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Newsweek Retracts Account of Koran Abuse by U.S. Military
After a drumbeat of criticism from the Bush administration and others, Newsweek magazine yesterday went beyond an apology it issued Sunday and retracted an article published May 1 that stated that American interrogators at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had tried to rattle Muslim detainees by flushing a Koran down a toilet....

...Mr. McClellan and Mr. Whitaker said that no senior White House officials had spoken privately to Newsweek's management to seek a retraction. After Newsweek retracted the article in the afternoon, Mr. McClellan called it a "good first step."

Mr. McClellan and other administration officials blamed the Newsweek article for setting off the anti-American violence that swept Afghanistan and Pakistan. "The report had real consequences," Mr. McClellan said. "People have lost their lives. Our image abroad has been damaged."

But only a few days earlier, in a briefing on Thursday, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had said that the senior commander in Afghanistan believed the protests had stemmed from that country's reconciliation process.

"He thought it was not at all tied to the article in the magazine," General Myers said....