The Ming Report

The Non-Denial Denials

May 16, 2005 - Once upon a time Michael Isikoff was the conservatives’ ideal investigative journalist. That was when he leaked the story of the Monica Lewinski – Linda Tripp tapes to Matt Drudge. Now he has joined the ranks of the malignant left leaning reporters who infest the main stream news media. The right is rising in righteous indignation over a paragraph written in part by Isikoff in Newsweek’s May 1st Periscope column. Isikoff reported that U.S. Southern Command report would say that military investigators had found that interrogators desecrated the Koran as a technique to psychologically break detainees at Guantanamo. Following a firestorm over the story in the Moslem east, Anti-American rioting, and demands that the guilty be punished the Pentagon issued a terse statement denying that the Southern Command report would substantiate the story that the Koran had been desecrated which had been reported in the media for weeks based upon freed detainees’ statements.

Isikoff had initiated the story by his contact with an unnamed source described as “a senior Pentagon official”. The official told Isikoff that the report would confirm the desecration story as part of the abusive techniques designed to break detainees. After writing the item the reporter returned to his source and asked him to review the item for accuracy. The source corrected an unconnected part of the 10 sentence story but did not comment on the claim that a US interrogator had flushed a Koran down the toilet. After the eruptions of Anti-American violence more than a week after the item appeared the Pentagon denied that the investigators had found “no credible allegations of willful Koran desecration”. The Pentagon did not deny that the incident occurred but only that the investigation had substantiated that it had. When Isikoff reached his source on Saturday he was told that the senior Pentagon official whose initial account of the investigation report on which the reporter had relied “could no longer be sure” that the allegations had surfaced in the Southern Command probe. The official did not say that the draft report he had seen did not contain the material he recounted to Isikoff but only that he could not be sure that it did. Newsweek editors apologized for any facts it got wrong but stopped short of a retraction.

Coming in the context of the Abu Ghraib scandal and confirmed prisoner accounts of female interrogators employing sexually humiliating techniques including smearing simulated menstrual blood on prisoners faces the story of desecrating the Koran confirmed by a senior official carried its own indicia of reliability and Newsweek ran with it. The non-denial denial technique employed here has been used by every administration since Nixon’s to avoid the impact of unpleasant allegations. Here it is being used to discredit the messenger but carefully avoiding a direct denial of the message. It is a time proven technique to discredit embarrassing news.