U.S. Confirms Gitmo Soldier Kicked Quran

[Monte Smith]

Oh heaven!


U.S. Confirms Gitmo Soldier Kicked Quran

By ROBERT BURNS
The Associated Press
Friday, June 3, 2005; 8:38 PM

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon on Friday released new details about mishandling of the Quran at the Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects, confirming that a soldier deliberately kicked the Muslim holy book and that an interrogator stepped on a Quran and was later fired for "a pattern of unacceptable behavior."

In other confirmed incidents, a guard's urine came through an air vent and splashed on a detainee and his Quran; water balloons thrown by prison guards caused an unspecified number of Qurans to get wet; and in a confirmed but ambiguous case, a two-word obscenity was written in English on the inside cover of a Quran.

The findings, released after normal business hours Friday evening, are among the results of an investigation last month by Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, the commander of the detention center in Cuba, that was triggered by a Newsweek magazine report _ later retracted _ that a U.S. soldier had flushed one Guantanamo Bay detainee's Quran down a toilet.

The story stirred worldwide controversy and the Bush administration blamed it for deadly demonstrations in Afghanistan.

Hood said in a written statement released Friday evening, along with the new details, that his investigation "revealed a consistent, documented policy of respectful handling of the Quran dating back almost 2 1/2 years."

Hood said that of nine mishandling cases that were studied in detail by reviewing thousands of pages of written records, five were confirmed to have happened. He could not determine conclusively whether the four others took place.

In one of those four unconfirmed cases, a detainee in April 2003 complained to FBI and other interrogators that guards "constantly defile the Quran." The detainee alleged that in one instance a female military guard threw a Quran into a bag of wet towels to anger another detainee, and he also alleged that another guard said the Quran belonged in the toilet and that guards were ordered to do these things.

Hood said he found no other record of this detainee mentioning any Quran mishandling. The detainee has since been released.

In the most recent confirmed case, Hood said a detainee complained on March 25, 2005, of urine splashing on him and his Quran. An unidentified guard admitted at the time that "he was at fault," the Hood report said, although it did not say whether the act was deliberate. The guard's supervisor reprimanded him and assigned him to gate guard duty, where he had no contact with detainees for the remainder of his assignment at Guantanamo Bay.

As described in the Hood report, the guard had left his observation post and went outside to urinate. He urinated near an air vent and the wind blew his urine through the vent into the cell block. The incident was not further explained.

In another of the confirmed cases, a contract interrogator stepped on a detainee's Quran in July 2003 and then apologized. "The interrogator was later terminated for a pattern of unacceptable behavior, an inability to follow direct guidance and poor leadership," the Hood report said.

Hood also said his investigation found 15 cases of detainees mishandling their own Qurans. "These included using a Quran as a pillow, ripping pages out of the Quran, attempting to flush a Quran down the toilet and urinating on the Quran," Hood's report said. It offered no possible explanation for those alleged abuses.

In the most recent of those 15 cases, a detainee on Feb. 18, 2005, allegedly ripped up his Quran and handed it to a guard, stating that he had given up on being a Muslim. Several of the guards witnessed this, Hood reported.

Last week, Hood disclosed that he had confirmed five cases of mishandling of the Quran, but he refused to provide details. Allegations of Quran desecration at Guantanamo Bay have led to anti-American passions in many Muslim nations, although Pentagon officials have insisted that the problems were relatively minor and that U.S. commanders have gone to great lengths to enable detainees to practice their religion in captivity.

Hood said last week that he found no credible evidence that a Quran was ever flushed down a toilet. He said a prisoner who was reported to have complained to an FBI agent in 2002 that a military guard threw a Quran in the toilet has since told Hood's investigators that he never witnessed any form of Quran desecration.

Other prisoners who were returned to their home countries after serving time at Guantanamo Bay as terror suspects have alleged Quran desecration by U.S. guards, and some have said a Quran was placed in a toilet.

