Help Bury The Dead 

It seems that the Newsweek Koran flushing story was a fabrication:

Newsweek magazine said on Sunday it erred in a May 9 report that U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, and apologized to the victims of deadly Muslim protests sparked by the article.

Editor Mark Whitaker said the magazine inaccurately reported that U.S. military investigators had confirmed that personnel at the detention facility in Cuba had flushed the Muslim holy book down the toilet.

The report sparked angry and violent protests across the Muslim world from Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more than 100 injured, to Pakistan to Indonesia to Gaza. In the past week it was condemned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and by the Arab League.

Plenty of coverage on Instapundit here and here. Michelle Malkin chimes in as well as Boots and Sabers. Austin Bay also has a long and well thought out take on the whole subject.

My suggestion to the editors of Newsweek is that they get their asses on the first available flight to Afghanistan with some shovels and help bury the dead from the riots that they caused! Instead they seem happy enough to say "Whoops. Our bad."

I wrote about this sort of thing last year during the Rathergate Scandal, and I think it holds just as true today. The danger presented here is with "undisclosed sources":

What bugs me even more is the media's ravenous foothold on a right that doesn't exist. Courts time and time again have stated that the media does not have the right (in court at least) to withhold the identity of a source. The media says it does due to "Freedom of the Press". This is bullshit. They claim that if they are required to disclose sources, no sources would come to them, and therefore they would not be able to accurately report events, eroding their 1st amendment rights. Worked great in this case didn't it? The problem is that this system is easily abused, and CBS is not taking the obvious step to remedy the problem.

Imagine if CBS were to say not only who gave them the documents, but also said who performed the poor authentication of them. They would be proclaiming to the world that we will protect your anonymity if you provide accurate information. But if you lie to us, we can't... no... we won't protect you. Wouldn't that bring even more integrity to news media? Shouldn't that be something that they'd want to do? Instead CBS is protecting liars and forgers, and destroying what little credibility they had with us. What does that say about the rest of their news? As far as I'm concerned now, CBS is just another Billy Bob's School of Journalism.

Now it's Newsweek that is protected the identity of people with bad information. Time to make those people own up to what they said. Any of you who still happen to have a subscription to that magazine... I would suggest you cancel soon. You are now the proud subscriber to bird cage lining.