Well, I’m out of the blogging/news loop for a while and I check back and find that hundreds of Iraqis are dying, the place is decending into civil war, and shtuff keeps blowing up. Then, to cap it all off…
WASHINGTON May 17, 2005 — The State Department, moving to undo damage it says was caused by a Newsweek article alleging U.S. desecration of the Quran, the Muslim holy book, is telling its embassies to spread the word abroad that America respects all religious faiths.
Yeah, it seems that Newsweek printed an article based on some faulty intelligence that said interrogators at Guantánamo and other facilities have tormented prisoners by flushing their copies of the Quran down the toilet.
“We condemn all acts inciting violent protest and we express our sympathies to those injured in recent demonstrations and to the families of those killed,” the State Department cable said. “We urge all members of the press to provide the same wide coverage to the magazine’s retraction as was given to the original allegations.”
You mean like the same wide coverage the mainstream media provided to the London Times memo, proving that Blair & Bush were negotiating to invade Iraq by cooking up the intel on non-existent WMD’s? How about the wide coverage we all saw when Newsweek, Time, the NY Times, the Wash. Post, etc., had to retract all their cheerleading coverage of the WMD issue and the run up to war? How about the wide coverage the allegations of prisoner abuse were given during the four months before any Abu Ghraib photos came out?
The United States, the cable said, “is a tolerant society in which freedom of religion for all faiths is ardently defended…. Disrespect of the Holy Quran is not, has not been and will never be the policy of the United States.”
But waterboarding, forced positions, naked human pyramids, vicious guard dogs, leashed prisoners smeared with shit, faked electrocutions, beatings, smearing fake menstrual blood on prisoners, extraordinary rendition… that’s all still on the table. But flushing pages of your holy book down the commode, why, that’s unforgivable. We’d never stand for that!…
The Newsweek report was not the first public airing of allegations about U.S. personnel at Guantanamo Bay desecrating a Quran. In August and October 2004 there were news reports based on a lawsuit and a written report by British citizens who had been released from the prison in Cuba. They claimed abuse by U.S. guards, including throwing their Qurans into the toilet.
In January, Kristine Huskey, a lawyer representing Kuwaitis detained at Guantanamo, said they claimed to have been abused and in one case a detainee watched a guard throw a Quran into a toilet.
…well, we mean anymore, we won’t stand for it anymore, now that the public knows about it and the Muslims are rioting about it.
Gosh, when this war first started, Bush was calling it a “crusade” and “infinite justice”. Now our prisons flush their holy books and use their religious principles against them. It would almost make one think that a Born-Again™ Dominionist Christian leadership wants an angry Muslim populace willing to fight a holy war and bring about Armageddon. But only, of course, if one was a cynic…
