published it, no one in the government came back to us and said, you got this wrong; you should correct it; this is going to have dire consequences for 11 days — until afterwards.

Perhaps it took them that long to figure out that the SouthCom report the document cited, wasn’t where the Qu’ran story actually appeared. Or, perhaps they noticed the error and said nothing. Either way, they had the chance to say “this is false,” and they chose not to.

Let’s recap: Newsweek gave the government the opportunity to deny the Qu’ran story, the government denied other parts of the same article but not the Qu’ran item, and the military commander in Afghanistan says that the riots had nothing to do with the Newsweek article, and — lest we forget — accounts of interrogators desecrating the Qu’ran have been in the public awareness for years.

So, what exactly did Newsweek do wrong?

Oh, right: they published information unflattering to the current Government of the United States of America.

As Bill Moyers recently said of the conservative war on public broadcasting: “We’re seeing unfold a contemporary example of the age old ambition of power and ideology to squelch and punish journalists who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable.“

Newsweek caved under relentless pressure from the White House and the Right-Wing Noise Machine, the princes and priests. Newsweek accepted responsibility for the deaths and retracted the article not because they thought they were wrong, but because they wanted to avoid suffering considerable damage, damage wildly out of proportion to the degree of their error. As a consequence, this event has furthered the precedent that publishing a single item critical of the regime — however true that item may be — which is even slightly incorrect in its sourcing or attribution, is enough to destroy the credibility of the article, the outlet, the medium, and by implication anybody anywhere who is openly critical of our government.

At the end of the day, as Chris Bowers put it, It Doesn’t Matter If The Newsweek Story Is True. All that matters is the moral of the story: Cross the regime, and you’re gonna get burned.

Or, as the freepers are continually warning anybody who gets attention by speaking out against the regime: We’ll do to you what we did to Dan Rather.

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