Pentagon Says Detainee Retracted Koran Toilet Flush Allegation

The Pentagon is now insisting that the detainee who made the allegation about a the Koran being flushed down the toilet has basically said “Never mind!”

The Guantanamo detainee who told an FBI agent in 2002 that U.S. personnel there had flushed a Koran in a toilet retracted his allegation when questioned this month by military investigators, the Pentagon said on Thursday.

“We’ve gone back to the detainee who allegedly made the allegation and he has said it didn’t happen. So the underlying allegation, the detainee himself, within the last two weeks, said that didn’t happen,” chief Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita told a briefing.

An FBI document, dated Aug. 1, 2002, contained a summary of statements made by the detainee in two interviews with an FBI special agent at the prison for foreign terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The names of the detainee and the agent were redacted.

“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 FBI agent wrote.

Di Rita told reporters on Wednesday the U.S. military, as part of an inquiry into Koran treatment at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo, interviewed the same detainee on May 14, and that the man did not corroborate the earlier allegation. But Di Rita at the time said he did not know whether the man actually had recanted his earlier statement.

During his news conference on Thursday, Di Rita said he changed his account of what the detainee had said after getting more information from the commander of the Guantanamo prison, Brig. Gen. Jay Hood.

The question now will likely be raised about confirming the Pentagon’s confirmation, etc. But at this point, at least, it seems as if the Pentagon is flush with victory. The Pentagon has also acknowledged that there were some instances of “mishandling” the Koran, the Guardian reports:

The Pentagon admitted last night that it had uncovered five instances of mishandling of the Qur’an at Guantánamo Bay, but it claimed that there was “no credible evidence” that a copy had ever been flushed down the toilet.



Brigadier General Jay Hood, commander of the US prison in Cuba, said an investigation had uncovered 13 separate allegations that the Qur’an had been mishandled, 10 by prison guards and three by interrogators.



Presenting what the Pentagon described as an interim report into alleged mistreatment of the holy book at the base, he said that in only five of those 13 instances – four of which were by guards and one by an interrogator – was there anything that could be broadly defined as mishandling of a Qur’an.



The investigation follows publication of allegations about the toilet incident in Newsweek magazine that was blamed for rioting in Afghanistan during which 16 people died. The magazine published a retraction, but went on to detail further allegations of desecration of the Qur’an by US military interrogators.



Brig Gen Hood said that in three of the five instances the mishandling appeared to have been deliberate, but refused to elaborate other than to say that none of the incidents was a result of a failure to follow standard operating procedures.

That acknowledgement is a wise one. At the very least this whole controversy is going to underscore the sensitivity of the religious issue with prisoners. Anything that makes the U.S. appear as if it’s conducting a religious war is going to bite Washington policy makers on their ample butts.