Wow June 3, 2005 Lauren Just wow. Roxanne wowed me with an ignorant reaction (of someone else’s) to the Koran “urine splashing” story that was confirmed tonight by the Pentagon. Newsweek ought to have its apology.
Big difference between “ought to” and “will.” It will be a damned shame if Newsweek doesn’t get its name cleared, as spurious of a claim against them that was made.
Well, I think that people should keep in mind that there’s a pretty big difference between “a guard urinated on the Koran” and the truth, which was that a guard urinated near an air vent, which conveyed said urine so that it splashed onto a prisoner and his Koran. The prisoner was given a new uniform and Koran. Incidents of willful Koran mishandlings have so far seemed quite few and far between. Newsweek didn’t say simply that the Koran had been mishandled; it claimed that the Koran had been purposely mishandled as an interrogation tactic, and until there is some conclusive evidence of that I don’t think the magazine ought to receive anything.
The report confirms that the Koran was purposely mishandled as an interrogation tactic: one interrogator kicked a Koran, and another stomped on one. Is the U.S. government’s admission not “conclusive evidence”?
Actually, and this is something people forget, the original Newsweek story claimed that reports of Koran abuse, including the toilet story, would show up in a Pentagon report. Newsweek never claimed these things actually happened. Big difference.
From what I can tell, there’s only been one case of Koran abuse as an interrogation technique. From the New York Times: The report said investigators had examined nine alleged incidents in which the Koran was mishandled, either intentionally or unintentionally, and confirmed five of them. Four involved guards at the detention center; one involved an interrogator. […] On July 25, 2003, a contract interrogator apologized to a detainee for stepping on the detainee’s Koran in an earlier interrogation. The detainee accepted the apology and agreed to tell other detainees and ask them to stop disruptive behavior caused by the incident. Newsweek did claim that Koran abuse had occured: Investigators probing interrogation abuses at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay have confirmed some infractions alleged in internal FBI e-mails that surfaced late last year. Among the previously unreported cases, sources tell NEWSWEEK: interrogators, in an attempt to rattle suspects, flushed a Qur’an down a toilet and led a detainee around with a collar and dog leash. There are a few places where you can find the full text of the article online for free, including here. I have a subscription to Newsweek (and am keeping it), and have the actual article in front of me. I realize that talking about guards vs. interrogators seems like splitting hairs, but in my opinion there’s a pretty big difference between a few morons desecrating the Koran and Koran desecration as official policy – though I doubt that much of the Muslim world sees as big a difference.
Okay, here’s the thing–WTF is a guard even doing messing with the prisoners’ copies of the Koran? The notion that these books are flying all over the place, just “happening” to get urine splashed on them, etc. just strikes me as completely retarded. Why is a guard pissing in an air vent and why would the Koran be sitting there instead of by the prisoner’s bed?
It may have been by the prisoner’s bed: the prisoner got splashed with urine, too. That’s why he was issued both a new Koran and a new uniform. Frankly, the stories in the report suggest that Koran abuse is not the only kind of abuse going on. I mean, in one instance prisoners’ Korans got wet because guards threw water balloons into the cell block. Why exactly were guards doing that?
That makes sense, Sally. It’s indicative of the larger scale problem that the prisoners are being kept in really small cells, it seems. Of course, since there’s people being kept there indefinitely, we have larger problems on our hands. But even if BushCo suddenly grew a conscience and respected the right of habeus corpus, it would still be critical that the religious faith of prisoners, guilty or not, be treated with respect.
They think they have a conscience. They think these are not people. Meanwhile, did you see that Bush et al were trying to keep all the Abu G photos from being released to the public by siting…wait for it…the Geneva Convention??