"Who's Really Abusing the Koran?"

"Each time a public official evokes Hitler to demonize the president, the American effort in Iraq or its conservative supporters, cheap rhetorical fantasy becomes only that much closer to a nightmarish reality where the unstable, here and abroad, act on the belief that America really is Hitler's Germany.
We will all soon reap what the ignorant are now sowing." (Victor Davis Hanson)

 

News and commentary on "Newsweeksgate" and the "American Gulag".

2005/06/20 - 2005/06/26:
"For 5 months 'I stayed in the box'" (James H. Warner, Washington Times, 2005/06/29)

2005/06/20 - 2005/06/26:
"Hitler, Hitler, everywhere" (Victor Davis Hanson, Jewish World Review, 2005/06/23)
"The Hyperbolic Opposition" (Ryan Sager, Tech Central Station, 2005/06/22)

2005/06/13 - 2005/06/19:
"Durbin slanders his own country" (Mark Steyn, Chicago Sun-Times, 2005/06/19)
"No American 'Gulag'" (Pavel Litvinov, The Washington Post, 2005/06/18)
"We Are Our History - Don't Forget It" (David Gelernter, Los Angeles Times, 2005/06/17)
"Durbin Supports the Troops" (James Taranto, Best of the Web Today, 2005/06/15)

2005/06/06 - 2005/06/12:
"Guantánamo is not the Gulag" (Cathy Young, The Boston Globe/IHT, 2005/06/10)
"Did Amnesty International Call For Kidnapping Of American Leaders?" (Captain's Quarters, 2005/06/09)
"Piss and wind" (Mark Steyn, The Spectator, from the 2005/06/11 issue)
"Who's Really Abusing the Koran?" (Max Boot, Los Angeles Times, 2005/06/09)
"Amnesty's Amnesia" (Anne Applebaum, The Washington Post, 2005/06/08)
"The G-Word" (Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post, 2005/06/08)

2005/05/30 - 2005/06/05:
"'FOX News Sunday' Transcript: Amnesty Int'l USA Chief William Schulz" (FOX News, 2005/06/05)
"An American Gulag?" (Kenneth Anderson, The Weekly Standard, from the 2005/06/13 issue)
"Detainees, not soldiers, flushed Quran" (CNN.com, 2005/06/04)
"Gitmo Grovel: Enough Already" (Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, 2005/06/03)
"Intimidated by extremists" (Frida Ghitis, International Herald Tribune, 2005/06/01)
"The truth about Guantanamo Bay" (Michelle Malkin, Town Hall, 2005/06/01)
"Amnesty International's irresponsible charges" (Dennis Byrne, Chicago Tribune, 2005/05/30)
"General slams Amnesty report" (Audrey Hudson, The Washington Times, 2005/05/30)

2005/05/23 - 2005/05/29:
"Amnesty's 'Gulag'" (The Wall Street Journal, 2005/05/28)
"Amnesty gets Bushwhacked" (Tony Parkinson, The Age, 2005/05/27)
"Republican crisis biggest in US since Second World War. Well, almost" (Gerard Baker, The Times, 2005/05/27)
"Pentagon Confirms Koran Incidents" (Josh White and Dan Eggen, The Washington Post, 2005/05/27)
"Just Shut It Down" (Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times/Der Spiegel, 2005/05/27)
"'American Gulag'" (The Washington Post, 2005/05/26)
"Inmates Alleged Koran Abuse" (Dan Eggen and Josh White, The Washington Post, 2005/05/26)
"Amnesty Takes Aim at 'Gulag' in Guantanamo" (Paisley Dodds, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/05/25)
"Stop the Masochistic Insanity" (Christopher Hitchens, Slate, 2005/05/23)
"Painted With Horns That Won't Retract" (Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post, 2005/05/23)

