Attack of the anonymous sources

It is curious that it took a week -- and massive demonstrations -- for the Pentagon to work itself up so.

The information at issue is a sentence in a short "Periscope" item on May 9 about a planned United States Southern Command investigation into the abuse of prisoners at the detention facility in Guantánamo. It said that American military investigators had found evidence in an internal report that during the interrogation of detainees, American guards had flushed a Koran down a toilet as a way of trying to provoke the detainees into talking.

Pentagon officials said that no such information was included in the internal report and responded to Newsweek's apology with unusual anger.

In a statement, Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said: "Newsweek hid behind anonymous sources, which by their own admission do not withstand scrutiny. Unfortunately, they cannot retract the damage they have done to this nation or those that were viciously attacked by those false allegations."

Please.

First of all, for a White House that routinely hides behind anonymous sources, this is pretty cheeky.

But the reason it took a week for the Pentagon to express its outrage is because the Koran in the toilet story, when first alleged, didn't seem so outrageous to either the Pentagon or the U.S. public given all the other outrageous things we know to have been done in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, and Afghanistan in our names.

Feel that? That's the scar tissue building around our nation's soul.