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Pentagon spin doctors control media coverage of
Quran Desecration
‘When is Someone Going to Toss Rumsfeld into a Cage?’
By Jason Leopold
06/04/05 "ICH" - -
If
you want to ensure that the media doesn’t
cover an important political story, send out a press release on a
Friday, preferably at the end of the day. By the time reporters
return on Monday, the story will be old news and will either be
buried deep within a newspaper or not covered at all.
That’s what the Pentagon brass is praying for.
At the end of the day Friday, the Pentagon confirmed a pattern of
widespread abuse of the Muslim holy book, the Quran, by military
personnel dating back two and a half years. Releasing the report
when most beat reporters have left for the weekend was a
calculated move by White House and Pentagon spin doctors to
control media coverage of the explosive report.
Where’s the outrage?
Last month, Bush and his cronies publicly stated that a 10
sentence item in Newsweek detailing that a prison guard flushed a
Quran down a toilet sparked an uprising in
Afghanistan
,
Pakistan
and
Indonesia
that led to more than a dozen deaths, was flat out wrong. Bush’s
mouthpiece, Scott McClellan, hammered away during his daily White
House briefings, calling into question the veracity of the story,
until Newsweek caved and retracted the item. The magazine’s
editor claimed the source who tipped the publication to the news
recanted.
But even though more evidence turned up of defacing the Quran,
White House and Pentagon senior officials issued warnings to
curious reporters who dared to follow up on the Newsweek story. A
frightened press corps cowered and the story died.
Then Bush took a trip to
Greece
May 24 to talk about Social Security and offered up this doozy
that explained why he says what he says, damn the facts.
“See, in my line of work, you got to keep repeating things over
and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of
catapult the propaganda," Bush said.
Fast forward to the real truth. Friday, June 03, 4:40 p.m. The
Pentagon identified more than a half-dozen cases where guards at
Guantanamo
Bay
defaced the Quran, including scribbling obscenities inside one
detainee’s holy book, urinating on another, kicking one and
tossing water balloons in the direction of others to cite just a
few examples.
To understand why defacing the Quran is such a serious matter
it’s important to know that for Muslims the Quran is considered
to be the literal word of God.
"Muslims believe the entire Quran is the word of God verbatim
as dictated by the Angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad,"
said Jamal Badawi, Islamic scholar at St. Mary's University,
Halifax
,
Nova Scotia
, in a June 2 interview with Knight Ridder News Service.
"Muslims believe the Quran has been preserved exactly as it
was given to the prophet, so that gives it special status."
Not one senior official in the Bush administration has ever lost
his or her job or been held responsible for the widespread
mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay as well as the
notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq where detainees were beaten,
stripped and led around on leashes. Instead, what the public is
being fed is a line of BS that the ill-treatment of prisoners is
an isolated case involving just a handful of soldiers. Sadly, a
majority of Americans are eating that up.
The Bush administration is putting innocent American lives, here
and on the frontline of the war in
Iraq
, in harms way for its constant refusal to hold people like
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his most senior staff
accountable for allowing the total breakdown of military prison
operations at
Guantanamo
and in
Iraq
.
This latest news about abuse at
Guantanamo
Bay
is just another example in the never ending saga of mistreatment
of prisoners that has been reported by human rights groups such as
Amnesty International and the Red Cross. Which begs another
question: when is someone going to toss Rumsfeld into a cage?
Jason Leopold is the author of the explosive memoir, News Junkie, to be released in early 2006 by Process/Feral House Books. Visit Leopold’s website at
www.jasonleopold.com .
© 2005 Jason Leopold
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