FACTUAL ERRORS

Newsweek acknowleges errors in a story alleging that U.S. guards at Guantanamo Bay flushed a Koran down the toilet, but stopped short of disavowing the piece.

An AP story recounts this response from the White House:

"It's puzzling. While Newsweek now acknowledges that they got the facts wrong, they refuse to retract the story," said presidential spokesman Scott McClellan. "I think there's a certain journalistic standard that should be met. In this instance it was not.

"This was a report based on a single anonymous source that could not substantiate the allegation that was made," McClellan added. "The report has had serious consequences. People have lost their lives. The image of the United States abroad has been damaged. I just find it puzzling."

Even better, ranking high on the hypocrisy meter is Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita's quote that could've been used of Bush: "People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said."

The feckless Bush administration, no doubt, fails to see the irony in this and its unbased claims of WMD on Iraq and its trumpeting of a single source deemed untrustworthy by our own CIA, as well as all the goodwill from around the world our so-called leaders have squandered.