This emailer has a good point:
“The White House’s spinning of the Newsweek error is a huge miscalculation. It worked with Rathergate, which involved non-existent 30-year old documents related to a tired, worn out story. The White House got the last word because the Bush National Guard story was toast. Does Karl Rove really believe this is the last word on Islam-and-Interrogation?
Rove is daring every media organization in the US to make prisoner abuse a Page 1 story again. What is he thinking? Stories of Koran-abuse are coming – and the harder the White House spins, the worse they’ll look when they arrive. For the life of me, I can’t understand why Rove didn’t just let the story die. The media had nearly convinced itself that prisoner abuse stories don’t matter, but Rove has just lit a flame under journalists everywhere.”
The White House’s high profile attack on Newsweek – and the reliable media pouncing on the story – is a good strategy if the underlying story is untrue and will not be verified by future reporting. But if the story is true – and no one has denied it – then it will surely come out. Worse, it will raise the whole issue of the abuse of Islam in the treatment of prisoners, which goes far beyond merely one alleged incident of a toilet flush. This may not be close to torture, but it sure does violate the Geneva Conventions; more importantly, it’s explosive in terms of alienating Muslims we need and winning the broader war.
JOURNALISM AND PATRIOTISM: One thing that really struck me when reading through all the reports of detainee abuse was the consistency of anti-Islamic rhetoric and tactics. Captain James Yee, originally and unsuccessfully framed by the military as a spy, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo. He doubtless has stories to tell. So will others – unless the military gets to them. Did a hunger strike take place at Gitmo because of issues related to treatment of the Koran? Karl Rove has just made that a much bigger story than it ever would have been otherwise. The bigger point here is that highlighting these abuses is not, pace Glenn, reflective of a loyalty to journalism rather than to America. It is precisely a belief in America, in her proud traditions of fair treatment of prisoners, that motivates many of us to expose these horrors. And it is out of a desire to win this war of ideas, especially among moderate Muslims, that many of us want to stop the kind of insanity that prevailed at Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and many other military facilities across the globe. Many Muslims already believe the Koran-flushing story and are being accused (not without reason) of paranoia. But what if this time – or at other times – their paranoia is justified? The consequences of the Bush administration’s new, half-baked policies on interrogation are only beginning to be felt. And they threaten our entire position in this war. That’s why some of us won’t stint in exposing these issues. We’re in this war to win it; not to engage in dumb, unnecessary self-inflicted wounds.
HERE’S THE PROBLEM FOR BUSH: Susan Hu over at Daily Kos is on the case. Here’s an important piece of reporting:
I took the extra step today of contacting an attorney that is representing over ten Guantánamo detainees. He works for a prominent, private, Washington, D.C. law firm, and has visited Guantánamo four times since late last year. All of his clients share the same nationality and, partly for this reason, all of his clients have been kept in complete isolation from each other.
Seeing his clients is not easy. First of all, it requires a week’s stay in barracks to meet with all his clients for a sufficient amount of time. The barracks are located on the other side of the base from the camps, and the two and half-hour transit time involves a bus and a ferry.
He must prepare, in advance, a list of which clients he wishes to see, and in what order. Once, he was told that the guards could not locate one of his clients.
He meets with his clients one-by-one, never in groups. The detainees have had no contact with each other, and no opportunity to collaborate on false allegations of abuse.
I asked him, “Have you heard any accounts of Qur’anic desecration?”
He replied, “Yes, two detainees told me completely independently that they had witnessed a Qur’an being thrown in the toilet. Another told me that he had witnessed a Qur’an being stomped on. And another told me he had witnessed a Qur’an being urinated on.”
He continued, “Most disturbances, like hunger strikes, have been over religious issues, like non-Muslims handling the Koran.” I asked how the guards were supposed to supply Qur’ans to the detainees without handling them? He told me that the Muslim chaplains could provide this service, but there were fewer and fewer chaplains available.
Are all these detainees lying? Hasn’t the White House now challenged the entire news media to find out what the allegations are and whether they have merit? If these stories are true, will the media have “blood on its hands” for reporting them? Or is the real responsibility to be found among those officials who constructed the policies that made such abuses possible?
The Dish 