Leave it to the Media (and Fox in particular, who was hammering hard on this one). The “KOran flushing” incident is being reported as having been “bad reporting”; but , not excatly, as Juan Cole explains.
The Pentagon has claimed that the incident did not occur. Although the corporate media are now reporting that Newsweek had “backed off” the report, that isn’t true.
Newsweek explains that in response to Pentagon queries,
“On Saturday, Isikoff spoke to his original source, the senior government official, who said that he clearly recalled reading investigative reports about mishandling the Qur’an, including a toilet incident. But the official, still speaking anonymously, could no longer be sure that these concerns had surfaced in the SouthCom report.”
Isikoff’s source, in other words, stands by his report of the incident, but is merely tracing it to other paperwork. What difference does that make? Although Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita angrily denounced the source as no longer credible, in the real world you can’t just get rid of a witness because the person made a minor mistake with regard to a text citation. It is like saying that we can’t be sure someone has really read the Gospels because he said he read about Caiaphas in the Gospel of Mark rather than in the Gospel of John.