Newsweek Apologizes for Report of Koran Insult

New York Times: "The information at issue is a sentence in a short "Periscope" item on May 9 about a planned United States Southern Command investigation into the abuse of prisoners at the detention facility in Guantánamo. It said that American military investigators had found evidence in an internal report that during the interrogation of detainees, American guards had flushed a Koran down a toilet as a way of trying to provoke the detainees into talking.

Pentagon officials said that no such information was included in the internal report and responded to Newsweek's apology with unusual anger.

In its article published today, the magazine said that although the reference to the Koran was a side element in an article, it was worth printing because it had come from an American government official. Other news organizations had written that American guards had desecrated the Koran, Newsweek said, but those reports were based on testimony from former detainees who had been released from Guantánamo.

The magazine said that because of reports of other abuses of prisoners by guards at Guantánamo, the possibility that a Koran was flushed down the toilet did not seem that far-fetched. But it said that to Muslims, such an act was especially inflammatory.

In its reconstruction of what happened, Newsweek reported that a copy of the original news item was apparently waved at a news conference on May 6 in Pakistan (the articles are dated several days after their actual publication).

By Tuesday, students in the eastern city of Jalalabad in Afghanistan had started anti-American demonstrations, citing the Newsweek article. It is unclear exactly how the students and other protesters learned of the article, though many Afghans get information from radio programs broadcast in local languages by the Voice of America, BBC and Radio Liberty, which often broadcast foreign news reports.

Mr. Di Rita, the Pentagon spokesman, said that the Pentagon began to dig into the allegations in the Newsweek article last Tuesday, when the violence started in Afghanistan. The next day, the military's Southern Command said in a statement that the four-star commander, Gen. Bantz J. Craddock, had ordered an investigation into the report.

At a Pentagon news conference last Thursday, reporters asked Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about the incident. He played down the Newsweek connection to the violence, citing an assessment from the senior commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry of the Army.

President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, commenting on the reported desecration after returning home on Saturday from a trip to Europe, said he blamed "enemies of stability" for exploiting student anger about it to foment violence. Afghans in Ghazni, a city south of Kabul that suffered some of the worst violence, have also said that local "troublemakers" may have taken advantage of the anger to shoot at police.

At his news conference, General Myers said that military investigators at Guantánamo were searching their interrogation logs to find the case cited in the Newsweek article.

By the end of the week, the military had completed its internal inquiry and was convinced that the allegation as reported by Newsweek never happened and that the article had played a significant role in inciting the violence in Afghanistan, Mr. Di Rita said. He informed Newsweek that its report was wrong.

Newsweek said this prompted Mr. Isikoff to go back to his source to try to confirm the original account.

"But the official, still speaking anonymously, could no longer be sure that these concerns had surfaced in the SouthCom report," Newsweek wrote, suggesting that it had perhaps been in other investigative reports. "Told of what the Newsweek source said, Di Rita exploded," the magazine wrote. " 'How could he be credible now?' " it quoted him as saying.

On CNN yesterday, Stephen J. Hadley, President Bush's national security adviser, said the administration was looking into the report "vigorously," and that if it proved to be true, disciplinary action would be taken against those responsible. He also said that certain radical Islamic elements were using the report as an excuse to incite protests against the government."