US officials say that the Muslim holy book, the Koran, has been disrespected at Guantanamo Bay. There has already been much handwringing over this and there will be more. It's a part of the overall campaign to discredit the Bush administration's overall record, not just its execution of the war on terror.
Charles Krauthammer has some thoughts.
Let's understand what mishandling means. Under the rules the Pentagon later instituted at Guantanamo, proper handling of the Koran means using two hands and wearing gloves when touching it. Which means that if any guard held the Koran with one hand or had neglected to put on gloves, this would be considered mishandling.
On the scale of human crimes, where, say, 10 is the killing of 2,973 innocent people in one day and 0 is jaywalking, this ranks as perhaps a 0.01. ...
Even greater hypocrisy is to be found here at home. Civil libertarians, who have been dogged in making sure that FBI-collected Guantanamo allegations are released to the world, seem exquisitely sensitive to mistreatment of the Koran. A rather selective scrupulousness. When an American puts a crucifix in a jar of urine and places it in a museum, civil libertarians rise immediately to defend it as free speech. And when someone makes a painting of the Virgin Mary, smears it with elephant dung and adorns it with porn, not only is that free speech, it is art -- deserving of taxpayer funding and an ACLU brief supporting the Brooklyn Museum when the mayor freezes its taxpayer subsidy.
Does the Koran deserve special respect? Of course it does. As do the Bibles destroyed by the religious police in Saudi Arabia and the Torahs blown up in various synagogues from Tunisia to Turkey.
Should the United States apologize? If there were mishandlings of the Koran, we should say so and express regret. And that should be in the context of our remarkably humane and tolerant treatment of the Guantanamo prisoners, and in the context of a global war on terrorism (for example, the campaign in Afghanistan) conducted with a discrimination and a concern for civilian safety rarely seen in the annals of warfare.
This Wall Street Journal column also has some observations.
So the Pentagon has now released the unhorrifying details of its inquiry into the mishandling of the Koran at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. It found only five cases, including one in which a detainee complained that his Koran had been kicked, and another in which urine from a guard relieving himself accidentally blew into an air vent and onto a Koran below.
That's it. With hundreds of different guards watching as many as 600 prisoners and some 28,000 interrogations over three years, that's what the hullabaloo prompted by Newsweek's false report about Koran abuse comes down to. In the case of the wayward urine, the report says the detainee was issued a new Koran and a fresh uniform, while the guard was reprimanded and kept away from prisoners for the rest of his Guantanamo duty. It should be noted that the prisoners only have Korans in the first place because the U.S. military has provided them -- some 1,600 in all. ...
Someone in the administration ought to point out that these measures are designed to prevent the next terror attack -- which, if it ever comes, could prompt a bipartisan crackdown on civil liberties that would make Guantanamo look like summer camp.
The reports about the disrespecting of the Koran at Guantanamo pale in comparison to the stories about the terrorists bombing of markets and places of worship. In the "men's inhumanity to men" category, the Guantanamo situation has to rank somewhere below social engineering. But with the attention it's been given by some, you'd think it would have been on par with the massacre of around 8,000 Muslim men and boys by Serbian soldiers in 1995.
To think that the disrespeting is systematic and on orders from-the-top-down is pure foolishness. The Bush administration must execute their war on terror without attacking any facet of Islam per se, for it is only a small fraction of those who practice Islam who also practice terrorism. Any kind of systematic mishandling by US forces would be used by terrorists to gain sympathy for their cause. The Bush administration might as well arm al-Qaeda and Zarqawi if it were to order abuse of the Koran.
Indeed, as Krauthammer notes, officials at the Pentagon have defined what it means to
"mishandle" a Koran and those who mishandle a Koran get punished. If we need reminders about the effect of incentives coming from leaders, we can remind ourselves that when an Islamic suicide bomber sets out on his bloody mission,
he thinks that he is going to be rewarded with unlimited sex with 72 virgins etc.
HT to the Atlantic Blog for the Krauthammer piece.
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