2005/05/16 - 2005/05/22:
"The Qur'an Question" (Evan Thomas and Michael Isikoff, Newsweek, from the 2005/05/30 issue)
"Muslims take part in a demonstration..." (Dylan Martinez, Reuters, 2005/05/20)
"Protesters chant 'bomb New York'" (The Evening Standard, 2005/05/20)
"Our Two-Front Struggle" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2005/05/20)
"The Best P.R.: Straight Talk" (Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times, 2005/05/20)
"Hypocrisy Most Holy" (Ali Al-Ahmed, The Wall Street Journal, 2005/05/20)
"Why Islam is disrespected" (Jeff Jacoby, The Boston Globe, 2005/05/19)
"Bashing Newsweek" (David Brooks, The New York Times, 2005/05/19)
"Suicidal Tendencies in the West" (Bruce Thornton, VDH's Private Papers, 2005/05/18)
"Seeking sanity in the asylum" (Kathleen Parker, Chicago Tribune, 2005/05/18)
"The Real Lesson of Newsweekgate" (Robert Spencer, FrontPageMagazine, 2005/05/18)
"Our Insular Media" (Claudia Rosett, The Wall Street Journal, 2005/05/18)
"Outrage and Silence" (Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times, 2005/05/18)
"The Smug Delusion of Base Expectations" (Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, 2005/05/17)
"Do Riots Save Islam's Honor?" (Irshad Manji, Los Angeles Times, 2005/05/17)
"Journalists and the Military" (The Wall Street Journal, 2005/05/17)
"Newsweek Says It Is Retracting Koran Report" (Katharine Q. Seelye and Neil A. Lewis, The New York Times, 2005/05/17)
"Newsweek retracts story on Koran under pressure" (Steve Holland, Reuters/My Way, 2005/05/16)

2005/05/09 - 2005/05/15:
"Activists of Pakistani religious group Pasban-e-Sahaba..." (Tariq Mahmoud, AFP, 2005/05/15)
"The Press’ Abu Ghraib: Newsweek Apologizes, After 15 People Are Dead" (Austin Bay, austinbay.net, 2005/05/15)
"Newsweek says Koran desecration report is wrong" (David Morgan, Reuters/My Way, 2005/05/15)
"Newsweek sparks global riots with one paragraph on Koran" (Catherine Philp, The Times, 2005/05/14)
"Protests Against U.S. Spread Across Afghanistan" (Carlotta Gall, The New York Times, 2005/05/13)
"Four Killed in Afghan Anti-U.S. Riots" (AP/FOX News, 2005/05/11)

 

"For 5 months 'I stayed in the box'" (James H. Warner, Washington Times, 2005/06/29)
"As a Marine Corps officer, I spent five years and five months in a prisoner of war camp in North Vietnam. I believe this gives me a benchmark against which to measure the treatment which Sen. Richard Durbin, Illinois Democrat, complained of at the Camp of Detention for Islamo-fascists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The senator's argument is silly. If he believes what he has said his judgment is so poor that his countrymen, assuming, of course, that he considers us his countrymen, have no reason not to dismiss him as a witless boob. On the other hand, if he does not believe what he said, the other members of the Senate may wish to consider censure.
Consider nutrition. I have severe peripheral neuropathy in both legs as a residual of beriberi. I am fortunate. Some of my comrades suffer partial blindness or ischemic heart disease as a result of beriberi, a degenerate disease of peripheral nerves caused by a lack of thiamin, vitamin B-1. It is easily treated but is extremely painful.
Did Mr. Durbin say that some of the Islamo-fascist prisoners are suffering from beriberi? Actually, the diet enjoyed by the prisoners seems to be healthy. I saw the menu that Rep. Duncan Hunter presented a few days ago. It looks as though the food given the detainees at Guantanamo is wholesome, nutritious and appealing. I would be curious to hear Mr. Durbin explain how orange glazed chicken and rice pilaf can be compared to moldy bread laced with rat droppings."

"Hitler, Hitler, everywhere" (Victor Davis Hanson, Jewish World Review, 2005/06/23)
"Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., was not alone when he recently compared American behavior at Guantanamo Bay to that of "Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings."
Tarring Bush and co. with Hitlerian imagery has become a debased parlor game. Politicians and other public figures toss about these charged references, expecting to create a buzz and assuming that their audience is as uninformed as they are.
Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., cited the Holocaust to blast American policy in Iraq: "This is just as bad as the 6 million Jews being killed." In his upside-down world, the mass murderer is the moral equivalent of those who stop him. Before Rangel, Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., evoked Nazi Germany to warn about the Bush administration.
An official of the Red Cross lectured that American guards at Guantanamo were "no better than and no different than the Nazi concentration camp guards." ...
And these people aren't the only ones to stoop to play this game. There's also been NAACP Chairman Julian Bond ("The American flag and the Confederate swastika"), former Ohio Sen. John Glenn ("It's the old Hitler business"), Garrison Keillor ("Brownshirts in pinstripes"), Linda Ronstadt ("A new bunch of Hitlers") and Al Gore ("Digital brownshirts"). ...
Each time a public official evokes Hitler to demonize the president, the American effort in Iraq or its conservative supporters, cheap rhetorical fantasy becomes only that much closer to a nightmarish reality where the unstable, here and abroad, act on the belief that America really is Hitler's Germany.
We will all soon reap what the ignorant are now sowing."

