Turns out Newsweek was right. I wonder if the right-wingers who were calling for Newsweek's scalp will now acknowledge the truth, or whether they will do what right-wingers do best and simply sweep it under the rug.

Actually, I don't wonder at all. Bad news is a terrorist plot. Will the right wing accuse the FBI of being a terrorist organization for reporting the truth?

This just in from Reuters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An FBI agent wrote in a 2002 document made public on Wednesday that a detainee held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had accused American jailers there of flushing the Koran down a toilet.

The release of the declassified document came the week after the Bush administration denounced as wrong a May 9 Newsweek article that stated U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo had flushed a Koran down a toilet to try to make detainees talk.

The magazine retracted the article, which had triggered protests in Afghanistan in which 16 people died.

The newly released document, dated Aug. 1, 2002, contained a summary of statements made days earlier by a detainee, whose name was redacted, in two interviews with an FBI special agent, whose name also was withheld, at the Guantanamo prison for foreign terrorism suspects.

The American Civil Liberties Union released the memo and a series of other FBI documents it obtained from the government under court order through the Freedom of Information Act.

"Personally, he has nothing against the United States. The guards in 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," the FBI agent wrote.

"The guards dance around when the detainees are trying to pray. The guards still do these things," the FBI agent wrote.

ThePentagon stated last week it had received "no credible and specific allegations" that U.S. personnel at Guantanamo had put a Koran in the toilet.

The documents indicated that detainees were making allegations that they had been abused and that the Muslim holy book had been mishandled as early as April 2002, about three months after the first detainees arrived at Guantanamo.

In other documents, FBI agents stated that Guantanamo detainees also accused U.S. personnel of kicking the Koran and throwing it to the floor, and described beatings by guards. But one document cited a detainee who accused a guard of dropping a Koran, prompting an "uprising" by prisoners, when it was the prisoner himself who dropped it.

The Pentagon had no immediate comment on the documents.

The United States currently holds about 520 detainees at Guantanamo, a high-security prison it opened in January 2002 for non-U.S. citizens caught in the U.S. war on terrorism.

Former detainees and a lawyer for current prisoners previously have stated that U.S. personnel at Guantanamo had placed the Koran in a toilet, but the Pentagon last week said it did not view those allegations as credible.

"Unfortunately, one thing we've learned over the last couple of years is that detainee statements about their treatment at Guantanamo and other detention centers sometimes have turned out to be more credible than U.S. government statements," said ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer.

Jaffer said the latest documents show the U.S. government had heard detainees complain as early as 2002 about desecration of the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, including at least one mentioning it had been placed in a toilet.

In another document, written in April 2003, an FBI agent related a detainee's account of an incident involving a female U.S. interrogator.

"While the guards held him, she removed her blouse, embraced the detainee from behind and put her hand on his genitals. The interrogator was on her menstrual period and she wiped blood from her body on his face and head," the memo stated.

A similar incident was described in a recent book written by a former Guantanamo interrogator.

The U.S. military launched an inquiry after the Newsweek article was published into whether Guantanamo personnel placed the Koran in a toilet, but the review was limited to searching through official day-to-day log entries.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan last week said Newsweek "got the facts wrong." Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman last week called the article "demonstrably false."

Hello Willysnout, I see you are taking a break from spreading your lies over at Protest Warrior to do the same here.

One question that no one has as of yet been able to explain

How does one flush a 464 page book down the toilet? Especially given the military's love affair with low flow toilets?

So willysnout, I guess I'll see you over at Protest Warrior when you find some more lies to talk about?

Look on page 3878 of the FBI files released as the result of the ACLU's Freedom of Information Act filing. It says: "The guards flushed a Koran in the toilet."

http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/052505/3836_3889.pdf

So, Caelestis, I'm afraid it is you who is lying. Unfortunately, the telling of lies has become the specialty of the American far right-wing, following the lead of the Pentagon, which lied about the circumstances of Pat Tillman's death, about the Jessica Lynch situation, about not having been informed about Koran desecration and about a wide variety of other issues.

The truth. It will set you free. Give it a try, why don't you?

Willysnout, I have accepted the truth, I'm not the one trying to denigrate our brave men and women in uniform.

If you "have accepted the truth," then you wouldn't lie about what I've posted.

I should also note that, like most of the right-wingers in this country, the denizens of "ProtestWarrior" approve of the desecration of the Koran by a 90% margin. They heavily approve of torturing Muslim captives; of "sexual humiliation"; of a "holy war" between Christianity and Islam; and that no detainee can ever be believed unless an American soldier is willing to testify that he saw that detainee being abused.

Not that the chest-thumping right wingers of this country will ever do it, but I'd suggest going to the ACLU's website and looking at the documents they obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. These documents weren't written by the ACLU, they were written by government personnel as they took testimony from detainees in a various places around the world.

The documents tell of torture in the name of Christianity; of sexual abuse, including rape, of male detainees by both men and women of the U.S. armed forces; of a lack of medical attention; of routine beatings and other forms of physical abuse; of systematic cultural and religious degradation.

