No sooner does Newsweek retract its Koran desecration story then a flurry of news reports attest to just what Newsweek seemed to be reporting. "Dozens have Alleged Koran's Mishandling" read a Los Angeles Times headline from Sunday. "They tore it and threw it on the floor," former detainee Mohammed Mazouz said of guards at Guantanamo Bay. "They urinated on it. They walked on top of the Koran. They used the Koran like a carpet."
Defense Department shill Lawrence DiRita claims that prison guards were instructed to respect Muslim religious rituals after the prisons for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay were first built in early 2002. But between 2002 and mid-2003 the International Red Cross received "multiple" reports from detainees that American interrogators had abused the Koran. "We raised the issues in our reports and verbally over a lengthy period of time," ICRC spokesman Simon Schorno said last week. "We talked to many detainees, not just one person." The FBI also knew of similar accusations at the time.
Prisoners who protested this treatment were "Earthed," in the words of freed Guantanamo detainee Martin Mubanga, a 32-year-old Londoner arrested in Zambia who spent 33 months in captivity before he was released without charge in January. "Earthed is basically when a minimum of five military policemen dressed in riot gear, with riot shields would come in and manhandle you and put you to the floor," Mubanga told radio host Laura Flanders in his first American interview. "All of this could have been avoided if they showed respect for our religion, its concept and its rulings."
The US responded with "corrective measures" in 2003 after the Red Cross presented its confidential reports. Yet by then Guantanamo had come to define the view of the US for much of the Muslim world. "The cages, the orange suits, the shackles--it's as if they're dealing with something like a germ they don't want to touch," Daoud Kuttab, director of the Institute of Modern Media at Al Quds University in Ramallah, recently told the New York Times.
Unfortunately, the abuses at Guantanamo may pale in comparison to the sadistic treatment of prisoners at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, where US interrogators tortured and left two innocent captives to die in December 2002. In the wake of the deaths, Army investigators recommended closing the case without filing any criminal charges. "Crucial witnesses were not interviewed, documents disappeared, and at least a few pieces of evidence were mishandled," the Times reported. But last October, the Army concluded that 27 officers and personnel should be charged with criminal offenses. Since then, only seven have been charged, and none convicted.
"Like a narrative counterpart to the digital images from Abu Ghraib, the Bagram file depicts young, poorly trained soldiers in repeated incidents of abuse," the Times wrote of a 2,000 page copy of the Army's criminal investigation. "The Bagram file includes ample testimony that harsh treatment by some interrogators was routine and that guards could strike shackled detainees with virtual impunity."
Accountability seemed not to be the motto of the Army in Afghanistan. Senior interrogators at Bagram were later sent to Iraq and re-assigned to Abu Ghraib.