"The Hyperbolic Opposition" (Ryan Sager, Tech Central Station, 2005/06/22)
"Amnesty, of course, set off the latest round of moral bankruptcy filings with its comparison of the terrorist-detention-and-interrogation facility at Guantanamo Bay to the Soviet gulag.
Now, the problems with gulag metaphor have been pretty thoroughly hashed out at this point. But what's worse, perhaps, than the simple untetheredness of the comparison is the way in which such rhetoric has lowered the bar for the defense of American conduct. ...
In fact, it's remarkable, since the Amnesty-gulag comparison, the extent to which administration supporters have begun to express great pride that America's interrogation facilities are so much more humane than those of Saddam -- or those of the insurgents just recently found torturing Iraqis in Karabila. And, of course, America is far more humane than any of the savage groups to which it is being compared.
Which is the point. It is just as much the fault of the Amnesty Internationals of the world as it is of the Scott McClellans that, so long as we're not beheading hostages or fitting them up with electric wires, Bush administration apologists can declare victory.
There's an important debate to be had in this country about just how far we're willing to go in our interrogations. But it's a difficult debate to even get started when one side thinks that we should be extremely concerned with the possibility that someone, somewhere might have desecrated the Korans of the people responsible for the murders of Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg, Fabrizio Quattrocchi, three-thousand Americans and now hundreds upon hundreds of Iraqi civilians."

"Durbin slanders his own country" (Mark Steyn, Chicago Sun-Times, 2005/06/19)
"Now let us turn to the ranking Democrat, the big cheese on the committee, Patrick Leahy of Vermont. Leahy thinks Gitmo needs to be closed down and argues as follows:
"America was once very rightly viewed as a leader in human rights and the rule of law, but Guantanamo has drained our leadership, our credibility, and the world's good will for America at alarming rates."
So, until Guantanamo, America was "viewed as a leader in human rights"? ... Not the weekend before 9/11 when the human rights grandees of the U.N. "anti-racism" conference met in South Africa to demand America pay reparations for the Rwandan genocide and to cheer Robert Mugabe to the rafters for calling on Britain and America to "apologize unreservedly for their crimes against humanity." If you close Gitmo tomorrow, the world's anti-Americans will look around and within 48 hours alight on something else for Gulag of the Week.
And this is where it's time to question Durbin's patriotism. As Leahy implicitly acknowledges, Guantanamo is about "image" and "perception" -- about how others see America. If this one small camp of a few hundred people has "drained the world's good will," whose fault is that?
The senator from Illinois' comparisons are as tired as they're grotesque. They add nothing useful to the debate. But around the planet, folks naturally figure that, if only 100 people out of nearly 300 million get to be senators, the position must be a big deal. Hence, headlines in the Arab world like "U.S. Senator Stands By Nazi Remark." That's al-Jazeera, where the senator from al-Inois is now a big hero -- for slandering his own country, for confirming the lurid propaganda of his country's enemies. Yes, folks, American soldiers are Nazis and American prison camps are gulags: don't take our word for it, Senator Bigshot says so." (See also: "Durbin Supports the Troops" (James Taranto, Best of the Web Today, 2005/06/15))

"No American 'Gulag'" (Pavel Litvinov, The Washington Post, 2005/06/18)
"Several days ago I received a telephone call from an old friend who is a longtime Amnesty International staffer. He asked me whether I, as a former Soviet "prisoner of conscience" adopted by Amnesty, would support the statement by Amnesty's executive director, Irene Khan, that the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba is the "gulag of our time."
"Don't you think that there's an enormous difference?" I asked him.
"Sure," he said, "but after all, it attracts attention to the problem of Guantanamo detainees." ...
By any standard, Guantanamo and similar American-run prisons elsewhere do not resemble, in their conditions of detention or their scale, the concentration camp system that was at the core of a totalitarian communist system.
For example, incidents of desecration of the Koran in Guantanamo by U.S. personnel have been widely reported. But those Korans were surely not brought to Guantanamo by the prisoners themselves from Afghanistan. They were supplied by the U.S. administration -- in spite of the obvious fact that most of the prisoners misguidedly found in the Koran the inspiration for their violent hatred of the United States. ...
Words are important. When Amnesty spokesmen use the word "gulag" to describe U.S. human rights violations, they allow the Bush administration to dismiss justified criticism and undermine Amnesty's credibility. Amnesty International is too valuable to let it be hijacked by politically biased leaders."

