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Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bentway who wrote (48343)	5/27/2005 2:47:31 PM
From: longnshort	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 173976

'No credible evidence' on Koran story From combined dispatches U.S. officials have found "no credible evidence" for a terrorism suspect's charge that the Koran was flushed down a toilet, and the prison's commander said yesterday the inmate himself said he never saw any desecrations of Islam's holy book. Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood said at a Pentagon news conference that the Guantanamo Bay prisoner was asked in a May 14 interview whether he had seen the Koran "defiled, desecrated or mishandled." The prisoner had said in a July 22, 2002, interrogation by an FBI agent, a partly redacted summary of which was made public this week, that a military guard threw the Koran into a toilet. "He allowed as how he hadn't, but he heard that guards at some other point in time had done this," Gen. Hood said, adding that this accusation from the 2002 FBI report was the only one the general had found that involved a toilet. "I'd like you to know that we have found no credible evidence that a member of the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay ever flushed a Koran down a toilet," Gen. Hood said. The prisoner also stated that he personally had not been mistreated but that he heard fellow inmates talk of being beaten or otherwise mistreated. Also yesterday, Gen. Hood said investigators have found at least five instances in which guards and interrogators at Guantanamo Bay mishandled Korans distributed to Muslim prisoners by their U.S. captors there. But he acknowledged using a broad definition of "mishandle," and added that some instances were unintentional and that none violated military procedures in place at the time. Gen. Hood said the five cases "could be broadly defined as mishandling" of the holy book, but he refused to discuss details. In three of the five cases, the mishandling appears to have been deliberate. In the other two, it apparently was accidental. "None of these five incidents was a result of a failure to follow standard operating procedures in place at the time the incident occurred," Gen. Hood said. According to Gen. Hood, there had been 13 charges of Koran mishandling, but eight were not substantiated. Six involved guards who either accidentally touched a Koran or "touched it within the scope of his duties" or did not touch it at all. "We consider each of these incidents resolved," the general said. The other two cases in which the accusation was not substantiated involved interrogators who either touched or "stood over" a Koran during an interrogation, Gen. Hood said. In one case not deemed to be mishandling, an interrogator placed two Korans on a television. "We've also identified 15 incidents where detainees mishandled or inappropriately treated the Koran, one of which was, of course, the specific example of a detainee who ripped pages out of their own Koran," he said.

To: bentway who wrote (48343)	5/28/2005 2:57:35 AM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 173976

The Riots Of The Faithful By Rob on Default Say Anything Orson Scott Card nails it on media accountability and anti-American bias, Muslim hypocrisy and other matters of great importance. There is far too much good stuff here to excerpt. Just read the whole thing. ornery.org Update: Ok, fine…here’s a little excerpt. <<< The press isn’t running for office. To say that the media culture is unpatriotic isn’t a political ploy, it’s an obvious observation. Oh, if my words actually mattered to them, they’d howl and scream about my illegitimate attack. But in private, they are perfectly happy to mock patriotism in all its forms. They’re only patriotic when somebody says they aren’t. They are loyal to a community — but it’s not America. It’s Smartland. The nation of the newsmedia people. That’s where they live. Not in America. These newspeople generally don’t even know anybody, apart from “sources,” who serves America in the military. Smartland consists of a very different crowd. I know that crowd. I’ve heard them jeer at all the values that most Americans still care about, laughing at religious people, at the middle class, at suburbanites, at the poor ignorant saps who don’t think correct thoughts all the time. You know — the citizens of Heartland. Those poor sentimental fools who stood in line to see The Passion and who like Adam Sandler movies and who get tears in their eyes when they see the American flag and whose hearts break a little when it burns. And yet the irony is that the reason the radical Islamists hate the West so much is primarily because of the unchecked and uncheckable excesses of the Smartish. From Hollywood to newspeople to the soft-subject professors in our universities, the culture that makes people like Osama bin Laden want to blow us up or crush us into dust is the culture of the R-rated movie, the anti-religion intellectual, the glorified abortionist, the babies-without-marriage crowd, and the what-me-worry media elite. Osama isn’t much worried about Christianity. Why should he? If a Muslim converts to Christianity in a Muslim country, he’ll just be killed. Christianity, despite our apparent numbers, has been reduced to nothing more dangerous to Islam than a swarm of gnats. It’s a lot harder to keep dirty movies and atheistic Western ideas out of Muslim lands. That’s the established church of the West these days — liberty without responsibility, filth praised as “edgy” and virtue despised as “bourgeouis.” If the Islamists ever ruled the world — and only a fool thinks that history offers some guarantee against it — then America’s unpatriotic elite will realize … No they won’t. Whom do I think I’m kidding? They’ll still blame it on Bush or the Christian right or the oil companies, because the central tenet of their belief is that their side can do no wrong. >>> Now, seriously, go read the rest. ornery.org sayanythingblog.com ornery.org