To listen to the right wingers and spinwits, the “liberal” Newsweek had to eat dirt over the “Koran in the Toilet” story, that Newsweek had “retracted” its story.

WRONG!

Newsweek did NOT retract its story that American interrogators had ripped up a Koran and flushed it down the toilet.

See the link and excerpt below for the real word from the horse’s mouth - Newsweek itself.

Newsweek merely corrected a detail in the story: The story had cited some official investigation, but later on it turned out that the investigation report cited was not about the Koran incident. Newsweek’s sources do not recant their information about the Koran in the Toilet story though, and Newsweek does NOT claim it got the story wrong. Newsweek merely acknowledges that it got a detail wrong.

In the right wing spin universe, when frenzily trying to make George Bush look a little bit better, an acknowledgement of a wrong detail becomes a complete retraction of the entire story and further evidence that the liberal Newsweek makes shit up to embarrass Bush.

It’s an alternative universe in which the right wing spinwits live.

For example, Bill O’Reilly’s piece is titled “The battle over Newsweek’s bogus Koran story continues”. Heres the O’Reilly link (may not work right - it’s a javascript link to a video files, sorry).

Read Newsweek’s own statement, and then go to FoxNews.com and see the O’Reilly piece with the word “bogus” in the title.

Unless I’m missing something in the Newsweek verbiage, Newsweek does NOT retract its allegation that investigators ripped up a Koran and Flushed it down the toilet. So I think it’s just plain jane evil pro-Bush propaganda that O’Reilly tells his loyal fans that Newsweek retracted a “bogus story”.

The Editor’s Desk - Letters & Live Talk - MSNBC.com
. . . I think it’s important for the public to know exactly what we reported, why, and how subsequent events unfolded.

Two weeks ago, in our issue dated May 9, Michael Isikoff and John Barry reported in a brief item in our Periscope section that U.S. military investigators had found evidence that American guards at the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had committed infractions in trying to get terror suspects to talk, including in one case flushing a Qur’an down a toilet. Their information came from a knowledgeable U.S. government source, and before deciding whether to publish it we approached two separate Defense Department officials for comment. One declined to give us a response; the other challenged another aspect of the story but did not dispute the Qur’an charge.

. . .

Last Friday, a top Pentagon spokesman told us that a review of the probe cited in our story showed that it was never meant to look into charges of Qur’an desecration … Our original source later said he couldn’t be certain about reading of the alleged Qur’an incident in the report we cited, and said it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts. Top administration officials have promised to continue looking into the charges, and so will we. But we regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst.