Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Koran- Toilet..yet again




Link
War (chicken)hawks lied, people died.

WASHINGTON - Terror suspects at the Guantanamo Bay prison told U.S. interrogators as early as April 2002, just four months after the first detainees arrived, that military guards abused them and desecrated the Quran, declassified
FBI records say.

"Their behavior is bad," one detainee is quoted as saying of his guards during an interrogation by an FBI special agent in July 2002. "About five months ago the guards beat the detainees. They flushed a Quran in the toilet."

The statements about guards disrespecting the Quran echo public allegations made many months later by some detainees and their lawyers after prisoners' release from Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The once-secret FBI documents show a consistency to the allegations and are the first indication that Justice and Defense department officials were aware in early 2002 that detainees were accusing their guards of mistreating the holy book.

Separately on Wednesday, Amnesty International urged the United States to shut down the prison, calling it "the gulag of our time." White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the human rights group's complaints were "unsupported by the facts" and that allegations of mistreatment were being investigated.

Pentagon officials have said recently that the public claims by released detainees were not credible and that the terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay had been trained to make such false claims.


But ...umm... I have a question.

It's been bothering me ever since the Newsweek flap.

The Koran's kind of a pretty extensive book. I would imagine at Guantanamo Bay, they have similar- or worse 1gpf (gallon per flush) toilets as in my home.

To flush the thing down a toilet- religious sensibilities aside, would require, I'd think, stopping up the toilet unless you ripped it into little bitty pieces, which I suspect did not happen.

So, I suspect it wasn't actually flushed all the way down the toilet, but it did get the toilet stopped up.

Which, to me, is far more troublesome, even taking religious sensibilities into account.

Do we really need "interrogators" stopping up toilets to make some kind of incoherent point?

On our tax dollar?

What kind of really neat intel did they get out of that stunt?

Probably none, but, yeah, they pissed off a whole bunch of Muslims.

Update:

Can't wait to see how the righties twist and spin this one...

Not to mention of course, that everybody since backed off the "Newsweek caused the riot" meme, including Scotty McClellan.





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