For those faithful few, it turns out that Newsweek learned nothing from last week's failure of judgment and professional discipline — the publication of a false story ending in an apology and reluctant retraction. With a lede that can only be described as impetuous in its breathlessness, Evan Thomas and Michael Isikoff turn from singular, anonymous sources for their work in the leftist magazine's May 30 edition to the International Committee of the Red Cross, members of which claim that captured Taliban were indeed subject to the vicarious horror of hardbound brutality. Copies of the Koran were harmed in the making of American wartime detention, say the allies of terrorists and the Hippocratics visiting them, and Newsweek believes the public has a right to know something about the stories, be they true or not. Qualifying phrases are present where absent one book-brutality tale ago, but the Wall Street Journal today editorialized that the ICRC hardly stands up as a credible witness. A field representative of the ICRC, you see, apparently indulged in a certain disqualifying moral equivalence, comparing American soldiers to the authoritarian armies their forebears defeated. And, too, the organization itself has abused its respected status:

[T]he ICRC is only too happy to throw [its] confidentiality rule out the window when it suits its ideological purposes. It did so in the wake of the false Newsweek report about the treatment of the Quran at Guantanamo Bay. The ICRC's Washington office volunteered to the world's media that it had given the Pentagon "multiple" reports from Guantanamo detainees about mishandling of the Quran, after which the detainee complaints had ceased. Pentagon officials confirmed the news, adding that the incidents had been both "minor" and "inadvertent."

...This behavior has unfortunately become an ICRC pattern. A pair of earlier ICRC reports on U.S. detention policies in Iraq and at Guantanamo were leaked to the press, and readily confirmed by ICRC officials in Geneva. The Guantanamo report, moreover, called the practice of indefinite detention at that prison "tantamount to torture," a phrase that has since been repeated everywhere by people wanting to damage the U.S. As we pointed out at the time, that statement was absurd, given that the ICRC's main complaint about the Gitmo detainees is that they were not granted prisoner of war status. POWs are explicitly allowed by the Geneva Conventions to be held indefinitely — that is, for the duration of a conflict. Another problem has been the ICRC's pretense that its policy document called Protocol 1 — once dubbed "a shield for terrorists" by the New York Times — is settled international law and applies to the U.S.

The Journal is generous, here, as the Taliban eagerly violated every requirement affording them Geneva protection. But like the Patriot Act, American detainment of men who were observed or believed in good faith to be trying to kill Americans, Afghans and other innocent people the day before they were caught is a topic fit for the left's worst and most incurious shibboleths; passion, not reason, dominate. Unattributed anecdotes are preferred to vindications of US soldiers, such as that from one Mohammed Ismail Agha late last year. What signatories has Newsweek chosen for its protest piece? An international organization demonstrably hostile to the United States and terrorists who now more than ever have a sponsored platform on which to claim anything about conditions under American detention, from textual torture on up. Neither of these collective parties should be taken seriously, least of all when their most substantive allegations are grossly distorted renderings of events. But both shed light, in the wake of bad journalism that got called out, on Newsweek's resolution — and whether rightists should ignore a deeper institutional problem.