BIG NEWS WEEK.(scandal over Newsweek reports on alleged desecration of Koran by interrogators at Guantanamo Bay )

The one person most directly responsible for touching off the current frenzy over alleged Koran abuse by American interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, more than anybody at Newsweek, was a Pakistani politician named Imran Khan. Khan is an Islamic populist, not exactly a rarity in that part of the world, but with a difference. Several differences, in fact. He is, first of all, a wealthy sports celebrity--a global cricket star for two decades--and a national hero not only for that but also because he built his country's first cancer hospital. He is a graduate of Oxford, and so thoroughly Westernized that his private life is fodder for the tabloids. After he laid down his cricket bat, he became increasingly devout, and in 1996 he founded his own political party. He is its only member of parliament, but his voice is listened to in Pakistan and beyond. Initially a supporter of General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's President, he now attacks him as an "American puppet." Khan says he wants Pakistanis to be America's "friends, but not lackeys." He has no sympathy with terrorism or dictatorship. He has even suggested that only democratically elected governments should be allowed to vote at the United Nations. In other words, he is pretty nearly the beau ideal of the sort of Muslim leader we want, and need, on "our" side.

Newsweek went to press with its story--three hundred words in the "Periscope" section, written by Michael Isikoff and John Barry--on April 30th. The item's most sensational assertion, attributed to "sources," was that "interrogators, in an attempt to rattle suspects, flushed a Koran down a toilet." The story added that that this "finding," among others, was "expected in an upcoming report by the U.S. Southern Command in Miami."

For five days, nothing. Then, on May 6th, Khan, in a press conference in Islamabad, waved a copy of the offending issue and thundered, "This is what the U.S. is doing--desecrating the Koran." And, rhetorically addressing Musharraf: "This war on terrorism is self-defeating if, on the one hand, you are demanding that we help them"--that is, us--"and, on the other hand, they are desecrating the book on which our entire faith is based." Khan's remarks were broadcast repeatedly throughout the Muslim world. The riots began on May 10th; in Afghanistan, seventeen people died and more than a hundred were injured.

Two weeks after the item's publication, the Pentagon registered its first objection. On May 15th, Newsweek published a four-hundred-word note by Mark Whitaker, the editor, saying that the magazine's "original source" now "couldn't be certain about reading of the alleged Koran incident in the report we cited, and said it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts." Whitaker added, "We regret that we got any part of our story wrong." On May 16th, after a day of bitter attacks from Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, and others, many of them accusing Newsweek of having blood on its hands, Whitaker issued this one-sentence statement: "Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Koran abuse at Guantanamo Bay."

In many quarters, including some with no particular ideological or political axe to grind, Newsweek's stumble is being treated as a journalistic felony on a par with Jayson Blair's deliberate and repeated fabrications at the Times or CBS News's gullible trumpeting of the forged Bush-National Guard documents. Not even close. In a careful chronology that Newsweek, to its credit, published in the same issue as Whitaker's editor's note, Evan Thomas described Michael Isikoff's principal informant as "a longtime reliable source, a senior U.S. government official who was knowledgeable about the matter." Before the "Periscope" item was published, Thomas wrote, John Barry showed a draft to "a senior Defense official," who steered him away from one detail--that a certain general might be a target of the investigation--but "was silent about the rest of the item." Newsweek evidently interpreted that silence as confirmation of a sort, thereby justifying its use of the plural "sources."

Newsweek has been widely pilloried, particularly in the ...