A few of the incidents resulted in reprimands to the people who did it, but there has been no investigation of the reality that all of these tactics have been standard operating procedure. It's not much of a way to win hearts and minds in the Muslim world, and it's a dramatic departure from U.S. policy in other wars, most particularly World War II.

If the U.S. is to have any hope of winning Bush's "war on terror," it will need the Muslim world's help, or at least its tolerance. I don't think that flushing the Koran "in" the toilet, and sexually abusing their prisoners, and torturing them in the name of Jesus Christ, advances either those goals or our values.

That's a hard message to read, but it's true, and if we don't face the truth then we're lost.

RE: Women in Combat

Whatever your position on the immediate issue, everyone needs to understand the underlying trap involved in it.
Under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, Congress is the designated authority on the composition of the armed forces of the United States. Per its authority, under the implementation of that power, by Title X U.S.C. Congress, part of which reads -
TITLE 10--ARMED FORCES
Subtitle A--General Military Law
PART I--ORGANIZATION AND GENERAL MILITARY POWERS
CHAPTER 13--THE MILITIA
Sec. 311. Militia: composition and classes

(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.
(b) The classes of the militia are--
(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and (2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.

That is the basis of the 'draft'. The draft is the selective activation of the unorganized Federal Militia. Now if the government was to reinstitute the draft with a formal or informal policy of women declared as equal participants in the combat role as men, a judicial challenge will be there to contest the historical discrimination of only drafting males. The government will be hard pressed to justify why men are disproportionately subject to this government authority and act. A reasonable case may be there to declare this portion of the law unconstitutional as is. Be careful for what you wish for, you may get it.

''If this is how liberals support the
troops, then could they please f*cking STOP already? Don't tell those of us in
the military you "support the troops", and then spend 110% of your time and print space breaking your necks to paint us all as bloodthirsty criminals because of the acts of a few – all as a thinly-disguised way to grind a political axe with a President with which 90% of the media has a deeply personal beef. It isn't fooling anybody – especially "the troops". We're perfectly aware
that, to the media, we are expendable pawns in a political chess game, and we resent the hell out the very real damage they do to us every single day.''
- An American serviceman serving
overseas emails Arthur Chrenkoff
 
-*-
 
US Army Major Mark Bieger and
the wilfull work of the enemy our troops face daily in
Iraq.

Above post was for free Willy.

If inappropriate, my apologies.

I was a kid who believed Walter Cronkite during the Vietnam war. Today's ''kids'' are very fortunate to have access to the internet.

Thank you for your service, Greyhawk and Mrs. Greyhawk.

A web site whose time has come (LGF)

I can't speak for others but I can certainly say that I don't regard "all" American troops as "bloodthirsty criminals." If I really believed something like that, then I wouldn't be sending packages to people over there with best wishes for success and safe return.

I think the U.S. military has been misused by sending them to Iraq to begin with, and that its honor has been stained by the civilian-imposed policy of torture, perversion and cultural degradation. The perpetrators at the low levels have moral responsibility for what they've done, but I hold the senior leadership primarily accountable for these things.

In World War II, the Japanese were vicious, bloodthirsty and depraved as a matter of policy. They tortured civilians and POWs in the most gruesome ways. American policy toward Japanese POWs was not to torture them in return, or to "sexuallly humiliate" them, or to degrade their culture. For one thing, it didn't work. For another, we were Americans and Americans were better than that.

http://mysite.verizon.net/vze6kt7j/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/aamitcsm.pdf

This country has changed since then, and not for the better I'm afraid.

Michelle Malkin on the latest inflammatory accusations, with facts - and class:

GUANTANAMO BAY: THE REST OF THE STORY

Corrected link to article.

Well there is at least some progress on the rightwingnut front. Michelle Malkin has acknowledged that some of the detainees' complaints might be justified. The Pentagon, on the other hand, trotted out a spokesliar to say that it had received NO credible reports of desecration of the Koran.

Ms. Malkin is happy to selectively quote from documents obtained by the hated ACLU, and I'd say that also represents progress because at least now we can put to rest the usual accusation from the rightwingnut fringe that the documents can be dismissed because of who obtained them.

I challenge people to do what Michelle Malkin did, i.e., read the documents that the ALCU has obtained. Read ALL of them. No fair-minded observer can conclude that torture, "sexual humiliation" and cultural degradation were "isolated incidents" as Bush has protrayed them to be, and no one can conclude anything other than that the Pentagon simply LIED when its spokesman claimed that there had been no credible reports of desecration of the Koran.

As for the torture policy itself, that's been documented by Seymour Hersh, the foremost investigative reporter in America. The crazies of the right wing can play their denial games to their heart's content, but the truth is the truth and truth shall set you free.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/040524fa_fact

A final thought: Many right-wingers will immediately cite terrorist horrors to justify the American policy and its implementation. My answer is to ask: Who determines American values? Are we to let terrorists turn us into the animals they claim we are?

Torture, "sexual humiliation" and cultural degradation are wrong. It doesn't matter if we are fighting people who commit horrible crimes themselves. Those things are still wrong. Not only that, but they don't even work. They not only stain the honor of our military and blacken this country's reputation, but they degrade our security by threatening to turn mainstream Muslim opinion against us.

The truth, people. Look it in the face, because if you avoid the truth you lose wars.