Isikoff should have nailed that down before he rushed to print. Why didn't he? Because it fit with what has become journalistic orthodoxy on the War on Terror. Many journalists seem to believe that we have become little different from our enemies. It is all about moral equivalence: The enemy kills innocent people; we kill innocent people (though the media grudgingly admit the latter occurs more often by accident). The enemy tortures and beheads its victims; we strip ours naked and put hoods over their heads while making them perform sexual acts. If you read only the pages of the New York Times or most of the other big dailies or weekly magazines, you'd believe that the United States -- as a matter of policy -- seeks to degrade Muslim detainees at every opportunity.
In fact, the U.S. military has bent over backwards to respect the religious beliefs of some very dangerous fanatics who want to kill us. We give detainees in Iraq and Guantanamo copies of the Koran; we allow them to pray and celebrate their feast days; and we strictly prohibit any disrespect to detainees' religious beliefs and observance. The military has gone so far as to proscribe who may touch the Koran and how it must be handled. In a January 2003 memo, the Pentagon issued rules saying only Muslim chaplains and interpreters can handle the Koran, and only after donning clean gloves in plain sight of the detainees. The memo directs personnel to use both hands when handling the Koran out of "respect and reverence."
The Washington Post reported this information -- but only after Newsweek retracted its original story. Just as much of the media jumped on CBS once it became clear that Dan Rather and company had been duped by Democrat partisans during the campaign, the media is doing some hand-wringing over the Newsweek flap. But mistakes like the one Michael Isikoff and Newsweek made will continue to occur if the media refuse to become as skeptical of those who hate America as they are of those who love and defend her.