Juan Cole: Guantanamo Controversies - The Bible and the Koran

[paineinthearse]

Excerpt: "This informed former officer has suggested the real reason for which some in the Pentagon are so angry about the Newsweek story. It may well so focus international outrage on Guantanamo that Rumsfeld will lose his little psych lab."

http://www.juancole.com/2005/05/guantanamo-controversies-bible-and.html

Monday, May 16, 2005
Guantanamo Controversies - The Bible and the Koran

The report in Newsweek that the US military desecrated the Koran as part of an attempt to break the Muslim prisoners there with humiliation techniques has provoked demonstrations, angry sermons, riots, and over a dozen deaths in Afghanistan, with demonstrations also in Gaza, Pakistan, Indonesia, and now Yemen. Both the chief Sunni Muslim cleric in Lebanon and its Shiite Grand Ayatollah, Muhammad Husain Fadlallah have now condemned it. The former threatened jihad or holy war. The latter said, "The desecration of the holy Koran in the terrifying Guantanamo detention center that America created under the title of fighting terrorism against the Muslims who have been arbitrarily rounded up there, is one of the American methods of torture . . . This is not an isolated act carried out by an American soldier but is part of an American program...of contempt for Islam, to disfigure its image in the minds of American." Shaikh Muhammad Sayyid al-Tantawi, the rector of al-Azhar seminary and the chief Sunni authority in Egypt, called the desecration of the Koran "a great crime." But he dismissed it as the work of "a bunch of kids, criminals . . ."

The Pentagon has claimed that the incident did not occur. Although the corporate media are now reporting that Newsweek had "backed off" the report, that isn't true. Newsweek explains that in response to Pentagon queries, "On Saturday, Isikoff spoke to his original source, the senior government official, who said that he clearly recalled reading investigative reports about mishandling the Qur'an, including a toilet incident. But the official, still speaking anonymously, could no longer be sure that these concerns had surfaced in the SouthCom report."

Isikoff's source, in other words, stands by his report of the incident, but is merely tracing it to other paperwork. What difference does that make? Although Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita angrily denounced the source as no longer credible, in the real world you can't just get rid of a witness because the person made a minor mistake with regard to a text citation. It is like saying that we can't be sure someone has really read the Gospels because he said he read about Caiaphas in the Gospel of Mark rather than in the Gospel of John. Newsweek has, in other words, confirmed that the source did read a US government account of the desecration of the Koran.

Nor is this the first such indication of this sort of incident. On August 18, 2004, ANSA, the Italian news agency, wrote of the families of detainees from Bahrain at Guantanamo: "The families' anxiety grew after the publication of a report by the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR), which contained information about tortures and maltreatment of prisoners. The report, based on testimony by three former Guantanamo prisoners, Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmad, defines as brutal the methods of the U.S. jailers. According to the report, prisoners were brutally beaten and compelled to watch other prisoners sodomising each other by force. The 150-page document says reptiles were taken to the cells in an attempt to force prisoner confessions, while the Koran was thrown into the toilets before the eyes of the detained."

more.....

posted by Juan @ 5/16/2005 06:25:00 AM