koran…

Since you raise the point of what actually happened, and there is clearly, an issue of accuracy in reporting, a perusal of the media is thick with stories that purport the same thing. Why would Newsweek’s story be bogus? There was simply a confidential source who balked under pressure and refused to come foward and cite his sources. He was likely credible, the events likely real and documented (albeit classified) and the political coverup fast and self-righteous.

After all, the disclosure that you cited on NPR was from military sources and was released on a Friday night (typically a good time for bad news to be covered-up and glossed over during the weekend).

Here’s a brief quote from the Washington Post.

Earlier this year, lawyers representing Kuwaitis held at Guantanamo said their clients told them that military police threw at least one Koran into a toilet. A released Afghan named Ehsannullah told The Washington Post in 2003 that U.S. soldiers taunted him by doing the same thing. Three Britons released last year also said Korans were put into toilets by U.S. guards.

The reality is far worse is going on well beyond the public eye, this is obvious from the glimpses that leak despite a thick wall of collusion between a media-savvy administration and a media-web “sin huevos.” Newsweek is a convenient political piñata for the right wing, but the inability to cite a confidential source is far from telling me that the story is bogus.

Why, after all did the administration not bash the Washington Post, the BBC, the Hartford Corant, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Miami Herald, or the New York Times, when they reported mostly identical stories on seperate occaisions?

Here’s a link to the original Newsweek article if you haven’t read it. Oh and you really should peruse the Wikipedia entry on this subject (which is where I drew the list of newspapers from)

I wonder how it came to be that we have attempted to disguise our war efforts behind a humanitarian front. Is it really shocking that prisoners are beaten or disrespected? Did we really expect to send soldiers away to fight with respect and empathy, with mercy? It’s a pitiful compromise and an inconceivable twist of logic that we are willing to accept a war as long as human rights are respected. The very definition of war is to diminish the humanity of a people and to crush them and the threat that they pose. Perhaps it is true, like in WWII, that war is sometimes necessary; this does not change what it means to engage in war.