"We Are Our History - Don't Forget It" (David Gelernter, Los Angeles Times, 2005/06/17)
"Ignorance of history destroys our judgment. Consider Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill), who just compared the Guantanamo Bay detention center to Stalin's gulag and to the death camps of Hitler and Pol Pot — an astonishing, obscene piece of ignorance. ...
There is an ongoing culture war between Americans who are ashamed of this nation's history and those who acknowledge with sorrow its many sins and are fiercely proud of it anyway. Proud of the 17th century settlers who threw their entire lives overboard and set sail for religious freedom in their rickety little ships. Proud of the new nation that taught democracy to the world. Proud of its ferocious fight to free the slaves, save the Union and drag (lug, shove, sweat, bleed) America a few inches closer to its own sublime ideals. Proud of its victories in two world wars and the Cold War, proud of the fight it is waging this very day for freedom in Iraq and the whole Middle East.
If you are proud of this country and don't want its identity to vanish, you must teach U.S. history to your children. They won't learn it in school. This nation's memory will go blank unless you act." (See also: "Durbin Supports the Troops" (James Taranto, Best of the Web Today, 2005/06/15))

"Durbin Supports the Troops" (James Taranto, Best of the Web Today, 2005/06/15)
"Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, took the Senate floor yesterday and likened American servicemen to Nazis...:

When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here [at Guantanamo Bay] -- I almost hesitate to put them in the [Congressional] Record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. . . . On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor."

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others - that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

We are fighting an enemy that murdered 3,000 innocent people on American soil 3 1/2 years ago and would murder millions more if given the chance -- and according to Dick Durbin, our soldiers are the Nazis." (See also [PDF]: "Congressional Record - Senate" (frwebgate.access.gpo.gov, 2005/06/14))

"Guantánamo is not the Gulag" (Cathy Young, The Boston Globe/IHT, 2005/06/10)
"What about the "American gulag"? It is important to remember that the United States is dealing with the unprecedented situation of de facto enemy combatants who belong not to the army of a hostile state but to a vast, murky terror network - a network that proved its deadliness on Sept. 11, 2001, and other occasions. This does not give America carte blanche for indefinite detention without charges, let alone torture of suspects, but it does pose serious issues of balancing civil rights and national security that other democracies, such as France, are grappling with as well. While the mistreatment of prisoners in U.S. detention facilities has been too common to be dismissed as bad acts by a few bad apples, it remains the exception, not the rule.
Prisoner abuse remains a real issue. But Amnesty's comparison, which the former Soviet political prisoner Vladimir Bukovsky characterizes as "stupid" and "an insult to the memory of millions who perished" in Soviet camps, does not help matters. Instead, it revives the tired specter of moral equivalency between flawed democracies and totalitarian dictatorships - a specter particularly obscene when real gulags still exist in places like North Korea. It also gives the Bush administration an "out" to deflect attention from its own policies to its critics' hyperbole."

"Did Amnesty International Call For Kidnapping Of American Leaders?" (Captain's Quarters, 2005/06/09)
"Here's the link to AI-USA's statement with this call for capturing US officials while traveling abroad...

If the US government continues to shirk its responsibility, Amnesty International calls on foreign governments to uphold their obligations under international law by investigating all senior US officials involved in the torture scandal. And if those investigations support prosecution, the governments should arrest any official who enters their territory and begin legal proceedings against them. The apparent high-level architects of torture should think twice before planning their next vacation to places like Acapulco or the French Riviera because they may find themselves under arrest as Augusto Pinochet famously did in London in 1998. ...