There are about 540 detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Some have been there more than three years without being charged with a crime. Most were captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002 and were sent to Guantanamo Bay in hope of extracting useful intelligence about the al-Qaida terrorist network.

Both President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld have denounced an Amnesty International report that called the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay "the gulag of our time."

The president told reporters at a press conference on Tuesday that the report by the human-rights group was "absurd."

On Wednesday, Rumsfeld called the characterization "reprehensible" and said the U.S. military had taken care to ensure that detainees were free to practice their religion. However, he also acknowledged that some detainees had been mistreated, even "grievously" at times.

© 2005 The Associated Press

[patricia]

Monte, according to the news that I just heard now, the Pentagon has admitted that Korans were urinated on by soldiers, written in by soldiers and thrown to the ground by soldiers. As far as anyone knows, there is no proof that the story about the Koran being flushed down a toilet, but the fact that the Pentagon is admitting to these other desecrations is interesting. By zeroing in, earlier, on the apparent act of "flushing a Koran down the toilet" and then saying that there was no proof that that particular act occurred does not mean that the other acts were of no consequence. Also, these are only acts which the Pentagon admits happened.
Do you seriously think that they were the only ones?? Please.

[Monte Smith]

I am as concerned as you are, patricia, at these five flagrant abuses of an inanimate object. That's why I suggest that no books be allowed at Quantanamo.

[Dr Dave]

Do you realize how idiotic this all is? How much it hurts us as a nation? The Bush Administration has the ultimate tin ear when it comes to international relations, and no more so than the way it handles relationships with countries that have majority Islamic populations. It may seem funny to us, but it is deadly serious to them. We can tut-tut them about the rigidity of their beliefs, but the rigidity of our own simply mirrors theirs. Somehow, we have become a Christian State, with all the liabilities such status confers.

[Monte Smith]

Oh my God!

[Monte Smith]

the image of a shoe is only one post away from an image of the Holy Koran!

[Monte Smith]

Blasphemy! Horror! War crime! Atrocity.

[crawjo]

People are going to use this as an excuse to kill other people.

[Monte Smith]

Originally Posted by crawjo

People are going to use this as an excuse to kill other people.

Yup. They're lucky to have it so handy in their demented, ridiculous, 12th century skulls.

[Monte Smith]

I'm gonna add fuel to the fire. The story is that a soldier kicked a book. But look at this, enemies:



Yuh huh! You betcha. That there is an image of a woman only half-veiled DRIVING A CAR.

Suck it up, fuckers!

[GoodSpeak]

Damned conservative media....

[GoodSpeak]

Originally Posted by RBS

Okay, Monte.

Here's what's gonna happen. You're going to be in the middle of Nabobville or wherever the hell you are. You're going to be taken out of your home and held in East Bumfuck, Afghanistan.

You may or may not be a terrorist, but no one will ever know, because the government that's holding you won't let anybody know.

Then, some guard named Abu will urinate all over your favorite possessions. Perhaps it's a Bible. Maybe a family photo album. Maybe it's your stock certificates. I don't friggin' know.

Then he'll kick it a few times. See if you don't get pissed off.

Oh, c'mon RBS.


An American soldier pissing on your possessions is OK. Didn't you study the US Constitution? We get to, they don't. OK?





Geez.




Where did you get your education....at some sub-standard public piece of shit high school?
















Crimony

If they managed to flush an Arab bible down the loo they must have a pretty good plumbing system down at Guantanamera.

[patricia]

Originally Posted by Monte Smith

I am as concerned as you are, patricia, at these five flagrant abuses of an inanimate object. That's why I suggest that no books be allowed at Quantanamo.

Laugh it up, Monte. How soon you forget that the much more enlightened people in Los Angeles rioted over the television image of some guy named Rodney King being mistreated by the police. He was hardly innocent, although the beating was definitely over-the-top policing.
The anger is not just about desecration of the Koran. Perhaps it also has something to do with the other injustices that have been visited upon them, as Dr Dave said. This is just the proverbial [to use a biblical term] last straw.
On a related subject, there also seems to be a dispute regarding the use of the term gulag to describe Guantanamo and other detention centres.
I can't help thinking of a line from Hillaire Bellock's poem "The Gnu":
"...Then no more is heard
But sounds of strong men
struggling with a word."

