05/16/05 "Antiwar" - - Contrary
to White House spin, the allegations of religious
desecration at Guantanamo published by Newsweek on
May 9, 2005, are common among ex-prisoners and have been
widely reported outside the United States. Several former
detainees at the Guantanamo and Bagram prisons have
reported instances of their handlers sitting or standing
on the Koran, throwing or kicking it in toilets, and
urinating on it. Prior to the Newsweek article, the
New York Times reported a Guantanamo insider
asserting that the commander of the facility was compelled
by prisoner protests to address the problem and issue an
apology.
One such incident (during which the
Koran was allegedly thrown in a pile and stepped on)
prompted a hunger strike among Guantanamo detainees in
March 2002. Regarding this, the New York Times in a
May 1, 2005, article interviewed a former detainee, Nasser
Nijer Naser al-Mutairi, who said the protest ended with a
senior officer delivering an apology to the entire camp.
And the Times reports: "A former interrogator
at Guantanamo, in an interview with the Times,
confirmed the accounts of the hunger strikes, including
the public expression of regret over the treatment of the
Korans." (Neil A. Lewis and Eric Schmitt, "Inquiry
Finds Abuses at Guantanamo Bay," New York
Times, May 1, 2005.)
The hunger strike and apology story is
also confirmed by another former detainee, Shafiq Rasul,
interviewed by the UK Guardian in 2003 (James Meek,
"The People the Law Forgot," Dec. 3, 2003). It
was also confirmed by former prisoner Jamal al-Harith in
an interview with the Daily Mirror (Rosa Prince and
Gary Jones, "My
Hell in Camp X-Ray," Daily Mirror, March
12, 2004).
The toilet incident was reported in the Washington
Post in a 2003 interview with a former detainee from
Afghanistan:
"Ehsannullah, 29, said American
soldiers who initially questioned him in Kandahar before
shipping him to Guantanamo hit him and taunted him by
dumping the Koran in a toilet. 'It was a very bad
situation for us,' said Ehsannullah, who comes from the
home region of the Taliban leader, Mohammad Omar. 'We
cried so much and shouted, "Please do not do that to
the Holy Koran."' (Marc Kaufman and April Witt,
"Out
of Legal Limbo, Some Tell of Mistreatment," Washington
Post, March 26, 2003.)
Also citing the toilet incident is
testimony by Asif Iqbal, a former Guantanamo detainee who
was released to British custody in March 2004 and
subsequently freed without charge:
"The behavior of the guards towards
our religious practices as well as the Koran was also, in
my view, designed to cause us as much distress as
possible. They would kick the Koran, throw it into the
toilet, and generally disrespect it." (Center
for Constitutional Rights [.pdf], Aug. 4, 2004.)
The claim that U.S. troops at Bagram
prison in Afghanistan urinated on the Koran was made by
former detainee Mohamed Mazouz, a Moroccan, as reported in
the Moroccan newspaper, La Gazette du Maroc. (Abdelhak
Najib, "Les Américains pissaient sur le Coran et
abusaient de nous sexuellement," April 12, 2005.) An
English translation is available on the Cage
Prisoners site (which describes itself as a
"nonsectarian Islamic human rights Web site").
Tarek Derghoul, another of the British
detainees, similarly cites instances of Koran desecration
in an
interview with Cage Prisoners.
Desecration of the Koran was also
mentioned by former Guantanamo detainee Abdul Rahim Muslim
Dost and reported by the BBC in early May 2005. (Haroon
Rashid, "Ex-Inmates
Share Guantanamo Ordeal," May 2, 2005.)
Calgacus has been
employed as a researcher in the national security field
for 20 years
This article was first
published at Antiwar
