…goes to this Reuters story: “FBI memo reports Guantanamo guards flushing Koran”. Sensational story, huh? That’s what the lefty who emailed us the link thought. He wrote:
Will this make your front page?
I hope you do the right thing and acknowledge that Newsweek was correct in it’s [sic] story, but I doubt it.
Unfortunately for our correspondent, who so badly wants the Newsweek story to be true, the article says no such thing. What it reports is old news:
An FBI agent wrote in a 2002 document made public on Wednesday that a detainee held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had accused American jailers there of flushing the Koran down a toilet.
That such accusations have been made by detainees, along with other implausible claims, has been public knowledge for a long time. The Reuters article notes that the Defense Department described the claim in question as “not credible.” The Reuters story also includes this disgusting account:
In document written in April 2003, an FBI agent related a detainee’s account of an incident involving a female U.S. interrogator.
“While the guards held him, she removed her blouse, embraced the detainee from behind and put her hand on his genitals. The interrogator was on her menstrual period and she wiped blood from her body on his face and head,” the memo stated.
A similar incident was described in a recent book written by a former Guantanamo interrogator.
This story is absurd on its face. What about the “similar incident” described by the former Guantanamo interrogator? Presumably Reuters refers to the recent book by Erik Saar, the only book-writing former interrogator I know of. I heard Saar relate this story on the radio, only it wasn’t blood, it was red ink, and there was nothing about the female soldier removing her blouse, etc. “Similar,” indeed.
This story has been marked by two features, I think: lousy reporting, and a desperate desire on the part of leftists worldwide to believe that assertions made by Guantanamo detainees, no matter how outlandish and uncorroborated, are true.
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