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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (554682)	3/12/2010 5:43:18 PM
From: J_F_Shepard	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573028

Wrong again...this is the NYTimes, not Fox News... query.nytimes.com "May 27, 2005 Inquiry by U.S. Reveals 5 Cases Of Koran Harm By THOM SHANKER; NEIL A. LEWIS CONTRIBUTED REPORTING FOR THIS ARTICLE. An American military inquiry has uncovered five instances in which guards or interrogators at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility in Cuba mishandled the Koran, but found ''no credible evidence'' to substantiate claims that it was ever flushed down a toilet, the chief of the investigation said on Thursday. All but one of the five incidents appear to have taken place before January 2003. In three cases, the mishandling of the Koran appears to have been deliberate, and in two it was accidental or unintentional, the commander said, adding that four cases involved guards, and one an interrogator. Two service members have been punished for their conduct, one recently. In announcing preliminary findings of his investigation, which began about two weeks ago, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, commander of the Guantánamo Joint Task Force, said the Koran mishandling did not occur as part of any effort to demoralize or intimidate detainees for interrogation. But General Hood declined to give further details until he had completed the investigation, which was started after Newsweek magazine published an article asserting that a separate investigation by the military was expected to find that a Koran had been flushed down a toilet at the detention center. The article, which the magazine subsequently retracted, prompted violence in the Muslim world that claimed at least 17 lives. ''I'd like you to know that we have found no credible evidence that a member of the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo Bay ever flushed a Koran down a toilet,'' General Hood said in a Pentagon news briefing. He said that his investigators conducted a new interview with one detainee who had been quoted in F.B.I. documents that were released Wednesday as having said under interrogation in 2002 that guards flushed a Koran down a toilet. In the new interview, conducted on May 14 as part of General Hood's investigation, the detainee said he was not a witness to any Koran abuse. General Hood said his investigators asked the detainee whether he personally had seen any incidents of Koran abuse, ''and he allowed as how he hadn't, but he had heard guards -- that guards at some other point in time had done this.'' The general said he could offer no explanation for any contradiction between the detainee's statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in July 2002 and the interview conducted by his team on May 14. Investigators never asked the detainee specifically about a Koran flushed down a toilet, General Hood said, nor did they mention his previous statements under interrogation, ''but he was asked about defiling, desecration, mistreatment of the Koran.'' It was not clear whether the military had also reinterviewed other inmates who are known, through the interrogation reports that were released on Wednesday, to have reported other instances of mishandling the Koran. General Hood did not say how many people, or whom, his team has questioned. The five instances in which the Koran was mishandled, General Hood said, were among 13 cases investigated in the past two weeks. ''None of these five incidents was a result of a failure to follow standard operating procedures in place at the time the incident occurred,'' General Hood said. But he added that in the initial months after the Guantánamo prison was set up, and until early 2003, there were not explicit, written rules about the Koran. And he said one incident concerned the breaking of another, unspecified rule, rather than the prison's standard operating procedures. The investigation also explored six more accusations of Koran abuse involving guards. In each of those instances, General Hood said, the guard ''either accidentally touched the Koran, touched it within the scope of his duties, or did not actually touch the Koran at all.'' Military policy acknowledges that some Muslims view a non-Muslim touching the Koran as a desecration. In two other instances of the 13 that were investigated, interrogators either touched a Koran or stood over the Islamic holy book during an interrogation, General Hood said.