Not willing to confirm, deny OR to caution or ask for time to find out more! Or they thought it was true--you left that hypothetical out in your list of hypothetical explanations.
It's not the first time that charge has been made. Maybe that gave it credibility to the DOD. An internet check turns up a number of reports of this treatment. Would it really surprise you that the kind of people who torture and kill Muslim detainees including using as torture such psychological tricks as rubbing what they think is menstrual blood on them and taking away their water so they can't wash their hands, which they are religiously required to do before they can engage in prayer to cleanse their souls (or for that matter, forcing them to commit sodomy), would do that?
Stupidity kills. Sometimes it kills hundreds of thousands of people. Sometimes the killing based on stupidity and lies goes on for decades.
Here's just one prior report, from 2004. I'm guessing the DOD knew about this and a number of similar ones. I'm wondering how many deaths are the Italian News Agency's fault:
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On August 18, 2004, ANSA, the Italian news agency, wrote of the families of detainees from Bahrain at Guantanamo:
"The families' anxiety grew after the publication of a report by the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR), which contained information about tortures and maltreatment of prisoners. The report, based on testimony by three former Guantanamo prisoners,
Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmad, defines as brutal the methods of the U.S. jailers. According to the report, prisoners were brutally beaten and compelled to watch other prisoners sodomising each other by force. The 150-page document says reptiles were taken to the cells in an attempt to force prisoner confessions, while the Koran was thrown into the toilets before the eyes of the detained."
Here's another one. There are many of these reports around. I wonder how many deaths since Jan 20 the Phila Inquirer is responsible for.
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From The Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 20, 2005:
By Frank Davies
Inquirer Washington Bureau
[.......................]
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 [an attorney in Philadelphia], 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...
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It's terrible, how the media keep causing the Muslim world to hate us. I hope all the released (because there was no evidence that they'd done anything wrong) detainees from Abu Ghraib haven't read Newsweek. Also the families of the ones who didn't make it out, or came back crippled. God forbid they should read Newsweek or the Philadelphia Inquirer or any of the other sources of such reports. |
