I know I'm linking to the Washington Post an awful lot lately, but one more consideration of the "Lynch Newsweek!" crowd that's currently pushing the canard that one magazine's one story is responsible for all those deaths in Afghanistan and elsewhere. 

Anne Applebaum hits it out of the park in her column today:

Now, it is possible that no interrogator at Guantanamo Bay ever flushed pages of the Koran down the toilet, as the now-retracted Newsweek story reported -- although several former Guantanamo detainees have alleged just that. It is also possible that Newsweek reporters relied too much on an uncertain source, or that the magazine confused the story with (confirmed) reports that prisoners themselves used Korans to block toilets as a form of protest.

But surely the larger point is not the story itself but that it was so eminently plausible, in Pakistan, Afghanistan and everywhere else. And it was plausible precisely because interrogation techniques designed to be offensive to Muslims were used in Iraq and Guantanamo, as administration and military officials have also confirmed.

(My emphasis.)

Applebaum goes on to cite many examples of offensive interrogation methods, including the use of dogs, nudity, shaving beards, sexual harassment, and fake menstrual blood.  Remember that these techniques were specifically designed to offend Muslims.  Remember also that many of these techniques were specifically approved by Donald Rumsfeld.

And don't forget that it doesn't work.  You want to talk about what's getting people killed?  Why not take the beam out of our own collective eye?  As Applebaum puts it:

There is no question that these were tactics designed to offend, no question that they were put in place after 2001 and no question that many considered them justified. Since the Afghan invasion, public supporters of "exceptional" interrogation methods have argued that in the special, unusual case of the war on terrorism, we may have to suspend our fussy legality, ignore our high ideals and resort to some unpleasant tactics that our military had never used. Opponents of these methods, among them some of the military's own interrogation experts, have argued, on the contrary, that "special methods" are not only ineffective but counterproductive: They might actually inspire Muslim terrorists instead of helping to defeat them. They might also make it easier, say, for fanatics in Jalalabad to use two lines of a magazine article to incite riots.