It seems to me that this rhetoric is much more offensive than the "gulag" analogy, and it represents a Rubicon of sorts for Amnesty International and its supporters. I think those who fund AI and align themselves politically with Schulz and its other leaders should be pressed to answer whether they support Schulz' call for the kidnapping of American officials traveling abroad. It's a simple question and demands a straightforward answer." (Hat tip: Instapundit. See also: "Statement Of Dr. William F. Schulz Executive Director, Amnesty International USA" (Amnesty International, 2005/05/25))

"Piss and wind" (Mark Steyn, The Spectator, from the 2005/06/11 issue)
"Nobody got killed in Gitmo, so instead America is being flayed as the planet’s number one torturer for being insufficiently respectful to the holy book of its prisoners, even though the Americans themselves supplied their prisoners with the holy book, even though the preferred holy book of most Americans is banned in the home country of many of the prisoners, even though Americans who fall into the hands of the other side get their heads hacked off, even though the prisoners’ co-religionists themselves blow up more mosques and Korans than Americans ever do, and even though the alleged insufficient respect to the prisoners’ holy book occurred at a rate of one verified incident of possibly intentional disrespect per year. But sure, go ahead, close Gitmo and wait for the torrent of rave reviews — right after the complaints that it is culturally insensitive to rebuild the World Trade Center when it’s the burial site of ten devout Muslim flying enthusiasts. ...
But I wonder if the Islamists’ ability to play the Western press like a fiddle is quite so smart in the long run. The majority of Americans have a higher regard for their military than their media, and for the jihad to retain its power in the popular imagination it has to be credible. When Newsweek, CBS et al fall over themselves to shill for Islamist spin-doctors, complaining that the infidels are not handling the Koran in appropriately submissive ways, they risk turning the jihad into one huge laughing stock. In that sense, the whiners are doing far more damage to Islam than the urinators are."

"Who's Really Abusing the Koran?" (Max Boot, Los Angeles Times, 2005/06/09)
"It would be nice if the global Islamic community, the news media and assorted human rights agitators could display the same level of outrage about the real atrocities perpetrated by our enemies as they do about the imaginary horrors of the American Gulag.":
"All the headlines about "Abuse of the Koran at Gitmo" are absolutely accurate. Brig. Gen. Jay Hood's internal investigation has uncovered some shocking incidents. On at least six occasions, Korans were ripped up. They were urinated on three times, and attempts were made to flush them down the toilet at least three other times.
Why aren't millions of Muslims rioting in response to these defilements? Because the perpetrators were prisoners, not guards. As John Hinderaker notes on weeklystandard.com, the most serious desecrations of the Koran at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility were committed by the Muslim inmates themselves.
You'd never know this from the news coverage, which pounced on Hood's finding of five confirmed incidents of Koran abuse as proof that Newsweek was on to something with its phony-baloney report about guards flushing a Koran down the toilet.
Far from confirming accusations of American depravity, what the report actually shows is that Guantanamo is the first gulag in history run on the principle that no sensibility of the inmates should be offended, no matter how inadvertently."

"Amnesty's Amnesia" (Anne Applebaum, The Washington Post, 2005/06/08)
Gulag II: "I don't know when Amnesty ceased to be politically neutral or at what point its leaders' views morphed into ordinary anti-Americanism. But surely Amnesty's recent misuse of the word "gulag" marks some kind of turning point. In the past few days, not only has Amnesty's secretary general, Irene Khan, called the U.S. prison for enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, "the gulag of our times," but Amnesty's U.S. director, William Schulz, has agreed that U.S. prisons for enemy combatants are "similar at least in character, if not in size, to what happened in the gulag." In an interview, Schulz also said that foreign governments should prosecute U.S. officials, as if they were the equivalent of the Soviet Union's criminal leadership.
Thus Guantanamo is the gulag, President Bush is Generalissimo Stalin, and the United States, in Khan's words, is a "hyper-power" that "thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights" just like the Soviet Union. In part, I find this comparison infuriating because in the Soviet Union it would have been impossible for the Supreme Court to order the administration to change its policies in Guantanamo Bay, as it has done, or for the media to investigate Abu Ghraib, as they has done, or for Irene Khan to publish an independent report about anything at all."

"The G-Word" (Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post, 2005/06/08)
Gulag I: "In short, if you're going to toss a loaded grenade of a word like gulag, you'd better be able to back it up.
Which is why the "Fox News Sunday" interview of Amnesty's U.S. chief, William Schulz, was quite revealing. ...

