It's hard to keep up with this one. And count me among those shocked that the Associated Press would run with this story, but they did.
Even as the MSM, including Fareed Zakaria, have universally conceded that Newsweek made a mistake in printing the allegation that US military personnel had flushed a Koran down the toilet in Guantanamo, newly declassified FBI documents show a consistency to the allegations and show that the Justice Deparment and DoD were aware in early 2002 that such accusations were being made against guards and were perhaps more credible than they admitted:
Terror suspects at the Guantanamo Bay prison told U.S. interrogators as early as April 2002, just four months after the first detainees arrived, that military guards abused them and desecrated the Quran, declassified FBI records say.
"Their behavior is bad," one detainee is quoted as saying of his guards during an interrogation by an FBI special agent in July 2002. "About five months ago the guards beat the detainees. They flushed a Quran in the toilet."
The statements about guards disrespecting the Quran echo public allegations made many months later by some detainees and their lawyers after prisoners' release from Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The once-secret FBI documents show a consistency to the allegations and are the first indication that Justice and Defense department officials were aware in early 2002 that detainees were accusing their guards of mistreating the holy book. [...]
Pentagon officials have said repeatedly that they have turned up no credible, substantiated claims that U.S. military guards had deliberately treated the Muslim holy book with disrespect
Pentagon officials had no immediate comment on the new FBI documents, which were made public Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU said it received them in response to a federal court order that directed the FBI and other agencies to comply with the organization's request under the Freedom of Information Act.
In many of the interrogations described in the FBI documents, military officers were present. Some were with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations; others were Navy and Army investigations personnel.
This takes some extra careful parsing. It could be that the Pentagon investigated the 2002 charges and found no credible evidence of such incidents, but the Associated Press disagrees that the evidence, based on these new documents, was not credible. It could be that the Associated Press is "circling the wagons" (see Hilzoy's deconstruction of that bit of paranoia). It could be the AP wants more riots in the Muslim world so it can help sell more newspapers. It could be that no one actually reads Newsweek (or anything else) at the AP, and this struck some editor there as news. Or it could be the Internet news service servers have achieved self-awarness and decided to publish what "They" think is newsworthy.
Or it could be the truth is finding its way to the public.
The ACLU has what they describe as "documents the government did not want the general public to read" on their website, including an FBI memo (pdf file), "stating that Defense Department interrogators impersonated FBI agents and used "torture techniques" against a detainee at Guantanamo."
And this detailed list of interview excerpts suggest there's more to the allegations with regard to the Koran story than one errant single anonymous source:
DETAINEES 3878-3881
Summary of FBI interview of detainee at Guantanamo Bay
08/01/02
Notes that "[p]rior to his capture, REDACTED had no information against the United States. 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 guards dance around when the detainees are trying to pray. The guards still do these things."
OK, so let's imagine the worst. Say the White House saw the potential for the riots in Pakistan and elsewhere to really spread and put enormous pressure on Newsweek to retract the statement, even though both organizations knew the statement was true. The short-sightedness of that would be staggering. The number of people who would need to remain complicit should have told all but the most incompetent of people that such a cover-up would be worse than the original alleged action. And it would eventually have to come out, so it was a foolish race against time.
Personally, I want this to be a mistake. I want the AP story to be mere follow-up, not potentially another gallon of gasoline on what was almost an extinguished fire.
More than that, though, I want the Adminstration to handle this latest story more competently than they did the Newsweek one. In the back of my mind, I'm sure they knew this was coming and that's why they came down so hard on the magazine.
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