"A controversial article from Harper's Magazine, which won the National Magazine Awards' prize for reporting, what many consider the Pulitzer Prize for magazines, continues to be plagued by accusations of factual inaccuracy. A Monday article from AdWeek further suggested that the award had more to do with the issue's politics than the article's merits.
The piece, which suggests a possible conspiracy in covering up murders of inmates at Guantanamo Bay, was supplied wholesale to the folks at Harper's, who went to press despite a lack of hard sourcing for the story. In fact, the evidence undergirding it was apparently so thin that even the hard-left New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh, who has crusaded against a number of prominent elements of the war on terrorism, including Guantanamo, would not touch it.
So a piece that won an award for reporting involved no actual investigation by the outlet that published it. Serious questions about its factual accuracy remain. The ideological parity between Harper's and the American Society of Magazine Editors, which administers the National Magazine Awards, suggests political considerations at play. That the Harper's editor who approved the story had suggested "coordinat[ing]" news coverage to then-candidate Obama's benefit on the infamous Journolist only reinforces that view."............
This reminds me of the time Newsweek incorrectly reported that an American interrogator flushed a Koran down the toilet in Guantanamo. It was clearly a politically inspired hack job, because who here really cares about such a minor incident?
Anyway, many people did care in the Muslim world and died because of that. Just because of the cheap shot by Newsweek.
And yes, I criticized when that idiot preacher burned Korans as well, which resulted in deaths. But at least that story was correctly reported, so far as I know.
Newsweek issued a formal retraction yesterday of the flawed story that sparked deadly riots in Afghanistan and other countries, after the magazine came under increasingly sharp criticism from White House, State Department and Pentagon officials.
The magazine's statement retracted its charge that U.S. military investigators had confirmed that an American interrogator at the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had flushed a copy of the Koran down a toilet. Newsweek Editor Mark Whitaker said he thought the magazine had already "retracted what we think we may have gotten wrong" in an editor's note published Sunday and in media interviews. "We've called it an error," he said. "We've called it a mistake."
But, he said, "it became clear people weren't quite hearing that and were getting hung up" on the semantics.
The May 1 item triggered violent protests last week in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia and other countries, in which at least 16 people were killed.
But wait, I thought Barry Obama was going to close Club Gitmo... I seem to recall some part of his campaign platform being concentrated on moving those poor, unfortunate, detainees at Club Gitmo off the island paradise to some more humane state side facility and granting them the same rights as US citizens or letting them go all together.
I guess Barry is too busy being Irish and hanging out with Her Magesty the Queen of England to be bothered with Club Gitmo any time soon...
I can explain it to you but I can't understand it for you.
"Any man who thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the Government take care of him; better take a closer look at the American Indian." - Henry Ford
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges; When the Republic is at its most corrupt the laws are most numerous. - Publius Cornelius Tacitus
