Flushing Out the Story

Marc Perkel writes under the headline "Newsweek was right after all":

"As it turns out and FBI memo has revealed that American jailers at Guantanamo Bay actually did flush the Koran down the toilet. This was on top of International Amnesty's report calling Guantanamo the 'gulag of our time' comparing it to communist prisons. Makes me wonder if all those corporate media apologists are going to apologize to Newsweek for being right all along?

"Have you noticed that the corporate news media is barely mentioning it?"

But isn't Newsweek, which kicked up the fuss, part of the corporate media as well?

Andrew Sullivan says the Koran stories are all too easy to believe in light of other documented abuses:

"SURPRISE! FBI documents provide countless claims by inmates that desecration or abuse of the Koran was deployed as an interrogation technique at Guantanamo. For good measure, we even have a toilet story. At this point: Did you really believe otherwise? Yes, these reports are from inmates; and, yes, those inmates are obviously biased, even trained to lie. But the sheer scope and scale of the protests, the credible accounts of hunger-strikes in Afghanistan and Gitmo, and the reference, cited below, of interrogators conceding that they too had heard of such techniques, seems to me to resolve the question.

"The U.S. has deliberately and consciously had a policy of using religious faith as a lever in interrogation of terror suspects. Is this 'torture'? It is certainly part of psychological abuse. It is also beyond stupid. Do you really think that throwing the Koran around is likely to prompt an Islamist fanatic to tell you what he knows? Did anyone ask what the broader consequences might be of such techniques - in polarizing Muslim opinion against the U.S., in providing every left-wing hack rhetorical weapons against the United States, in handing the Islamists a propaganda victory that makes all our effort to spread democracy in that region that much harder?

"Still, we can be grateful for Scott McClellan for one thing: he dared the press to provide substantiation for the Newsweek claim. We've now got it. Will administration defenders finally concede we have a problem?"

But Penraker questions why the detainees would be making these allegations:

"That's what their manual tells them to do. They've been trained to spout the most incendiary accusations possible on release from prison. These were people who were willing to kill hundreds or thousands of people at the drop of a hat, or to hack the head off a living innocent - are we supposed to believe everything they say?

"The [New York] Times seems to. . . . This is all talk. This is terrible journalism. Shout the allegation to the rooftops, mumble the truth under your breath. Front page treatment for each and every allegation.

"The Times, by magnifying each incident out of proportion, by not supplying necessary information (by alerting its readers to the instructions in the manual) may be guilty of getting numerous prisoners in other countries tortured or killed."