UPDATE: Jay Tea at WizBang suggests that one group of people who should be upset by Koran desecration is the American taxpayers, because the copies of the Koran given to the Gitmo detainees were supplied (and paid for) by the US government.
Dirty Harry at Jackson's Junction wonders why the Left is so upset at Americans desecrating religious symbols. After all, isn't that what the Left does best?
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Some excerpts from an Associated Press story released this evening:
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.
Water balloons! The horror! Next thing you know, those sadistic guards will be forcing detainees to listen to Milli Vanilli. But the report also reveals this:
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... (emphasis added)
So there were three times as many cases of inmates abusing their own Korans, including the infamous toilet-flushing (which apparently was done by and inmate and not a US soldier) and deliberately urinating on a Koran, which was never done by US personnel. It seems reasonable to me that the detainees, who are trained by Al Qaeda to continually accuse their captors of abuse and torture, were probably trying to dummy up "evidence" to use against the Americans.
And WE are the bad guys here???
As LaShawn Barber has previously pointed out, a copy of the Koran is just a book, a collection of pages bound together with string and glue. It is a holy object and should be treated with respect, but it is an inanimate object - you can buy one at any bookstore.
According to the report, the military takes abuse at Gitmo seriously and disciplines those found guilty of perpetrating it. No one is "out of control" there, except in the fever-swamp imaginations of the Left. And speaking of "tolerance" and "respect," it should be remembered that in the "progressive" (according to the press) kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the mere act of possessing a Bible is grounds for imprisonment. I don't know about you, but I'd much rather be in Gitmo under the care of the US than in a Saudi prison under the boot of hardcore Wahabi extremists who practice stoning and amputation for sport.
A comment on one of my previous posts suggested I thought that the torture of Gitmo inmates was OK because Saddam tortured his own people. In case you haven't figured out my general point on all of this, here it is.
The United States does not torture its prisoners. We do not have a "Torture Room 4" or a squad of monkey-faced inbred redneck goons that gouge prisoners' eyes out with screwdrivers, as this vile Seattle Post-Intelligencer cartoon from a few weeks ago specifically suggests.
What we do have is a lot of non-uniformed terrorists and Taliban members who were taken prisoner on the battlefield, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are not innocent civilians; rather, they are hardened fighters and, by the Geneva Conventions, war criminals. We have used specific methods designed to break their will to fight and to resist interrogation. We have also questioned these prisoners at length, many unwillingly. They are religious fanatics who have been trained to die in the pursuit of holy war. They frequently attack guards with urine and feces and they must be held in solitary prison cells, because housing them together is much too dangerous.
But interrogation, even if it involves psychological and coercive methods, is not torture. Torture is the systematic use of physical and psychological injury for the sole purpose of dehumanizing and destroying captives.
We are tough with terrorist prisoners becasue want to keep them from engaging in riots and insurrections. But we still treat them as human beings. We give them comfortable quarters, clean clothes, religious freedom, medical care, recreation and exercise, and a healthy diet. On the other hand, the torturer deliberately deprives his captives of food, sanitation, and medical care. This degrades the prisoners by forcing them live in their own squalor and to literally begin killing one another for food. Read the stories of Nazi concentration camp survivors if you want to understand the true nature of torture and its effect on its victims.
Abuse of prisoners did occur at Abu Graib prison in Iraq, and the
military investigated it thoroughly and disciplined those who were
involved. What happened at Abu Graib was not official US government policy,
despite the wacky conspiracy theories that keep popping up. That's the
difference between a true terrorist state and a handful of soldiers who
briefly went out of control in Iraq. When Abu Graib was administered by Saddam, real torture
was used for the entertainment of prison officials. Videos of
prisoners being tortured were sent to Saddam himself, who amused
himself with them as he relaxed in his gilded presidential palace.
That is truly sick.
There is no excuse for Americans abusing Iraqi prisoners, but those
who abused prisoners will never be allowed near them again. In Iraq,
the most successful torturers were rewarded with promotions and money.
I should also make it clear that ordering a group of naked men to pose
for degrading photos is a far cry from gouging out someone's eyeball with a
screwdriver or ripping their kneecap off with an electric drill.
Likewise with a copy of the Koran. It is just a book. Even if you step on it, no one
screams in pain, no one dies from infected wounds, no one is blinded,
no one loses their limbs. To equate stepping on a book with "torture"
or even abuse is just utterly mind-bogglingly stupid.
What both saddens and angers us on the Right is that Democrats seem to be completely
ambivalent about the fact that Saddam gouged out eyeballs, cut off
tongues, ears, and fingers, broke bones, raped, sodomized,
electrocuted, flagellated, and impaled his own citizens. When seven
former Iraqi prisoners came to the US for free medical treatment to
repair the wounds that they received in Saddam's real torture chambers,
the Left yawned. The major press outlets gave the story only pitiful
line-item coverage. And when those private torture videos owned by Saddam Hussein were offered to the press, they refused to air them or print videocaps. The mainstream press remains firmly committed to spiking this story.
But let a US soldier (gasp!) step on a book (horrors!) and Democrats come completely unhinged and the mainstream press goes nuts.
Just for the record (again) I believe that if US personnel abuse prisoners they should be reprimanded and barred from further contact with prisoners. But it is just as wrong for the Democrats and the press to grossly distort and report only one side of this issue, thereby engaging in a deliberate attempt to make American soldiers seem like monsters in the tradition of Hitler and Stalin. It seems to me that there are some seriously misplaced priorities on the Left.
More on this from Michelle Malkin and LaShawn Barber. LaShawn says that she is ready to start kicking a few Korans herself if she hears any more of this nonsense. Take it easy there, LaShawn. Remember Proverbs 26:11.
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