What Fucking Balls

A magazine made what may be a serious mistake (though of course there's a heap of other documented cases of the military's systematic use of severe humiliation tactics, subsequently buried after the initial uproar over Abu Graib):

Newsweek magazine, under fire for an article that prompted violent protests by mistakenly reporting that U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had desecrated the Quran, said Monday it was investigating the matter and would make other corrections or retractions if needed.
***
"It's puzzling. While Newsweek now acknowledges that they got the facts wrong, they refuse to retract the story," said presidential spokesman Scott McClellan. "I think there's a certain journalistic standard that should be met. In this instance it was not.
"This was a report based on a single anonymous source that could not substantiate the allegation that was made," McClellan added. "The report has had serious consequences. People have lost their lives. The image of the United States abroad has been damaged. I just find it puzzling."

Let's get this straight: It has been definitively proven that the Bush Administration intentionally lied to justify its invasion of Iraq, which led to hundreds of thousands dead and wounded, and free promotion for Al-Qaeda's recruiting department. They've never admitted a mistake, and our Kommander-and-Thief has even joked about the fact that there were no WMDs. The incompetence of their intelligence gathering and war planning has been shown to be roughly equivalent to that of the Russians in WWI. And they have the nerve to criticize the "journalistic standards" of a magazine? As if Newsweek is responsible for increasing anti-American sentiment around the world, and not Bush's militant imperialist policies.

What fucking balls.

UPDATE: kos has a similar post, without pointing out the obvious.

UPDATE: Taibbi chimes in:

It's funny. The only time anyone thinks to blast the use of "unnamed sources" is when the mistake occurs in that rarest of phenomena in mainstream journalism: the dissenting piece of investigative journalism. *** [K]issing ass is not a crime in America, while questioning the government often is. At least, you better not screw it up if you try. God help you then.