Our Image Abroad Has Been Damaged
White House Press Secretary Scottie McLellan has never uttered a more truthful statement--it's just a bit misdirected, according to Jacob Weisberg at Slate

Let's see. A mistake … lives lost … America's image abroad damaged. Does any of that sound vaguely familiar? A few instances do spring to mind. Newsweek didn't have anything to do with them. McClellan's boss did. Item: The Bush Administration endorsed poorly sourced and documented reports by Iraqi defectors that Saddam Hussein possessed and was continuing to develop weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear ones. On the basis of this mistake, Bush led the country into a war, which may or may not be justified depending on your point of view but which almost certainly would not have happened otherwise. So far, approximately 1,600 American military personnel, at least 2,000 Iraqi police and guardsmen, and upwards of 20,000 civilians have died as a direct result. America's reputation for speaking truthfully and acting in accord with international norms was flushed down the latrine, with very real consequences, including for our effort to contain nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea. Unlike the Newsweek story, the administration's WMD screw-up was not a good-faith error or the result of simple sloppiness and haste. As the recent Intelligence Commission report showed, the findings of the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, and Energy Department stretched the evidence for Iraqi WMD, which was then misused and oversold by former CIA director George Tenet and Vice President Dick Cheney, among others. [...] Item: Here are some things that Scott McClellan does not dispute happening at the Guantanamo detention center: A female interrogator removed some of her clothes and sat in the lap of a detainee who was a devout Muslim; a female interrogator smeared a detainee's face with what she told him was menstrual blood and said the water would be turned off in his cell, so he would be unable to wash; a female interrogator grabbed a prisoner by his genitals; an interrogator gagged with duct tape a prisoner who wouldn't stop chanting Quranic verses; commanders requested permission to use water torture on detainees to make them think they were suffocating; interrogators intimidated prisoners with vicious dogs. The scandalous mistreatment at Guantanamo, along with the denial of any legal rights to detainees, has done enormous damage to America's reputation for respecting human rights and abiding by the rule of law. None of this is said to excuse a piece of bad journalism by some good journalists. (Disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co., which also owns Newsweek.) But let's be clear: Newsweek hardly bears sole responsibility for rioting deaths in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which were fomented by anti-American agitators and reflect both a pathological religious fanaticism and anger over many other issues. What's more, Bush's flacks are in no position to prosecute this case. When it comes to torturing inmates to death, sexually humiliating prisoners, and otherwise doing our best to outrage the religious sensitivities of devout Muslims, Scott McClellan has nothing to say. But faced with an erroneous charge that an American guard might have insulted a copy of the Quran, he turns livid and demands satisfaction. There's something of a pot-and-kettle problem here.

Here's also a bit of commentary from MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who is quickly becoming my favorite news broadcaster:

Last Thursday, General Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Donald Rumsfeld’s go-to guy whenever the situation calls for the kind of gravitas the Secretary himself can’t supply, told reporters at the Pentagon that rioting in Afghanistan was related more to the on-going political reconciliation process there, than it was to a controversial note buried in the pages of Newsweek claiming that the government was investigating whether or not some nitwit interrogator at Gitmo really had desecrated a Muslim holy book. But Monday afternoon, while offering himself up to the networks for a series of rare, almost unprecedented sit-down interviews on the White House lawn, Press Secretary McClellan said, in effect, that General Myers, and the head of the after-action report following the disturbances in Jalalabad, Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, were dead wrong. The Newsweek story, McClellan said, “has done damage to our image abroad and it has done damage to the credibility of the media and Newsweek in particular. People have lost lives. This report has had serious consequences.” Whenever I hear Scott McClellan talking about ‘media credibility,’ I strain to remember who it was who admitted Jeff Gannon to the White House press room and called on him all those times. Whenever I hear this White House talking about ‘doing to damage to our image abroad’ and how ‘people have lost lives,’ I strain to remember who it was who went traipsing into Iraq looking for WMD that will apparently turn up just after the Holy Grail will — and at what human cost. Newsweek’s version of this story has varied from the others over the last two years — ones in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post, and British and Russian news organizations — only in that it quoted a government source who now says he didn’t have firsthand knowledge of whether or not the investigation took place (oops, sorry, shoulda mentioned that, buh-bye).

And from a later post:

And one more note on the original subject — "Qu'ran Abuse" — which somehow got lost in the frenzy of the last four days. On Sunday, May 1, the New York Times reported that as the military investigated abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the paper had spoken to a former detainee named Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi. He said that in his three years at Gitmo, there were three major hunger strikes by detainees — one of them after guards there had piled up copies of the Qu'ran, and stepped on them.         Al-Mutairi said that action was so bad, that even a senior officer at Gitmo got on the camp public address system, promised that abuse of the Qu'ran would stop, and apologized for it.         The Times also quoted an unidentified former U.S. interrogator at Guantanamo, who confirmed the hunger strike, and the broadcast apology, although he evidently did not witness the piling up of, and stepping on, the Qu'rans.