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In the manufactured uproar over a retracted Newsweek story about the alleged desecration of the Quran at the Guant‡namo Bay detention center, a few inconvenient facts have been conveniently ignored by all the president's men.

First, despite the insistence by press secretary Scott McClellan and Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita that the Newsweek story prompted anti-American riots and violence that led to at least 17 deaths in Afghanistan, top military officials say the article was, at most, a pretext for factions already bitterly opposed to American involvement in that nation and the presidency of Hamid Karzai. "The violence that we saw in Jalalabad was not necessarily the result of the allegations about disrespect for the Quran, but more tied up in the political process and the reconciliation process that President Karzai and his cabinet is conducting in Afghanistan," said Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, after a conversation with the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan.

Even a spokesman for Karzai is saying the article was used as a tool by "enemies of Afghanistan" to stir up unrest while the president was out of the country.

Second, Newsweek gave the Pentagon an opportunity to fact check the piece before publication, which said a military report had confirmed that interrogators flushed pages of the Quran down a toilet to shake up a Muslim detainee.

Not until 10 days after publication, when the riots turned deadly, did the Pentagon call for a retraction.

Finally, the allegation is hardly shocking - or new. As U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., points out in a letter to McClellan and published on today's Commentary page, Guant‡namo detainees have been alleging exactly such incidents of Quran desecration since at least March 2003.

But there is more to this episode than the crass political exploitation of which Conyers writes. This is another instance in what appears to be a systematic attack on the checks and balances inherent in this nation's republican form of government.

From dangerous and unprecedented attacks on the independent judiciary to a wide-ranging effort to undermine confidence and faith in that human and admittedly imperfect institution, the news media, some among the Republican leadership in both the executive and legislative branches of government seem determined to stifle every last vestige of political dissent in the United States.

The undermining of the media ranges from the constant drumbeat on talk radio - Rush Limbaugh explicitly called mainstream media "anti-American" on Tuesday - to the Bush administration's hiring of friendly "journalistic" commentators to advocate its policies and production of "politicommer-

cials" disguised as newscasts, all at taxpayer expense.

The attack on Newsweek has every appearance of being part and parcel of this strategy, and the consequences are chilling. As Bill Moyers said Sunday at a conference on media reform in St. Louis:

"An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight - ask questions and be skeptical."