The implication in McClellan's statement is that sometime between May 10, when DiRita said that because of the number of agencies involved in investigating allegations of abuse at Guantanamo, "I think we're probably several weeks away from being able to say that the commander has made his final assessments there," and May 16, when McClellan made his remark, the Pentagon and Justice Department had concluded and reviewed their several investigations and were certain that the allegations were false.

But yet another spokesman, US Southern Command's Lt. Col. Jim Marshall, told USA Today on May 16, the same day McClellan made his categorical statement, that "the military did not start looking at allegations of Koran desecration until last week after the Newsweek article was published" and he didn't know how long the investigation would take.

Taken in sum, the various government and military statements offer wildly contradictory images of what the government and military know, or think they know, about the accuracy of the Newsweek allegation. One thing upon which everyone now seems agreed, including Newsweek but with the possible exception of General Eikenberry (who hasn't been heard from in some time), is that the allegation helped trigger the rioting in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Regardless the provenance of the Newsweek item, it's certain that reports of interrogators abusing copies of the Koran have been circulating for more than two years, including, most recently, a New York Times story about Newsweek's retraction of its item that includes an on the record interview with a former translator at Guantanamo.

"Last month, a former American interrogator confirmed to The New York Times an account given in an interview by a former Kuwaiti detainee, Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi, who said that mishandling of the Koran once led to a major hunger strike. The strike ended only after a senior officer expressed regret over the camp's loudspeaker system, which was simultaneously translated by linguists at the end of each cell block, the former interrogator said.

In that case, the accusations were of copies of the Koran being tossed on the floor in a pile and treated roughly, but there was no assertion that any had been put in the toilet.

Erik Saar, a co-author of the book "Inside the Wire" and an Arabic language translator at Guantánamo from January to June 2003, said in an interview Monday that while he "never saw anything along the lines of a Koran being flushed down a toilet," the issue of how guards and interrogators handled the book was a chronic problem."