stop saying that!

These days, whenever I make brief forays into mainstream media, or when it jumps out at me and I can't avoid it, I see or hear the phrase "now-retracted Newsweek story," or "a story in Newsweek, which has since been retracted". That's the party line: the story was false, Newsweek retracted it. Even though the story was true, Newsweek wasn't the first to report it by any means, and the retraction was coerced.

This morning I find this on the front page of the New York Times:

Newly released documents show that detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, complained repeatedly to F.B.I. agents about disrespectful handling of the Koran by military personnel and, in one case in 2002, said they had flushed a Koran down a toilet.

The prisoners' accounts are described by the agents in detailed summaries of interrogations at Guantanamo in 2002 and 2003. The documents were among more than 300 pages turned over by the F.B.I. to the American Civil Liberties Union in recent days and publicly disclosed Wednesday.

The story goes on to say that these are the unsubstantiated charges of prisoners (what, the guards don't won't corroborate? I'm shocked!), and that none of the newly released documents confirm the Newsweek report. Uh-huh. File this under "yellowcake from Niger," or perhaps "weapons of mass destruction related activities," or perhaps "this was a war of liberation".

By the way, those "newly released documents" are a product of the ACLU's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The FOIA that the government is trying to dismantle...