By all means, let's argue about the correct terms, while hundreds of innocent people are held without due process, tortured and humiliated.
Is this the Democracy of which the Bush Administration speaks??

[Captain Hate]

That does it, I'm cutting Ollie's head off.

[patricia]

Originally Posted by Captain Hate

That does it, I'm cutting Ollie's head off.

And your point is..................???
Are you referring to the beheadings by terrorists of kidnapped foreign nationals in Iraq??
Are you suggesting that illegally incarcerating, humiliating and torturing mostly innocent people at Guantanamo and other facilities is justified as revenge ??? If so, who exactly are the barbarians???

[willy]

Burried deep in the story, and seemingly missed or ignored by everyone here, is the following:

"Hood also said his investigation found 15 cases of detainees mishandling their own Qurans. "These included using a Quran as a pillow, ripping pages out of the Quran, attempting to flush a Quran down the toilet and urinating on the Quran," Hood's report said. It offered no possible explanation for those alleged abuses."


The title of the piece is "U.S. Confirms Gitmo Soldier Kicked Quran." The article provides no further details of that single incident, instead reporting on one instance of a contract interrogator, not a soldier, stepping on a Quran and then apologizing. The contract interrogator was later fired. In other cases, the story notes, "a guard's urine came through an air vent and splashed on a detainee and his Quran; water balloons thrown by prison guards caused an unspecified number of Qurans to get wet; and in a confirmed but ambiguous case, a two-word obscenity was written in English on the inside cover of a Quran."



So, Muslims can wipe their asses with the Koran, but if someone else accidently does something to it all hells breaks loose (thanks in no small part to the MSM, or, as Joesph Stalin used to call them, the useful idiots).


Read the official Pentagon report instead of this spin job.

[Captain Hate]

We're living in a parallel universe if this pisskoran horseshit is taken as seriously as, say, the murder of a Lebanese journalist by Syrian goons.

[patricia]

Would you all have any objection to American detainees, if held by the "insurgents" and "suspected terrorists" being treated the same way that Afghan and Iraqi detainees are being treated at Guantanamo and elsewhere??
That's unlikely to happen, since the insurgents are fighting what is essentially a guerilla war, with no large facilities to hold captured Americans, so they kill them.

[willy]

They are not "insurgents" or "suspected terrorists". They are real terrorists killing their own people because they have the audacity to want to live in a somewhat free society where they have some say in what goes on. The Iraqi people want to move out of the 8th Century and the terrorists (largely from other Muslim countries) are doing everything they can to stop that from happening.


BTW-How many Qurans have been blown up by terrorists who bomb their own people in temples and mosques?


As for treating American captives the same way as terrorists are treated at Gitmo and other places I'd say that would be a walk in the park compared to have your finger nails pulled out, being tourtered repeatedly, being forced to play Russian Roulette with your fellow captives, etc. I'd certainly rather have someone accidently kick my Quran as opposed to having a cattle prod shoved up my ass. Call me silly, but comparing GITMO or Abu to Uncle Joe's Gulags or Hussein's torture chambers and rape rooms is as assinine as trying to pass Dan Rather off as sane, and the American people see right through this whole little charade, just as they did with the "fake but accurate" memos.

[Root Doctor]

Originally Posted by willy

They are not "insurgents" or "suspected terrorists". They are real terrorists killing their own people because they have the audacity to want to live in a somewhat free society where they have some say in what goes on. The Iraqi people want to move out of the 8th Century and the terrorists (largely from other Muslim countries) are doing everything they can to stop that from happening.


BTW-How many Qurans have been blown up by terrorists who bomb their own people in temples and mosques?


