Newsweek journalist helps circle the wagons
In this week’s edition of Newsweek, Anna Quindlen wrote an article titled "Life of the Closed Mind" in the last-page column "The Last Word". Though what I’m focusing on here was not the point of the article, I took exception to her mentioning of conspiracies and their purveyors. "It’s no wonder," she writes, "after the conspiracy that took place right under our noses came to fruition on September 11, that we have a nation of conspiracy theorists. But everything now is a conspiracy: a right-wing conspiracy, a Clinton conspiracy, above all a media conspiracy. When Newsweek retracted its story in which an unnamed source claimed an investigation had turned up desecration of the Qur’an by interrogators in the Guantanamo Bay detention center, conspiracy theorists went wild: the magazine was a liberal hotbed of hatred for the military, the magazine was set up by the Pentagon to mask the administration’s own malfeasance. No one believes in mistakes anymore, in the reporter who mistakenly believed the source was trustworthy, the editors who trusted the reporter’s skill and judgement. Mistakes are an inevitable byproduct of work done by human beings under deadline pressure. But today, human error in so many arenas has been supplanted by ubiquitous suggestion of sinister forces"
Fine, I can understand and agree with her perspective; mistakes are made when the pressure is on. That’s a fact of life. But does anyone really think that, if the story had been something less than what it was, if it had had nothing to do with anything dealing with the Bush administration, it would have been rushed into print without the proper fact checking? I don’t.
The fact is that the story had the aura of scandal about it; that it had the possibility of causing problems, or at the very least some minor embarrassment for, the Bush White House. That is why it was thrown into the public’s line of view without the proper steps being taken, the proper checks. It turned out that it was not true….people rioted and people died. For something that was not true.
Now, they have another unsubstantiated claim, from 3 years ago, by the same source, claiming abuse by plumbing of the Qur’an by guards at Gitmo.
The guy’s a liar. None of it ever happened, and I’ll tell you why I think that:
Granted, I may be misunderstanding, but from what I’ve seen, the report is that the guards flushed the book down the toilet …..now, I’m a janitor (or, to be more PC, a "Custodian") by trade.
I’ve seen what very frequently happens when people try to flush something as shapeless and flimsy as a wad of paper towels, or perhaps an excessively large wad of toilet paper. I’ve even seen what happened when some moron accidentally dropped an open plastic sandwich bag of tampons into the bowel and tried to flush it. The toilet stopped up of course, and wouldn’t flush it away. Any of it. We had to snake it out.
Would someone tell me how something as solid, and the size of, a prayer book, is going to flush away? How it would even fit from the bowl down into the pipe? It wouldn’t. The whole thing was made up by the conveniently "unnamed source" in order to cause problems.
As I say, I focused here on just a small section of Quindlen’s article, but that’s the part that leapt out at me. The rest of it wasn’t bad, but I didn’t agree with much of it.
She’s defending her employers and fellow journalists, and that’s okay. But for her to so rationalize what was obviously shoddy work sloppily done in the name of simply getting the word out just so it could cause problems is just wrong.
And that’s all it was for; to cause problems for a president and an administration they loath. The only ones who don’t realize it are people like Anna Quindlen, and they simply don’t want to know it.