Newsweek magazine has apologized for any errors in a story that set off rioting by angry Muslims, but especially in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

It all stems from a sentence in a little yarn about guards at Guantanamo Bay supposedly flushing a copy of the Koran down a toilet.

An excerpt from the NYT story:

We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst," Mark Whitaker, Newsweek's editor, wrote in the issue of the magazine that goes on sale at newsstands today. In an accompanying article, the magazine wrote that its reporters had relied on an American government official, whom it has not identified, who had incomplete knowledge of the situation.

But Mr. Whitaker said in an interview later: "We're not retracting anything. We don't know what the ultimate facts are."

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."

The original account, he said, was "demonstrably false" and "was irresponsible and had significant consequences that reverberated throughout Muslim communities around the world."

Lawrence Di Rita, the top spokesman for the Pentagon, called the editor's note "very tepid and qualified." He added later, "They owe us all a lot more accountability than they took."

This story is another one of those pesky anonymous sourcing stories.

Newsweek said it had shown a draft of the article to the source, and that person said nothing about the Koran reference.

But ...

"But he was silent about the rest of the item," Newsweek reported. "The official had not meant to mislead, but lacked detailed knowledge of the SouthCom report."

Now, back in the day of Watergate, the Washington Post's rule was that for stories relying on anonymous sources, there had to be two of them, and they had to be independent of each other and yet still in a position to know.

Newsweek only talks of one source.

Newsweek also said other reports of Koran desecration had come out of Guantanamo, but from former prisoners.

The Army has claimed the only report of a Koran going down a toilet was when a prisoner ripped some pages out and tried to stuff them in a bowl to back the thing up.

Newsweek went back to its source.

"But the official, still speaking anonymously, could no longer be sure that these concerns had surfaced in the SouthCom report," Newsweek wrote, suggesting that it had perhaps been in other investigative reports.

A Bush administration spokesman said the matter was being vigorously investigated.

Now, one of the reporters on the story was Michael Isikoff, a very seasoned guy.

But it really, really sounds to me like the two-source rule should be implemented by Newsweek, or that a single source be required to provide some documentation to back up their claims.

What say you, oh readers of this blog?