WALLACE: Is it possible, sir, that by excessive rhetoric or by your political links, that you have hurt, not helped, your cause?
SCHULZ: Chris, I don't think I'd be on this station, on this program today with you if Amnesty hadn't said what it said and President Bush and his colleagues haven't responded as they did. If I had come to you two weeks ago and said, "Chris, I'd like to go on FOX with you just to talk about U.S. detention policies at Guantanamo and elsewhere," I suspect you wouldn't have given me an invitation. ...

Excuse me, but did Schulz say that it's okay to unleash words like "gulag," even if it's not an "exact or literal analogy," because it gets him booked on Fox News? Is that the new standard? Yes, Chris, I called the president a war criminal because it was the only way I could get on Hardball?" (See also: "'FOX News Sunday' Transcript: Amnesty Int'l USA Chief William Schulz" (FOX News, 2005/06/05))

"'FOX News Sunday' Transcript: Amnesty Int'l USA Chief William Schulz" (FOX News, 2005/06/05)
A transcript of an interview with the apparent high-level architect of moral equivalence — executive director of Amnesty International USA, William Schulz:
"WALLACE: Mr. Schulz, the Soviet gulag was a system of slave labor camps that went on for more than 30 years. More than 1.6 million deaths were documented. Whatever has happened at Guantanamo, do you stand by the comparison to the Soviet gulag?
SCHULZ: Well, Chris, clearly this is not an exact or a literal analogy. And the secretary general has acknowledged that.
There's no question. But what in size and in duration, there are not similarities between U.S. detention facilities and the gulag. People are not being starved in those facilities. They're not being subjected to forced labor.
But there are some similarities. ...
WALLACE: ... In your presentation of the report, you listed what you called high-level torture architects, including Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General Gonzales. Then you went on to say, and let's put it up: "The apparent high-level architects of torture should, therefore, think twice before planning their next vacation to places like Acapulco or the French Riviera, because they may well find themselves under arrest as Augusto Pinochet, famously did in London in 1998."
Now, Pinochet was a Chilean dictator who presided over the death or disappearance of 3,000 of his own people. Do you stand by the comparison of Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales to a brutal dictator?
SCHULZ: No, that wasn't the comparison. My point was very simple... ...
WALLACE: Now, Secretary Rumsfeld did, we believe, approve putting prisoners in stress positions for prolonged periods of time, stripping them naked and even using dogs to frighten them.
Mr. Schulz, do you have any evidence whatsoever that he ever approved beating of prisoners, ever approved starving of prisoners, the kinds of things we normally think of as torture?
SCHULZ: It would be fascinating to find out. I have no idea..." (Hat tip: USS Neverdock.)

"An American Gulag?" (Kenneth Anderson, The Weekly Standard, from the 2005/06/13 issue)
Anderson on Amnesty International and, here, Human Rights Watch:
"HRW's latest world report, for instance, opens with an essay by its executive director, Kenneth Roth, which compares Sudan and the United States, Darfur and Abu Ghraib. Roth opens in lawyerly fashion, claiming that "no one would equate the two." He then spends the rest of the essay doing little else. ...
To start with, HRW has said that someone -- preferably the U.N. Security Council, but failing that a coalition that must necessarily involve the United States -- should intervene in Darfur.
There is much to be said for that position morally, and I admire Human Rights Watch for overcoming its bias for international organizations and against ad hoc coalitions of the willing, in the interests of the people of Darfur.
But if the United States is what HRW says it is, why would the arch-criminals -- in Washington, that is -- care about doing anything so obviously, well, good? Which is it to be? The United States government and its leadership are a gang of criminals who should be isolated, sanctioned, arrested, and condemned as in principle no better than the undeniably criminal Sudanese government -- but, by the way, it would be excellent if the Great Satan would also mount its noble charger, rattle its weapons, gird up its loins, and intervene to defend the people of Sudan. Please report to the International Criminal Court's dock in The Hague to be tried for torture and war crimes and what-not -- but on your way, could you stop by Darfur, using military force if necessary to protect the people from genocide, make sure the peace treaty ending the war in the south doesn't fall apart, and don't do anything that we might regard as unnecessary collateral damage (we'll be watching, and we'll add anything we don't like to the list of your crimes). And, oh yes, be sure to arrest and bring the wicked Sudanese leaders and militias along with you to The Hague, so they can be prosecuted after we finish with you."

