Muslim WakeUp! ran an article, yesterday, by Joshua Frank, concerning the recent Newsweek/Qur’ān brouhaha. Frank argues that Newsweek’s was a ‘cowardess reaction’: ‘They just pulled the story after being pressured by the Bush administration.’ He cites a few other reports of US military Qur’ān-toilet interrogation incidents.

I don’t especially sympathise with Newsweek’s situation: The trashy pseudo-news rag got caught in an uncomfortable situation. However, I think that Frank, and others on the Left, are a little unfair when they call Newsweek’s retraction a cowardly move: If, as they claim, their government informant will no longer stand by his story, they have no choice but to retract. But the should-they-have-retracted-earlier/should-they-never-have-retracted debate really isn’t of much interest to me. The White House and the Pentagon are using this to deflect attention from their more provably real failings, and the Left is sticking to it like a Gore-Lieberman bumper sticker because… well, because we’re stubborn and because most of us don’t really know what else to do. This is just another typical early 21^st century American political game.

What really bothers me is that Newsweek, the Pentagon, the American Left, and perhaps even protesters in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere in the Muslim world (though I can’t claim any real confidence in the causal explanations I’m reading) have placed greater importance on the word of one nameless, faceless US government official of unknown rank than on the testimonies of several former Muslim Guantánamo prisoners who were actually present for the experiences they describe.

The conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks dismissed the several former Gitmo-detainees rather casually, today:

Could there be a few more liberals willing to admit that prisoners routinely lie about their treatment? (Do we expect them to say their time in captivity wasn’t so bad?)

I hope you’re already raising at least one eyebrow, but even if this sounds reasonable at first, think about it again: The men who are making these claims are not current Guantánamo detainees (who are probably also mostly innocent, but for argument’s sake, let’s pretend that there’s good reason for their incarceration), but released, free men whom even the US government concedes were most likely never real threats to the United States. Now, these men claim that they were abducted by bad men, that they were imprisoned, that they were detained for many months, and that their religion was denigrated by their captors. We already know that the first three of these claims are true. We also have visual proof that US military interrogators were highly disrespectful of their wards in Abu Ghraib. And we have concerns from International Red Cross inspectors that there may have been and may still be human rights abuses in Gitmo. Now, I’ll grant that nothing’s proven, yet, and that the staff at Guantánamo must be considered innocent until proven otherwise, but why, why, for what possible reason could we consider these testimonies less news-worthy, less furor-worthy, less action-worthy than an anonymous tip from a distanced American paper-pusher? Because the men who tell these stories (Shafiq Rasul, Tarek Dergoul, Asif Iqbal, Abdul Razak, Mohammed Sangir…) are brown, bearded Muslims, and their individual voices simply don’t matter.

This is a far bigger issue than whether or not Newsweek needs to grow a pair: We as a culture need to grow a pair of ears and start listening to the stories that really matter from the people who tell them.

This entry was posted on Thursday, 19 May 2005 at 22:54 and is filed under News Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.