Ladies and Gentlemen, We Have a Scapegoat

These guys are shameless. Absolutely shameless. A couple of weeks ago, Newsweek published its now infamous item about an upcoming report from the U.S. Southern Command it claimed would include an incident in which an interrogator at Guantanamo flushed a Koran down the toilet. Shortly thereafter, riots broke out in Afghanistan and across the Muslim world.

On Thursday, May 12, General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, in a joint press appearance with Donald Rumsfeld, told reporters that the riots were not related to the Newsweek article:

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.

But that was before it occurred to the administration to scapegoat Newsweek. Yesterday during his press gaggle, Press Secretary Scott McLellan changed the official story:

This report has had serious consequences. It has caused damage to the image of the United States abroad. It has -- people have lost their lives. It has certainly caused damage to the credibility of the media, as well, and Newsweek, itself.

Before scapegoating: “Not at all tied to the article.”

After scapegoating: “It has caused damage . . . people have lost their lives.” (It's really a shame, because everything's been going so swimmingly up to now.)

But let’s don’t forget what specifically Newsweek retracted: “Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Qur'an abuse at Guantanamo Bay.”

They’re saying nothing about whether any Korans have been desecrated in any way in Guantanamo. They’re merely stating that the report they cited didn’t include the charges they'd claimed it included. (Why they didn’t offer this retraction immediately after their source backed down is a mystery. It was clear pretty early that, regardless of the truth of the Koran desecration incident itself, that charge was not made in that report. Dragging their feet before finally giving in allowed the right wing press slam to gain momentum.)

And what about those charges of flushing a copy of the Koran? Despite McLellan’s insistence to the contrary yesterday (“The Department of Defense said last week that they could find no credible evidence of it either. They have looked into it.”), the Pentagon has stated that this and other reports of desecration of the Koran are still being investigated and are probably several weeks from being completed. So we don’t know how much truth there might be in that allegation. But did General Myers almost give us a hint last week?

There are several log entries that show that the Koran may have been moved to -- and the detainees became irritated about it, but never an incident where it was thrown in the toilet.

That’s word for word, punctuation mark for punctuation mark, from the Defense Department transcript. It reads as though Myers started to say something and then caught himself. What do you think?

This story is all over the blogoverse, but for a nice pithy, prickly summation, Keith Olbermann offers a good place to start.