The BBC on Newsweek

The BBC covers this story better than anyone else. Here is the conclusion of the article:

It is hard to avoid the inference that the people who are really to blame are the men and women who have abused their prisoners, not those who have reported allegations about the ill treatment.

What happened in prisons like Guantanamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib after 2001 has done serious damage to the United States and its allies: not just the dwindling number who still have troops in Iraq, but the new governments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Do not blame the news media for this. Instead, all the effort needs to go into convincing the world that the abuse has stopped, and will never be allowed to start again.

So should Newsweek be let off the hook? I'd say that they should not have included the information that they could not verify, even if other media outlet had published it. Their source did not show them the report that contained the information about the Koran flushing, so they should have found independent verification of the incident.