Flushing Newsweek By David Wallace-Wells

Flushing Newsweek By David Wallace-Wells: "Newsweek finds a rare defender in the Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum, who writes that the story was merely a pretext for the riots, not their cause. Conservative Andrew Sullivan, an outspoken critic of the Bush administration on torture issues, offers another perspective. 'I think it's telling that some bloggers have devoted much, much more energy to covering the Newsweek error than they ever have to covering any sliver of the widespread evidence of detainee abuse that made the Newsweek piece credible in the first place,' he writes. 'A simple question: after U.S. interrogators have tortured over two dozen detainees to death, after they have wrapped one in an Israeli flag, after they have smeared naked detainees with fake menstrual blood, after they have told one detainee to 'Fuck Allah,' after they have ordered detainees to pray to Allah in order to kick them from behind in the head, is it completely beyond credibility that they would also have desecrated the Koran?' Though he does fault Newsweek, Sullivan believes that, 'Three factors interacted here: media error/bias, Islamist paranoia, and a past and possibly current policy of religiously-intolerant torture. No one comes out looking good.'"