As for treating American captives the same way as terrorists are treated at Gitmo and other places I'd say that would be a walk in the park compared to have your finger nails pulled out, being tourtered repeatedly, being forced to play Russian Roulette with your fellow captives, etc. I'd certainly rather have someone accidently kick my Quran as opposed to having a cattle prod shoved up my ass. Call me silly, but comparing GITMO or Abu to Uncle Joe's Gulags or Hussein's torture chambers and rape rooms is as assinine as trying to pass Dan Rather off as sane, and the American people see right through this whole little charade, just as they did with the "fake but accurate" memos.

How can the terrorists be from other Muslim countries and at the same time be bombing their own people and Mosques in Iraq?

[willy]

Muslims bombing fellow Muslims. Is the Iarqi Allah different than the Iranian or Saudi Arabian Allah? This is a holy war, remember? Killing all the christian and Jewish infidels. Now the terrorists are killing fellow Muslims who aren't radical enough for them. With all those sacred Qurans blown to smithereens (but we're not supposed to notice that, are we?)

The problem is that the many want some sort of freedom while the few fanatical terrorists want to keep them in the dark ages where stonings and the sanctioned rape of women reign supreme. This is what the "insurgents" are fighting for, and the vast majority of Iraqis are saying "no way. Been there. Done that".

The MSM can call those killing their fellow Muslims in Iraq who are working for a better life than the rape rooms and torture chambers of Saddam "freedom fighters" or "insurgents" all they want. The American people know better. They are terrorists pure and simple.

[crawjo]

We don't know if these detainees were actual terrorists or not. Many innocent people have been swept up by the U.S. dragnets, only to be released months later, after receiving abuse. Shit, at one of the Iraqi prisons a man was tortured to death, and all he did was be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

[Root Doctor]

Originally Posted by willy

The American people know better. They are terrorists pure and simple.

Are you really Professor Irwin Corey, Willy?

[sonic1]

Originally Posted by crawjo

We don't know if these detainees were actual terrorists or not. Many innocent people have been swept up by the U.S. dragnets, only to be released months later, after receiving abuse. Shit, at one of the Iraqi prisons a man was tortured to death, and all he did was be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

No Crawjo. Willy KNOWS. He KNOWS they are guilty.






As far as what the prisoners are doing to their own book, it is helpful to remember that the Jews did the same sorts of things when they were imprisoned. When one is imprisoned, sometimes does strange self-depricating things.

[patricia]

If you think that this is bad, wait until the detainees are released. Then the full extent of the abuse will be common knowledge, first hand, from those estimated 70%-90% who are innocent of any crime, aside from being Iraqi or Afghan, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Most were mistakenly scooped up and imprisoned, not realizing that they were resisting their "liberators".

[sonic1]

Listen you little Canadian. You are either with us or you are against us.

They WON'T be getting out.

[patricia]

Originally Posted by sonic1

Listen you little Canadian. You are either with us or you are against us.

They WON'T be getting out.

Good point, Sonic 1. It's a little difficult to support cruelty, no matter which side practices it. I'm odd that way.
I guess that this President didn't read the famous political pundit, POGO's comment, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
Pity.

[Monte Smith]

Did someone on this thread honestly ask if it would be OK to see hypothetical American captives of jihadists treated with the same kind of respect shown to detainees at Guantanamo?

Um. Yes. Yes, that would be great. It would be wonderful if our enemies would accord their captives the Guantanamo treatment. What an improvement that would be. In fact, if they were that beneficient, we would not be fighting them in the first place, since they would be exhibiting the kind of respect for others that makes terrorism impossible.

[crawjo]

The problem, Monte, is that now that all these abuses have come to the light, future U.S. protestations over the treatment of American POWs will ring hollow. Since the United States has disregarded the Geneva Conventions, what right will it have to decry similar abuse in future wars?

And if you read all the reports. there's been a lot worse abuses than just pissing on a book. Torture, murder...none of these things are any better than being decapitated.