Retraction of the the retraction on page B59

I'm amazed this is getting any coverage at all, given the free press chill in the air, but apparently, all that outrage about Newsweek printing the story about interrogators flushing the Koran down the toilet? Funny story. Turns out it's true:

The conflicting accounts of how U.S. military guards handled Muslim prisoners' Qurans at Guantanamo Bay show two sides of a psychological war between the terror suspects and their holders.

Detainees have claimed guards used the holy books as a weapon to break their will to resist interrogation. The Pentagon asserts that some detainees fabricated their claims in a calculated effort to agitate the wider prison population and undermine the control of the U.S. military.

In the latest disclosure, declassified FBI reports showed that detainees at the U.S. naval prison in Cuba told FBI and military interrogators on a number of occasions as early as April 2002 three months after the first prisoners arrived at the makeshift prison that guards abused them and desecrated the Quran.

"Their behavior is bad," one detainee is quoted as saying of his guards during an interrogation by an FBI special agent on July 22, 2002. "About five months ago the guards beat the detainees. They flushed a Quran in the toilet."

The report was obtained by the ACLU through yet another Freedom of Information Act request. Why do Freedom of Information Act requests hate freedom?

Anyone who was paying attention the last couple of years knew that detainees were making these statements. That doesn't make them true, but that wasn't even what Newsweek claimed. Newsweek said the allegations would be in the upcoming Southern Command report. Turns out it was in reports dating back three years.

Still want to play that "Newsweek lied, people died" game, Michelle Malkin?

Scotty McClellan certainly doesn't. Because he came out and flatly denied ever saying that the Newsweek story cost people their lives. I know, get up off the floor. It's ridiculous. But read this:

Q: One other question. Karzai was quite definite in saying that he didn't believe that the violence in Afghanistan was directly tied to the Newsweek article about Koran desecration. Yet, from this podium, you have made that link. So --

McCLELLAN: Actually, I don't think you're actually characterizing what was said accurately.

Q: By whom?

McCLELLAN: As I said last week, and as President Karzai said today, and as General Myers had said previously, the protest may well have been pre-staged. The discredited report was damaging. It was used to incite violence. But those who espouse an ideology of hatred and oppression and murder don't need an excuse to incite violence. But the reports from the region showed how this story was used to incite violence.

Apparently it now takes exactly one week for statements to get flushed down the memory hole. How much clearer could you be than saying "people have lost their lives," like on May 16? Or "People did lose their lives," on May 17? Do you think that if it doesn't show up in the paper today, we won't remember? I know we all lead busy lives, and Paris Hilton has a new Carl's Jr. commercial out and everything, but there are these things called transcripts, and when you say "people did lose their lives" in answering a question about the Newsweek article, you can't come back the next week and say "I never said that people lost their lives" because of the Newsweek article.

Clearly we all know what the next move for this White House will be. Stopping these goddamn Freedom of Information Act requests! They're clearly the problem.

Actually, they're doing just that. According to this diary at Kos, a recent ruling has ensured that FOIA requests will be costly, time-consuming, and nearly impossible to complete. Particularly costly, as the ruling prohibits those requesting documents from being reimbursed by the government for attorney fees. It's the classic corporate endgame of making it too expensive to sue them.