CONFIRMED

The fire behind at least some of the smoke:

The U.S. military for the first time on Friday detailed how jailers at Guantanamo mishandled the Koran, including a case in which a guard’s urine splashed through a vent onto the Islamic holy book and others in which it was kicked, stepped on and soaked in water.

The Abu Ghraib official’s reference to someone throwing down and stepping on a Koran as part of an interrogation “Pride and Ego Down” technique now makes much more sense. A few caveats about this Pentagon media push. It’s very odd that most of the incidents acknowledged occurred after new guidelines were given. I’m dubious that only one minor incident occurred before. It’s odd that only one individual was interviewed for this report. The “pissing down an air-vent” incident sounds just bizarre. Yeah, sure the wind caused your pee to drift into a prisoner’s air-vent. It sounds like something some schoolboy would come up with. The soldier whose pee drifted was later discharged. Lastly, the way this was released late on Friday evening suggests to me that it’s part of a strategy to deflect attention, minimize what occurred and urge the press to move on, rather than a genuine attempt to get to the bottom of this. Maybe we’ll never know the full truth. This minimal amount of information seems to me to be the perfect Pentagon solution: they haven’t outright denied anything; they’ve provided a handful of minor examples of abuse as a minimal concession; and the strategy now is to accuse the press of exaggeration and the detainees of lying.