Document Showing Koran Toilet Flush Allegation
This is an update to this morning's post about the ACLU's press release on the Government being aware of a detainee's claim in August, 2002 that guards flushed a Koran down the toilet.
Here is one such document, you may have to zoom in to read it. It's stamped August 1, 2002, but the interview referred to took place on July 22 and July 29, 2002. (Or you can find it among dozens on this page (pdf) at the ACLU site - scroll down to page 44 or 45.)
It's an FBI interview of a detainee, conducted with a translator present. It's document number 4136-4137, referred to here as
DETAINEES 4136-4137 Summary of FBI interview of detainee at Guantanamo Bay 07/22/02 Records detainee's responses to questions.
Scroll down to the last paragraph on the page. It says,
Prior to his capture he had no information against the United States. Personally, he had nothing against the United States. The guards at the detention facility do not treat him well. Their behavior is bad. About five months ago, the guards beat the detainees. They flushed a Koran in the toilet.
You can also see just this quote from the page here. So the incident occurred around February, 2002.
Update: The AP reports this same quote here.
But, as TalkLeft noted here, the Miami Herald reported it on March 9, 2005 (available on Lexis.com)
Yet recently declassified court documents allege that, as far back as 2002, some of Guantanamo's staff cursed Allah, threw Korans into toilets, mocked prisoners during prayers and deliberately took away prisoners' pants knowing that Muslims can't pray unless covered. Imagine a U.S. prisoner of war who is a devout Christian having his Bible tossed into the toilet or his rosary taken away. The U.S. government would rightly denounce such offenses as human-rights violations.
And on March 6, 2005:
Three Kuwaiti captives -- Fawzi al Odah, 27, Fouad al Rabiah, 45, and Khalid al Mutairi, 29 -- separately complained to their lawyer that military police threw their Korans into the toilet, according to the notes of Kristine Huskey, a Washington attorney.
The Philadephia Inquirer on January 20, 2005:
Some detainees complained of religious humiliation, saying guards had defaced their copies of the Koran and, in one case, had thrown it in a toilet, said Kristine Huskey, who interviewed clients late last month. Others said that pills were hidden in their food and that people came to their cells claiming to be their attorneys, to gain information. "All have been physically abused, and, however you define the term, the treatment of these men crossed the line," Wilner said.
American Gulag in the Carribbean. And the press hasn't even begun to zero in on (as opposed to haphazarly mention from time to time) the abuses at Bagram in Afganistan, which I predicted, in tandem with Guantanamo, would result in George Bush leaving office as the most disgraced President in history since Richard Nixon.
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