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More quran abuse despite newsweek retraction { May 26 2005 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/world/11739544.htmhttp://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/world/11739544.htm
Posted on Thu, May. 26, 2005
prisoners’ claims remain unverified
More Qur’an abuses alleged
WASHINGTON — Prisoners at the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, told FBI interviewers in 2002 and 2003 that guards repeatedly desecrated the Qur’an, government documents showed Wednesday.
The allegations include an incident in which guards “flushed a Qur’an in the toilet,” the FBI documents revealed. In another incident, a detainee refused to cooperate with investigators after accusing an interrogator of “humiliating the Qur’an” while questioning another inmate.
The documents — the latest to be released as part of a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union seeking to shed light on U.S. treatment of prisoners in Cuba — parallel allegations of Qur’an desecration by prisoners in civil lawsuits against U.S. authorities and in interviews with news organizations.
No independent verification has been made of the prisoners’ claims. The FBI reports say some prisoners, when asked, did not say they had experienced such abuse of the Qur’an firsthand but had only heard rumors about it.
One prisoner, the FBI notes say, “considers it his duty as a Muslim to believe the rumor until it is proven untrue.”
ACLU officials said the documents showed that U.S. officials failed to take seriously allegations that guards were desecrating the Qur’an when the claims surfaced.
“The United States government’s own documents show that it has known of numerous allegations of Qur’an desecration for a significant period of time,” said Amrit Singh, an ACLU lawyer.
However, the Army instituted elaborate procedures to ensure sensitive treatment of the Qur’an at the Guantanamo Bay center two years ago. Some prisoners told FBI interviewers that conditions had since improved.
The latest government documents were released as Amnesty International, the London-based human rights group, in its annual report called the prison camp at Guantanamo “the gulag of our time” and urged Washington to shut it down.
Irene Khan, Amnesty’s secretary-general, accused the United States of shirking its responsibility to set the bar for human rights protections.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Amnesty’s complaints were “ridiculous and unsupported by the facts.” Allegations of prisoner mistreatment are investigated, he said, and “We hold people accountable when there’s abuse. We take steps to prevent it from happening again.”
The Pentagon is conducting an internal investigation of reported abuses at the prison camp but has declined to say what it has found so far.
The issue of desecration of the Qur’an flared this month after Newsweek magazine reported that U.S. investigators had confirmed an incident in which a Qur’an was flushed down a toilet at the prison and that the incident would be included in an upcoming government report. The article — which Newsweek subsequently retracted — was said to have caused deadly rioting in the Muslim world.
Pentagon officials did not have any immediate comment on the new documents.
The documents included notes from a July 29, 2002, interview in which a detainee complained of ill treatment and beatings by guards. “They flushed a Qur’an in the toilet,” the detainee alleged, according to the report. “The guards dance around when the detainees are trying to pray. The guards still do these things.”
The document did not elaborate, but other summaries of FBI interviews showed that prisoner complaints about mistreatment of the Qur’an occurred with some regularity.
They included allegations that guards threw the holy book on cell floors or improperly touched it during searches. Others complained that guards would take the Qur’an away from prisoners for failing to cooperate with investigators.
One prisoner said a guard’s dropping of the Qur’an led to an “uprising” at the prison in July 2002. But the FBI notes said that “in actuality” the detainee had dropped the holy book and blamed the guard.
Other prisoners said that “issues regarding the Qur’an” led a fellow inmate to attempt suicide in January 2003, the notes of one interview showed.
“It was just a matter of time before something like this occurred,” the detainee warned, according to the FBI notes. “The guards need to be made aware of how they are humiliating the Qur’an.”
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