Future Imperfect

Slate's press critic, Jack Shafer, brings up another, more prosaic problem with Newsweek's story: they shouldn't have gone with a story that predicted what was going to be in a report that wasn't yet written.

But Newsweek also made a third blunder worth dissecting: It let its anonymous source predict the contents of a future government document, a journalistic no-no as far as I'm concerned. Many years ago at a newspaper job far, far away, my attorney David Andich cautioned me and my writers against publishing what anonymous government officials said would be in their reports. He also told us to be especially wary of the prosecutor who informed us—confidentially, of course—that he was going to indict the deputy mayor next Tuesday. If you commit those stories to print and the report or indictment doesn't contain the information your source predicted, you will find yourself in a world of legal hurt, he said.

In my mind's eye I can see Andich reviewing the Newsweek copy. The Quran findings were "expected" to be part of the military report. "Expected by whom?" Andich would have said. "Can't you wait until you have a draft or the final document in hand to report that they were included? What's your hurry?"

But here's something else, something very, very interesting indeed.

Many bloggers have raised the issue of possible disinformation. Shafer does something I haven't seen anyone else do: he hits Nexis. (How many times have we complained about reporters not using Google? Most reporters, certainly any reporter at a major outlet, will have access to Nexis, and not the cheap Academic version, but the real deal, with all the bells and whistles. There's simply no more powerful search engine and no better data base for finding anything that's been in the media within the last few years.)

What he finds is stunning:

Next, I wonder why Newsweek wasn't more skeptical about Quran-desecration charges. Muslims so venerate the Quran that they are outraged if anyone touches one without first washing their hands, let alone put it into a dung-hole. One would guess that this sort of desecration would be too outrageous to be common, but a short voyage on the Nexis Wayback Machine proves it to be almost widespread. The earliest example I found was from an Aug. 18, 1983, Associated Press story filed in Islamabad, Pakistan. A Western traveler told the AP that Soviet soldiers and Afghan troops had used mosques as toilets and shredded the Quran for toilet paper. "My impression is that they were trying to humiliate the Afghans, but it just makes them hate (the Soviets) even more," the traveler said. The AP noted that it couldn't confirm the story.

On March 12, 1986, Australia's Advertiser reported that religious authorities in Saudi Arabia ban the flushing of local newspapers because their pages "usually contain a verse from the Koran." On Nov. 18, 1987, the AP moved another story—dateline, Washington—advancing a conservative human rights organization's claim that Soviet troops used mosques as latrines and the Quran as toilet paper.

Moving into the 1990s, Muslims beheaded a Nigerian Christian after his wife was accused of using the Quran as toilet paper, according to a Jan. 3, 1995, AP account. Before the arrest of Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing case, the American-Arab Relations Committee told the AP (April 21, 1995) of receiving calls from people who said the Quran should be used as toilet paper. Deutsche Presse-Agentur (Feb. 8, 1999) reported that Philippine troops had burned mosques and flushed a torn-up Quran down a toilet to agitate Muslim rebels. The Quran-as-toilet-paper charge has even been leveled against Muslim militants by Russia's Interfax (Oct. 1, 1999).

All of the stories cited above are poorly sourced, so it's anybody's guess how many of them are true. But just as every paranoid has at least one enemy, an actual case of the toilet-paper story is documented in Nexis: 15 years ago, an Israeli soldier used pages from a Quran as toilet paper when he found it in a bathroom of a boys' school in which his unit bivouacked (Jerusalem Post, May 29, 1989). He said it was accidental, and he apologized, as did his superiors.

Compare the ubiquity of the toilet story with other kinds of Quran desecration. In my Nexis sifting I found only a handful of examples from the last 25 years: A man rips up a Quran (Statesman, India, March 27, 2001); the non-believers burn a Quran in India (San Jose Mercury News, March 23, 2001); and an Iraqi woman protests the search of her bag, which contains a Quran, by U.S. trooper's dog (Agence France Presse, Oct. 31, 2003). All unspeakable violations, but none with staying power of the toilet-paper meme.

Could it be that the Gitmo prisoners lied or exaggerated about the Quran story, pushing forward the most outrageous meme in their inventory, and that their inflated charges percolated up to Newsweek? The Abu Ghraib photos and reports from various U.S. military lock-downs around the world should prepare us for the possibility that U.S. handlers committed such sacrilege. But if the original source of the allegations turns out to be prisoners, we might want to view their charges with the same doubts we apply to any testimonies about prisons from prisoners. (My emph.)

Does this give more credence to the idea that people all over the world, whenever in conflict with Muslims, instantly think first about throwing holy books in the crapper? or to the idea that the very thought is so outrageous that it's the perfect propaganda vehicle, since this particular book really is viewed differently than other holy books?

Think Belgian Babies, people.