The truth about whether U.S. troops desecrated the Quran is still unknown. Yes, under intense pressure, Newsweek retracted its story. But the specific allegation that U.S. soldiers placed the Quran in a toilet has actually never been proven or disproven. Did those events really take place or not? Does the White House even care to find out? Maybe not:

It is unclear if the Pentagon is going to pursue a probe into the alleged incident or drop it in light of Newsweek’s admission. A SouthCom spokesman said the investigation was still open, but [Pentagon spokesman Bryan] Whitman said he did not know whether it had been closed.

If the administration is truly concerned about its new public diplomacy woes in the Muslim world — if it really wants to take the steam out of the Newsweek crisis — there’s only one appropriate course of action: immediately appoint an independent commission to investigate the allegations.

After all, we are dealing with the same Pentagon that knew of widespread abuse at Iraqi prisons weeks before the Abu Ghraib photos were released, and said nothing. If the desecration did happen, no one believes this administration will come clean on its own. And until the Pentagon gets serious about an independent investigation, much of the world will simply assume it happened no matter what the truth is.

The Pentagon is outraged that Newsweek would suggest that the military is desecrating Korans of Muslim detainees without definitive proof. Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita, however, apparently has no problem floating allegations that detainees are desecrating their own Korans based on an uncorroborated, anonymous source. From today’s Pentagon press briefing:

DIRITA: We’ve found nothing that would substantiate anything that you just said about the treatment of a Koran. We have, other than what we’ve seen — that it’s possible detainees themselves have done with pages of the Koran. And I don’t want to overstate that, either, because it’s based on log entries that have to be corroborated.

Sounds like DiRita is well on his way to repairing relations with the Arab world.

A congressionally mandated report authored by the independent, nonprofit National Research Council found that a nuclear weapon designed to reliably destroy underground bunkers could kill one million people. The Bush administration proposed an $8 million dollar program to study the technical feasibility of designing such a weapon in its budget for FY 2006. This is a major setback for proponents of the research, since they had argued that the weapon would be “usable” in combat because it would not cause massive civilian casualties.

- Andy Grotto