Still Upset About Alleged Koran Abuse in Gitmo? Stop.

I was going to say that I agreed with you on this, but after thinking about it more...I may have discovered the answer, maybe this will help?

I think maybe what people ARE outraged by is the attitude that people doing things like flag burning or book-flushing are displaying. In other words, the "symbols" are being used as tools to demonstrate their personal hatred towards whatever group is being targeted. Now THAT, I can understand, may cause some outrage. Without a flag or whatever other "symbol", it's much much harder to display your hate message. So it's not actually the destruction of the "tool" that pisses people off, I think it's mostly the message of hate being broadcast by it.

If any of the above makes any sense anyway.

In particular, I find it highly offensive because it's an attack against their religion. Though these illegally detained POWs may be Muslim, there's simply no logical reason to attack Islam as a whole.

Wholeheartedly agree, even if some Muslim extremists view Judaism and Christianity in a negative light, it's still no excuse for flushing the Koran.

Apparently some of our upper military, and the executive branch of or government, have forgotten the atrocious manner in which our prisoners were treated in Hanoi.

I am NOT saying that Gitmo = Hanoi. I am saying that some tactics like this remind me of how our POWs were handled in Hanoi.

True, yes...

But in this context, it's not necessarily an attack on Islam itself (well, it COULD have been intended that way by the person doing it), but it could just be intended as part of an iterrogation intended to "break" a prisoner's morale. (If it is, I hope the prisoner is glad that our methods are book flushing and not fingernail pulling...)

Maybe we should bring this up with the Muslims burning US flags and blowing up Jews, maybe we could reach a compromise... Really, this "Koran abuse" thing is pretty mild compared to the symbolic hate speech you often see in the Muslim world. This may be politically incorrect to say, but I think it's extremely hypocritical to get so bent out of shape over this, but then just shrug a shoulder--or even celebrate--when Jews are blown up or planes crash into buildings. I guess now they have some idea how Christians or Americans feel, heh. Not that they'll actually put the two together.

Hmmm, it amazes me that the prisoners don't simply laugh their asses off at the absurdity of it. If my choice is between waterboarding or being poked in the bible, which should I choose? hmmmmm.

I know this might sound kind of silly, but take a step back and put it into context.

You are talking about people who have little more than their religion. You are talking about people who have been systematically denied education and books.

For some, the Quran isn't just some book, it is the only book.

If you look at it so simplistically then I guess you are right. However, we are "liberators" and should hold ourselves to a higher standard.

If you know you have people who already dislike you, why would you then want to destroy their only book? It makes no sense.

And today a US Military Commission admits that abuse of the Koran has happened in Quantanamo Bay. Good job guys, at winning the hearts and minds of your average Muslim.

- Ace

Truly bizarre, Kiamat. You actually quote the very clause that gives these people full POW status, but you don't even notice.

Para 6 above makes it clear that members of a resisting population DONT need uniforms. DONT need a symbol. DONT need to be subordinate to a state (whatever that means). DONT need to have signed anything.

They just need to be fighting to get an invader out of their homeland.

Just the way you and your neighbour would pick up your guns if a hi-tech Muslim army with hugely superior fire power was penetrating to the heart of the United States, after having bombed your local city to destruction.

You'd snipe from every corner. You'd plant booby traps. You'd cut their throats in back alleys. If you didn't how would you look your fellow americans, your wife and children, in the eye ?

You'd probably not sacrifice your life as a suicide bomber. Think of the courage and dedication that would take.

I don't actually approve of any of this. I'm just trying to give you a glimpse of the fact that the other side are human too, with feelings, and loyalties, and honor, and obligations, just like your own. Did you think they were closer to animals ?

You're right, and we do hold ourselves to a higher standard. I think the only topic for debate is to what degree we should hold ourselves to that higher standard. I don't think it's realistic to ask our troops to perform flawlessly in every way. We can ask for "best effort" and I'm sure that's what we get, but mistakes are going to happen. And while I'm sure the majority are competent at what they do, they just aren't trained for everything they're asked to do. (Whether the guys in this case were trained appropriately or not, I don't know.) ..And/or our troops don't consider the possible consequences of what *to them* is fairly trivial. I don't think this argument holds up against prisoner abuse, but ..."book abuse"? I hope nobody gets in serious trouble for "damaging an inanimate object".

If I had to guess before this became public, I wouldn't have expected this kind of negative reaction to arise from mishandling a few books, religious or not. I doubt that our troops are overly concerned about this politicial/legal/religious stuff, that's for the higher-ups to worry about. I know it wouldn't be the first thing on my mind.

So a few mistakes were made, although I consider them fairly mild in this case, and now I'd imagine that a repeat of this mistake is unlikely. The only crime is if this continues to happen dispite all the bad press and such.

