Liberty's Blog

Being PC.

NewsWeek reports that some of the guards on Guantanamo Bay had left the Koran on a Toilet and someone may have even flushed one down the toilet. Some idiots in Afghanistan hear about this and they go on a tear and kill some people. Rueters expounds:

The report sparked angry and violent protests across the Muslim world from Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more than 100 injured, to Pakistan to Indonesia to Gaza. In the past week it was condemned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and by the Arab League.

On Sunday, Afghan Muslim clerics threatened to call for a holy war against the United States.

The only problem is that the Koran flushing probably never happened.

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," Whitaker wrote in the magazine's latest issue, due to appear on U.S.
newsstands on Monday.
The weekly news magazine said in its May 23 edition
that the information had come from a "knowledgeable government source" who told
Newsweek that a military report on abuse at Guantanamo Bay said interrogators
flushed at least one copy of the Koran down a toilet in a bid to make detainees
talk.
But Newsweek said the source later told the magazine he could not be
certain he had seen an account of the Koran incident in the military report and
that it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts.
Whitaker told Reuters that Newsweek did not know if the reported toilet incident
involving the Koran ever occurred. "As to whether anything like this happened,
we just don't know," he said in an interview. "We're not saying it absolutely
happened but we can't say that it absolutely didn't happen either."

So how did this incident that didn't happen get into the pages of NewsWeek? MSNBC provides some insite:

At NEWSWEEK, veteran investigative reporter Michael Isikoff's interest had been sparked by the release late last year of some internal FBI e-mails that painted a stark picture of prisoner abuse at Guantánamo. Isikoff knew that military investigators at Southern Command (which runs the Guantánamo prison) were looking into the allegations. So he called a longtime reliable source, a senior U.S. government official who was knowledgeable about the matter. The source told Isikoff that the report would include new details that were not in the FBI e-mails, including mention of flushing the Qur'an down a toilet. A SouthCom spokesman contacted by Isikoff declined to comment on an ongoing investigation, but 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.

Given all that has been reported about the treatment of detainees—including allegations that a female interrogator pretended to wipe her own menstrual blood on one prisoner—the reports of Qur'an desecration seemed shocking but not incredible. But to Muslims, defacing the Holy Book is especially heinous. "We can understand torturing prisoners, no matter how repulsive," says computer teacher Muhammad Archad, interviewed last week by NEWSWEEK in Peshawar, Pakistan, where one of last week's protests took place. "But insulting the Qur'an is like deliberately torturing all Muslims. This we cannot tolerate."

Michael Isikoff is pretty well respected, and no one expected that the piece he wrote would be so inflamatory. Still I can't understand why Secratary Rice is getting so defencive abouyt it. She wants to punnish anyone that pisses, shits on or flushes a Koran.

Ms Rice said “disrespect for the Holy Quran is not now, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be, tolerated by the United States.”

“We honour the sacred books of all the world’s great religions. Disrespect for the Holy Quran is abhorrent to us all,” she added. Assuring the Muslims that the Bush administration will not ignore the reported incident, she said: “Our military authorities are investigating these allegations fully. If they are proven true, we will take appropriate action.”

I have the urge to find a Koran and use it as a liner for the cats litter box.

posted by Liberty @ 7:03 PM