Retraction my @$$!

Digby nails it:

This little item in Newsweak is a pretext for action against interrogation techniques that are already well known. Which is why the quasi retraction over the week-end is such a chickenshit display of cowardice on the part of Newsweak. This is old news to anybody who's been paying attention. The jihadists know it, those of us following the story know it and the government certainly knows it. The riots last week in Afghanistan and now around the world are orchestrated to gin up support and their followers are already pissed off enough about this stuff to get with the program quite easily.

Look, British citizens released from Gitmo talked about these kinds of interrogation tactics months ago, as have others. Some who have been involved in training for U.S. interrogators have also said that religious humiliation is a tactic that has been used. No, this is not news to anyone who has been paying attention, and Newsweek should have been very careful about what they actually retracted. They should have stood by the point of the story, which is that these methods are indeed being used. They were put under great pressure to retract the entire story, as others have remarked, because Rummy likely doesn't want a lot of scrutiny regarding his little "psych lab."