Don't be so naive. This is not the abuse of a book. It is a deliberate attempt to find precisely those acts that matter most to the prisoner. That which is most humiliating, or contaminating, or insulting, based on their culture. Which is why menstrual blood was wiped on faces, why dogs were used, why they were forced to simulate masturbation or homosexual acts in front of each other, why their holy book was equated to excrement.

Deliberately chosen because of the deep psychological impact on the prisoner, and hence potential to reduce his humanity and "break him down". These are torture techniques. Torture is mental too.

How if captured american soldiers were forced to masturbate publicly, smear excrement on the stars and stripes, watch the bible flushed page by page, etc etc, all accompanied by verbal abuse, mocking, and triumphal sneering ? With jubilant photographs to record their humiliation for posterity? Not sure the menstrual blood would go down too well, either.

Face it, the US forces are indulging in significant amounts of torture, and have thus revalidated its use worldwide and undermined all the past efforts to reduce it , with the expected results.

The reasons they do it are the reasons everyone always did it, and the very same reasons that a few years ago the US joined the rest of the decent world in condemning.

In order to estimate the scale of these acts of humiliation, I put forward for discussion the following calculation.

Of all these acts, only 1% of occasions will have been informally photographed by the guards.
Of all these photographs, only 25% will need developing, the rest will be digital cameras, and thus never seen outside the photographers like-minded, trusted circle.
Of this 25% which get processed (back home?), only 10% of them will get noticed negatively by the processing people.
Of those negative reactions, only 10% will get actually reported to, and taken up by, the media, so that we hear about them.

10% of 10% of 25% of 1% is 0.1*0.1*0.25*0.01 = 0.000025
which is 1 in 40,000.

Since we have seen pictures from about 2 or 3 separate instances of this sort of behaviour, the calculation would suggest about 100,000 instances since the beginning of the occupation of Iraq.

This seems high. Even if my estimates of percentages are wrong by a factor of 5, we still have 20,000 instances of this sort of serious abuse.

I'd call that widespread, wholesale, and deliberate.

If you disagree with my calc, please say which percentage(s) you think wrong, rather than just spouting abuse.

Here are my figures, to make discussion easier:

A: % of serious abuse occasions that photographs are taken, owned by guards personally
B: % of those photographs that need film processing
C: % of those noticed by a concerned film processor
D: % of those reported to, and disseminated by, the media

My guesses are A:1%, B:25%, C:10%, D:10%

To argue, give us your four numbers. Doesn't take much typing.

Bravo Ellie, well said.

I have to disagree with your latest post however, making a statistical arguement based on numbers pulled out of thin air is just unproductive, better to simply say that the amount of hard proof of abuse to leak out is likely to be small in proportion to the amount of abuse actually occurring.

All of this just convinces me that the interrogators at Gitmo are about as smart as dirt. Any prisoner with half a brain would exaggerate the hell out of their "suffering" over having an inanimate object abused in hopes that the interrogators would keep at it rather than abusing their bodies. I don't condone any of it of course. I think it's all incredibly shameful and makes any of our government's claims of being a force of morality and righteousness in the world nothing but extremely hypocritical bullshit.

I'm not so sure about that formula, but why not look at it like this. Although not all-inclusive this list below might help us decide how likely it is we don't know the half of whats happened.

What are the chances a small group of soldiers would be allowed to live totally out of control and un-supervised in a deployed military police unit stationed at a major prison? This can be chance X.

What are the chances that any given photograph taken by a guard of something they know is immoral and against the law would be sent to people that were not involved in the incident, through processing or emails? That can be chance Y.

What are the chances that someone (a certain Captain Carolyn A. Wood) would be in command of military intelligence at Bagram Control Point in Afghanistan near Kabul during the start of the wars, where she would lie to commanding officers about the treatment of prisoners until several afghans eventually died of abuse being chained to the ceiling and beaten to death -- only to be transfered to another prison soon thereafter to create and lead the interrogation center now known as Abu Ghraib? I'm labeling this Chance Z.

You can decide for yourself the likelihood of each of these events occuring naturally.

X*Y*Z == "Freedom on the March" - President Bush

The impression I've gotten so far, is that it is about the "abuse" of the Koran. Admittedly I haven't read enough about the subject to know for certain what exactly is causing the outrage in the Muslim world over this, but from what I've seen personally it doesn't seem to have much to do with the prisoners themselves. I could be wrong, and I'll adjust my stance accordingly if I am, but I doubt it. It seems to me that what they're outraged about now is the extreme disrespect for Islam itself. I.e. I think is about Islam, and "the book" because it symbolizes it.

