Newsweek Says It Is Retracting Koran Report By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and NEIL A. LEWIS After a drumbeat of criticism from the Bush administration and others, Newsweek magazine yesterday went beyond an apology it issued Sunday and retracted an article published May 1 that stated that American interrogators at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had tried to rattle Muslim detainees by flushing a Koran down a toilet. The original article was blamed for inciting widespread protests and riots in the Muslim world, where desecration of the Koran is viewed as an incendiary act, and where at least 17 people were killed in the ensuing violence.
"Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Koran abuse at Guantánamo Bay," the statement from Newsweek said.
The carefully worded retraction came after the White House said the Newsweek article had damaged the image of the United States abroad. It reflected the severity of consequences that even one sentence in a brief news article can have at a time of intense anti-American sentiment overseas and political polarization, as well as extreme distrust of the mainstream media at home.
Mark Whitaker, editor of Newsweek, said in an interview that the magazine was retracting the part of the article saying sources told Newsweek that a coming military report would say interrogators had flushed a holy book down the toilet to unnerve detainees. As it turned out, Newsweek now says, there was one source. And Mr. Whitaker said that because that source had "backed away" from his original account, the magazine could "no longer stand by" it.
"I did not want to be in the position of splitting hairs," Mr. Whitaker said, "to look like we were being evasive or not fully forthcoming."
The magazine's retraction was the latest step in a complicated and fast-moving drama that involved a disparate cast of players, including one of the nation's top investigative news reporters and a cricket star in Pakistan. In the span of a few days, it has added a new dimension to the journalistic debate about anonymous sources as well as new questions about how the United States treats captives from the Muslim world.
In the interview, Mr. Whitaker contrasted his action with that of CBS News when it refused to back down immediately last year from a report that raised questions about President Bush's National Guard service.
"Clearly it became a problem for CBS because people thought they weren't acknowledging that they screwed up," Mr. Whitaker said.
He continued: "Unlike CBS, we felt we were being extremely forthcoming by publishing all the details and publishing the Pentagon's denials and saying we committed an error. But then it seemed that people felt like we weren't apologizing. In order for people to understand we had made an error, we had to say 'retraction' because that's the word they were looking for."
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