Everyone has heard of Newsweek’s May 9 story about the desecration of the Koran in Guantanamo bay that said American interrogators put copies of the Quran on toilets or in one case, flushed one down a toilet in an attempt to rattle suspects.
Newsweek’s article cited “sources” as saying a report from a military investigation into allegations of prisoner abuse revealed that interrogators, “in an attempt to rattle suspects, flushed a Quran down a toilet.”
The article sparked massive anti-American riots in Afghanistan, Palestine, Egypt, Sudan, Pakistan, Indonesia and elsewhere in the Muslim world last week.
In its May 23 issue, Newsweek reported that its senior government source had backed away from his initial story, saying he couldn’t remember if the toilet allegations were in the particular report from the investigation.
And after pressure from the Bush administration, Newsweek disavowed the whole story on Monday. And Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief, says the magazine is taking preventive action in the aftermath of the incident, going back to learn from the mistakes they made.
White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan acknowledged there are still other ongoing investigations into other reports of religious intolerance — including desecration of the Koran — by interrogators at Guantanamo Bay.
What do I think?
Well, I think this whole story is most probably true, but that the US government has put so much pressure onto everyone involved to just break the whole thing down and invalidate it.
[Sources: CNN, Al Jazeera]
This is what I think as well.
Guantanamo Bay are now related to the cheapest and most brutal interrogation methods, so such a thing could so possibly happen over there.
I wonder where does “democracy” and “human rights” go when they’re mostly needed!
Well it seems Guantanamo is the second one as they tend to deport the ones they really want to “question” (in the middle age sense of the word) to Afghanistan. They get away with it because it is not on american territory, inside the US it would be harder because of human rights activists…
Oh and the latest US government rewrote the definitions of human rights and democracy in the past years, and they stick pretty close to their new definitions…
All this is laking me sad and i could go on it for hours 🙁
A number of things spring to mind: First nobody can flush a book, no matter how small, down a commode. The design simply prevents this. It’s even more true in Western toilets that have a gooseneck design to aid their flush. They are strong, but they wouldn’t accept such large cargo.
Second, obviously something is funny here. Newsweek bends and apologizes and then breaks and retracts the story. The question really should be, why did they run such a story in the first place when it is so inflammatory and contributes nothing to the real debate? Are there similar stories being run about the slaughter of innocent Shia, fellow Muslims, in Iraq. Or about the descecration of churches in Iraq? Not that you see on a regular basis.
This story was run because it was “hot” and done to sell magazines. It was a mistake to do it. The outcome should have been clear. America already took one in the balls after the whole Abu Ghraib situation. No one is going to believe a word they say that is positive while everyone will belive they are capable of anything negative.
This editor deserves to be fired, that is for sure. But really it just shows how shaky things have gotten in the media. Al Arabeeya now runs adverts touting their truthfulness over organizations such as Al Jazeera that fake their news with a piece showing a fake skirmish that’s made to look like Iraq. Who knows what is real.
There is one fact in all this, no one could actually flush a book down a commode. What actually did happen we will likely never know.
Uber Duber,
whether a book can be flushed or not is not what really matters, it could be simply thrown inside the toilette or torn apart and flushed as separate papers, but then again, what really matters is that religion is being abused and harassed in many ways (forget about the flushing thing). Torture has crossed its limits, respected no religion, no human rights and nothing.
Prisoners are treated as animals, and we’ve seen pics and filming on how prisoners were kicked while praying, and how they were dragged naked into investigation….etc. It’s these facts that we have witnessed all around the world that make us believe that Quran could be very possibly desecrated, I mean why not believe it if the prisoners have been through the shittiest and most humiliating methods ever!
And one more thing just for the sake of knowing, harassments of both Muslims and Christians are reported, if you know of the Muslim part more that’s the fault of foreign coverage not the Arab one. News do report the attacks on Shiites and Christians. For example, Arab media covered the Israeli attacks on Palestinian churches; Arab media is covering the killings of Shiites in Iraq and following up on the kidnapped journalists and civilians from all religions and from all countries.
What I’m trying to say is, we respect each other’s religions, and there are places where there are some sensitivities and problems, and that happens all around the world, not just among Arabs. And when a religious book is desecrated, whatever it was, and when a certain religion is humiliated, then we must act to protect it.
Koran desecrated?
What about suicide bombers who blow masks with the hundreds people with the Koran in their hands? Can we call it