In 1209, during the infamous crusade against the Albigensians of the Languedoc, the Catholic bishop of Beziers refused to surrender the heretics who had taken refuge in his city.
When the town was taken, the victorious commander asked the papal representative how his troops could tell the faithful from the heretics.
"Kill them all," the abbot replied, "for the Lord will know his own."
From that awful day to this melancholy Memorial Day weekend with its mounting casualty lists in Iraq and Afghanistan, sober minds have understood that the passion of combat and the inevitable fog of war conspire to obscure even the most rudimentary moral distinctions. For that reason, sane societies are prudent about the demands they place on their young men and women under arms and set them bright lines of conduct to follow when such demands are made.
The ability to make rational distinctions, we have painfully learned, is the intellectual equivalent of the opposed thumb -- one of the critical attributes separating us from the brutes. That point, however, has been all but lost in the two weeks of mostly nonsensical reaction that has followed the revelation that Newsweek magazine erred in a brief item about the mistreatment of Muslim prisoners the United States is holding in its Cuban jail.
When the magazine's Michael Isikoff and John Barry imprudently relied on a single anonymous source for a May 9 report alleging that U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had "flushed a Koran down a toilet," it was an example of bad journalistic practice and a mistake. But, as reports published Friday demonstrated, it was a far less significant one than the critics have tried to make it out.
According to a U.S. military inquiry undertaken in response to the Newsweek item, five of 13 alleged incidents in which the Koran was somehow abused by guards or interrogators at Guantanamo turned out to be true. "No credible evidence" was found that an Islamic holy book was flushed down a toilet, which one supposes should be some sort of comfort. The military's investigation, however, is incomplete, and who knows what yet may emerge from this Cuban cesspool.
In this context, Newsweek's mistake seems increasingly minor. The notion that it ever was anything more than that may be energizing for our own ideological jihadis; it even may be a minor political opportunity for the Bush administration and supporters of its war in Iraq. But it hasn't been convincing from the beginning -- and seems less so by the day.
