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01 Dec 2008 10:58 am

The Abuse Of Faith

The Bush-backing blogosphere took the discrediting of one Newsweek story to proclaim that religious freedom was meticulously respected at Guantanamo Bay, Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Camp Cropper, and elsewhere in the black sites world of the CIA. But the more testimony from former Gitmo inmates emerges, the more the stories and anecdotes of abusing and violating the religious tenets of the prisoners proliferate. It is impossible to verify these things, of course. And al Qaeda operatives are trained to lie. But there is a consistency and pattern to the reports, along with detailed testimony from many FBI agents, that make me believe that using faith to torture prisoners was far from rare.

Here's a disturbing summary of the mounting evidence from the Catholic magazine, Commonweal:

When I first read about the incident reported in the infamous May 1, 2005 Newsweek exposé-a Qur’an in the toilet!- I assumed it was a one-time offense, and I was not surprised when Newsweek later retracted the report. But according to the detainees’ own accounts, before 2005 almost everyone from Kandahar, Bagram, or Guantánamo had witnessed desecration of the Qur’an. The U.S. inspector general’s own May 2008 report on FBI involvement in detainee interrogations found that abuse of the Qur’an was one of the most frequently reported offenses. Thirty-one FBI agents claimed to be aware of it.

One of the worst offenders was General Geoffrey Miller, Rumsfeld's Gitmoizing apparatchik. But read the whole thing.

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