Pentagon Confirms Koran Incidents

"We then proceeded to ask him about any incidences where he had seen the Koran defiled, desecrated or mishandled, and he allowed as how he hadn't, but he had heard . . . that guards at some other point in time had done this," Hood said yesterday. "He went on to describe to his interrogator that that was a problem that was only in the old camp."

Hood said "old camp" appeared to mean Camp X-Ray, the temporary cells where captives were held when Guantanamo Bay opened in January 2002. But he acknowledged that interrogators did not specifically ask the detainee this month whether a toilet had been involved, nor did they refer to the original statement the detainee gave to the FBI nearly three years ago.

Hood emphasized that most of the confirmed incidents occurred before standard procedures were put in place in January 2003 for proper handling of the Koran. A broader investigation by the U.S. Southern Command into allegations of abuse and mistreatment contained in memos written by FBI personnel stationed at Guantanamo Bay is continuing. Hood and Di Rita declined to address the larger probe.

According to U.S. Southern Command documents, officials at Guantanamo Bay were aware of the importance of the proper handling of the Koran in the facility's very first days. Responding to concerns from the International Committee of the Red Cross in January 2002, command officials wrote that they needed to make sure that detainees were allowed time to pray and that they were given appropriate ways to store their Korans.

The "Koran must be kept neat and wrapped in something," according to a memo dated Jan. 21, 2002. "Can we get them a small green cloth to wrap it?"

The FBI documents released Wednesday by the ACLU contained summaries of a dozen interviews in which detainees said they had witnessed or heard about mistreatment of the Koran by guards or interrogators.

They also included new allegations of severe physical abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and in Afghanistan.

The FBI records provide at least one example in which a detainee may have lied about mistreatment of the Koran. According to a summary of an interview with one prisoner, an uprising in July 2002 had started with a claim by another detainee that a guard had dropped a Koran.

"In actuality," the summary says, "the detainee dropped the Koran and then blamed the guard. Many other detainees reacted to this claim and this initiated the uprising."

The FBI documents do not indicate whether this version of events is accurate, although Pentagon officials have recounted a similar-sounding incident. FBI officials have declined to comment.

The ACLU also released more FBI documents yesterday, including a memo indicating that military interrogators posed as officials from the FBI and State Department while questioning detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

One memo, from November 2003, refers to "DOD interrogators at Guantanamo representing themselves to be officials of the FBI and U.S. State Department." A previously released version of the same document had revealed the FBI impersonations, but the reference to the State Department had been redacted.

State Department spokesman Richard A. Boucher told reporters yesterday that he was unaware of the impersonation allegations. Another spokesman said the department does not employ interrogators or take part in interviews at Guantanamo Bay.

Another newly released document, dated January 2004, suggested that the FBI would "finally make an arrest" in connection with "interrogations in June 2003 when an FBI agent was impersonated." No such arrest has been publicly announced.

In several e-mails, FBI agents angrily complained about the impersonations and suggested that the ruse was aimed in part at avoiding blame for any subsequent public allegations of abuse.

The earlier documents also included e-mails from FBI agents who said they had witnessed Guantanamo Bay detainees being shackled to the floor for days at a time, deprived of food and water and left to defecate on themselves.