QURAN FLAP Editor retracts flawed article

The Newsweek piece sparked violence that killed 16 people or more.
WASHINGTON POST
NEW YORK -- Newsweek issued a formal retraction Monday 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 Guantanamo Bay detention facility had flushed a copy of the Quran 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.
The damage-control efforts by Newsweek followed criticism by White House spokesman Scott McClellan, who called it "puzzling" that Newsweek, in his view, had "stopped short of a retraction."
"That story has damaged the image of the United States abroad and damaged the credibility of the media at home," McClellan said in an interview. He said that Americans, including President Bush, "share in the outrage that this report was published in the first place."
Whitaker said in the interview that Newsweek is "still trying to ascertain" whether there is any evidence that such a Quran episode took place, as some detainees have alleged. Last year, four former British detainees charged in a lawsuit that Guantanamo guards not only beat and stripped them but also threw prisoners' Qurans into a toilet.
Newsweek, however, had alleged that the U.S. Southern Command had confirmed that an interrogator defiled the sacred Muslim text.
Officials' comments
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the story has "done a lot of harm" to U.S. efforts to reach out to the Muslim world. She told journalists that "it's appalling that this story got out there. ... The sad thing was that there was a lot of anger that got stirred by a story that was not very well founded."
Rice said she hopes "that everybody will step back and take a look at how they handled this -- everybody."
Pentagon officials said they investigate all specific and credible allegations, but not always on the media's timetable. Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters that military investigators had reviewed 25,000 pages of documents and found that more than one detainee stopped up a toilet with pages from the Quran as a protest -- but discovered no evidence that U.S. interrogators had done such a thing.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld noted that it takes time to review 25,000 pages, adding: "People need to be very careful about what they say, just as they need to be very careful about what they do."
Newsweek, which is owned by the Washington Post Co., said Sunday that its brief item was based on an unnamed senior U.S. official who now says he can "no longer be sure" of the information provided to reporter Michael Isikoff.
McClellan said the story "appears to be very shaky from the get-go" and rests on "a single anonymous source who cannot substantiate the allegation that was made." Isikoff said Sunday that "there was absolutely no lapse in journalistic standards."