Kos blogger Susan Hu has discovered four other media citations of the allegation that Gitmo interrogators desecrated the Koran: one from the Philadelphia Inquirer, and three from Human Rights Watch. Now we cannot know for sure – yet – if these allegations are real, or propaganda. But we do know for certain that other “techniques” designed to use religion as an interrogative tool have been deployed, including the smearing of fake menstrual blood on detainees’ faces. This religious warfare was also deployed at Abu Ghraib. I wrote in my review of the official records of the torture:
One Muslim inmate was allegedly forced to eat pork, had liquor forced down his throat and told to thank Jesus that he was alive. He recounted in broken English: “They stripped me naked, they asked me, ‘Do you pray to Allah?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ They said ‘Fuck you’ and ‘Fuck him.'” Later, this inmate recounts: ”Someone else asked me, ‘Do you believe in anything?’ I said to him, ‘I believe in Allah.’ So he said, ‘But I believe in torture and I will torture you.'”
The man cited, Charles Graner, was found guilty of detainee abuse. So we have evidence of the abuse of Islam by U.S. interrogators; we have four citations of the Koran incident; Newsweek has not retracted the story; and more will no doubt come out. One thing worth reiterating: the notion that this obscenity simply couldn’t have happened in the U.S. military (something I believed two years ago) is no longer an operative assumption. We know that incidents like this have happened. And even now, the administration is not denying it outright.
The Dish 