I realize what it's an attempt to do. But would I call it torture? (Since that's what you seem to imply.) Hell no. I don't know if that's what these American troops were doing at the time, but since we're bringing up torture for intelligence gathering--we DO have to get information out of these people somehow. We're not going to do it by putting them in nice ACed rooms and 1st class room service. We have to do SOMETHING to gather intelligence information. What exactly, short of using feathers to tickle their noses, should be used to "break" their will and get them to cooperate? Because if we DON'T get this information somehow, we'll have no chance to defeat these people, and many more innocents will die as a result.

The latest I've heard about was something about a Koran being "kicked intentionally" and "stepped on". Oh my god. Those American bastards. They are torturing their prisoner's religious literature. Please.

I'm not saying it's perfectly OK (although if it's going to make someone who knows where a suitcase nuke is hidden talk to us, IT IS)--I'm saying it's blown WAY out of proportion. Now, if these guys were just guarding these prisoners and beating on them, trying to give them a rough time, and so on just because they can--that's absolutely wrong, and it's a disgrace to the nation. But I don't think the majority of our military is like that. I don't think pulling statistics out of our asses is going to convince anyone of anything.

At the same time, we have Muslim fundamentalist terrorists cutting people's heads off, and they're the ones who are outraged? That's what pisses me off the most, the blatant (and well known) hypocrisy.

Yes, all it takes is one whistle blower. This is why I dub this exercise, "out of our asses statistics". It's fun to do, but it pretty much stinks.

Ellie,

Not to put to fine a point on it, but its my understanding the prisoners in Gitmo are heald becasue of their connection to exported terrorism, such as the 9/11 attacks, and not because they resisted an invading army. I think that is the touted justification. they were nor resisting invaders as the iraqis were, there are considered to have engaged in offensive military action against a foreign nation.

I don't think this makes holding them without a hearing proper, but I do concurr that if they were involced in this action, they are in fact, at best "spies" and more likely "war criminals."

I think its high time we got off the moral high horse that says we are "liberators" and the "forces of right and freedom." And we started accepting what we are. A band of soldiers in an invading army doing their damnedest to help the Iraqi people under impossible conditions, with an non-sensical military objective. Our soldiers are in combat, and are living their lives under constant threat of death. Someof them have lost buddies to this war, or family members. Why do we assume that there is no problem for them to be paladins? Give them a break, they aren't evil, murdering torturers. They are soldiers. And they are acting like soldiers, and making some mistakes as soldiers do, and crossing some lines as soldiers do.

Its a war, if you want to be the guardians of morality, then don't even ever ever send young men to kill, and get killed.

Well it is right to be concerned about treatment of Detainees. Its right to be concerned about actions of soldiers in a war.

Military Justice is in place for these reasons, let the military take care of these things. Enough coverage of course exists to make sure the Military doenst sweep it under the rug.

Concern is good - But it is true compared to most wars , the US is definitely improving on how people are treated overal. There were many worse incidents from previous wars - such as Free fire zones in Vietnam , etc.

I think it would have been in our better interest to have treated all prisoners as either war criminals or POWs tho.

Not doing so was baiting the US detractors in the world to cry foul.

So we've been told. Apparently these villains are so dastardly that even revealing why they're dastardly would risk countless lives. Obviously they're too dangerous to risk them successfully defending themselves in a normal court of law with such trivialities as a lack of evidence or witnesses. That would breach national security, you see.

We're at war, don't you understand? But they're not soldiers. Nope, they're enemy combatants. Which makes them civilians. Sort of. We don't have to give them the protections extended to civilians either. It's not a black and white situation, except where it clearly is.

Don't question it. Questioning it is providing aid and comfort to the enemy. That's the same as being the enemy. You might be an enemy combatant without even knowing it. That's what comes of asking questions.

War is Peace. Trust Big Brother. God is On OUR Side.

I hate Seymour Hersh.
I hate Nixon.
I love sugar.

As I said, I am against holding them without a trial. To me they are war criminals and should be tried and shot, or tried and released as the case may be. But they are not, by any means freedom fighters protecting thier homeland. Any more than the U.S. Troops in Iraq are freeedom fighters protecting their homeland.

No they are soldiers attepeting to force national (or someone's) will on another nation. Its war. The misconception that I find most dangerous in the outlook of the american press, and on both sides of the political coin is that war can be fougnt cleanly, and nicely, by the numbers and it never gets tense, emotional or messy, without civilian casualties. Anyone who as ever been in combat knows what a very foolish idea this is.

The real danger I see in all this rhetoric is that we are trying as a nation, to convince ourself that unleashing war is not unleashing hell. If you are going to to take the step, then you better: 1. know what you are doing, and 2. be prepared to do what it takes. If not, leave the soldiers home.