But 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
Simple words from Newsweek. They regret they "got any part" wrong. This is what they got wrong.
Particularly, this is what John Barry got wrong:
NEWSWEEK National Security Correspondent John Barry, realizing the sensitivity of the story, provided a draft of the NEWSWEEK PERISCOPE item to a senior Defense official, asking, "Is this accurate or not?" The official challenged one aspect of the story: the suggestion that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, sent to Gitmo by the Pentagon in 2001 to oversee prisoner interrogation, might be held accountable for the abuses. Not true, said the official (the PERISCOPE draft was corrected to reflect that). But he was silent about the rest of the item. The official had not meant to mislead, but lacked detailed knowledge of the SouthCom report.
In simpler words, because the "official" did not say it was false, Barry ASSUMED it was true.
In another article in 2003, Barry wrote in Newsweek:
The notes of the U.N. interrogation–a three-hour stretch one August evening in 1995– show that Kamel was a gold mine of information. He had a good memory and, piece by piece, he laid out the main personnel, sites and progress of each WMD program. Kamel was a manager–not a scientist or engineer–and, sources say, some of his technical assertions were later found to be faulty. (A military aide who defected with Kamel was apparently a more reliable source of technical data. This aide backed Kamel’s assertions about the destruction of WMD stocks.) But, overall, Kamel’s information was "almost embarrassing, it was so extensive,” Ekeus recalled–including the fact that Ekeus’s own Arabic translator, a Syrian, was, according to Kamel, an Iraqi agent who had been reporting to Kamel himself all along.
Most all of that testimony was discredited as well. Barry does point out the conflicts in that article tho. But, why even publish it?
Bottom line, Barry is reckless with his information and insensitive to the impact of what that recklessness might do. John Barry does not need to be writing for a national publication. If Newsweek was serious in their "apology", they would agree with me. If not, they need to start being distributed with all the other shock magazines in grocery stores.
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