"News" Week

"People lost their lives. People are dead. People need to be very careful about what they say, just as they need to be careful about what they do." - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (May 17, 2005)

"Bring 'em on." - George W. Bush (July 3, 2003)

"Newsweek Lied. People Died." - Conservative Pundit and Member of The Joey Nichols Club, Michelle Malkin (May 15, 2005)

The Downing Street Memo, recently leaked, reveals that President George W. Bush decided to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in summer 2002 and, determined to ensure that U.S. intelligence data supported his policies, "fixed" the intelligence and facts relevent to WMD.

1,804 - Current number of Iraq Coalition Casualties

21,707 to 24, 628 - Number of civilians reported killed by military intervention in Iraq

"I do think (the Newsweek article has) done a lot of harm," (Secretary of State Condoleezza) Rice said. "Of course, 16 people died but it's also done a lot of harm to America's efforts" to demonstrate tolerance and breed goodwill in the Muslim world."

Here's an example of how the ultra-conservative NY Post, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, demonstrates tolerance toward Muslim Shites: With a cheap joke.



And by the way:

Q: Do either one of you have anything about the demonstrations in Afghanistan, which were apparently sparked by reports that there was a lack of respect by some interrogators at Guantanamo for the Koran. Do either one of you have anything to say about that?

GEN. MYERS: It's the -- it's a judgment of our commander in Afghanistan, General Eikenberry, that in fact the violence that we saw in Jalalabad was not necessarily the result of the allegations about disrespect for the Koran -- and I'll get to that in just a minute -- but more tied up in the political process and the reconciliation process that President Karzai and his Cabinet is conducting in Afghanistan. So that's -- that was his judgment today in an after- action of that violence. He didn't -- he thought it was not at all tied to the article in the magazine.

General Craddock, our commander of Southern Command, has been in Guantanamo for the last couple of days digging into this issue to see if there was a time when the Koran was not respected. I can tell you that the version of the Koran that we provide to detainees is approved by the ICRC. So we're very careful about that. They have looked through the logs, the interrogation logs, and they cannot confirm yet that there were ever the case of the toilet incident, except for one case, a log entry, which they still have to confirm, where a detainee was reported by a guard to be ripping pages out of a Koran and putting in the toilet to stop it up as a protest. But not where the U.S. did it.

Now, there -- so it's something we're going to look at. That's still unconfirmed; it's a log entry that has to be confirmed. There are several log entries that show that the Koran may have been moved to -- and the detainees became irritated about it, but never an incident where it was thrown in the toilet.

- U.S. Department of Defense briefing, May 12, 2005