"Detainees, not soldiers, flushed Quran" (CNN.com, 2005/06/04)
Ed Morrissey sums up the recent Koran/Gulag hysterics: "...this week represents the nadir of responsible thought about the war on terror." The headline for this AP dispatch provides a graphic example of this rock bottom moment: "U.S. CONFIRMS URINE TOUCHED QURAN AT GITMO."
WaPo has more details on that particular incident: "In the March incident, as described in the report, the guard had left his observation post to go outside to urinate. The wind blew his urine through an air vent into the cell block. The guard's supervisor reprimanded him and assigned him to gate guard duty, where he had no contact with detainees, for the rest of his assignment at Guantanamo Bay.":
"A U.S. military investigation into the mishandling of the Muslim holy book at the Guantanamo Bay prison for suspected terrorists has determined that detainees -- not U.S. soldiers -- attempted to flush the Quran down the toilet there.
However, the report did find four confirmed incidents in which U.S. personnel at the base mishandled the Quran, including guards kicking a detainee's Quran; a guard's urine "splashed" a detainee and his holy book after coming through an air vent; and guards got in a water balloon fight that resulted in two detainees' Qurans getting wet.
In a fifth confirmed incident, it could not be determined whether a guard or a detainee wrote a two-word obscenity in a detainee's Quran.
The findings of the report, issued by Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, commander of the detention center in Cuba, were released late Friday. They found no evidence to support allegations that U.S. soldiers attempted to flush the Muslim holy book down the toilet." (See also the report [PDF]: "Koran Inquiry: Description of Incidents" (southcom.mil, 2005/06/03). Also: "Military releases Koran-abuse findings" (Guy Taylor, The Washington Times, 2005/06/04): "The findings show that al Qaeda and Taliban detainees at the detention center themselves mishandled Korans on 15 occasions, three times more than the military prison's guards and interrogators. 'These included using a Koran as a pillow, ripping pages out of the Koran, attempting to flush a Koran down the toilet, and urinating on the Koran.'")

"Gitmo Grovel: Enough Already" (Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, 2005/06/03)
"The self-flagellation over reports of abuse at Guantanamo Bay has turned into a full-scale panic. There are calls for the United States, with all this worldwide publicity, to simply shut the place down. ...
The self-flagellation has gone far enough. We know that al Qaeda operatives are trained to charge torture when they are in detention, and specifically to charge abuse of the Koran to inflame fellow prisoners on the inside and potential sympathizers on the outside.
In March the Navy inspector general reported that, out of about 24,000 interrogations at Guantanamo, there were seven confirmed cases of abuse, "all of which were relatively minor." In the eyes of history, compared to any other camp in any other war, this is an astonishingly small number. ...
Does the Koran deserve special respect? Of course it does. As do the Bibles destroyed by the religious police in Saudi Arabia and the Torahs blown up in various synagogues from Tunisia to Turkey.
Should the United States apologize? If there were mishandlings of the Koran, we should say so and express regret. And that should be in the context of our remarkably humane and tolerant treatment of the Guantanamo prisoners, and in the context of a global war on terrorism (for example, the campaign in Afghanistan) conducted with a discrimination and a concern for civilian safety rarely seen in the annals of warfare.
Then we should get over it, stop whimpering and start defending ourselves." (See also: "Just Shut It Down" (Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times/Der Spiegel, 2005/05/27))

"Intimidated by extremists" (Frida Ghitis, International Herald Tribune, 2005/06/01)
"One day, when historians study this first major war of the 21st century, they will scratch their heads in disbelief, wondering how it came to pass that Muslim extremists managed to intimidate moderates of every religion - including Islam - on every continent on earth.
The whole planet, it seems, twisted itself into knots trying to untangle the forces at work behind the retracted Newsweek story about desecration of the Koran. Journalistic practices came under attack, while experts on Islam tried to soothe the less erudite, not quite justifying, but more than thoroughly explaining why desecration of the Holy Book leads to mob rampage and murder in a Muslim society.
No question, insulting any religion is beyond reprehensible. It appears, however, that nothing is more reprehensible than insulting the Muslim religion. And the extremists now decide what constitutes an insult. ...
While Muslim moderates get swept away by the tide of extremism, unprotected by so-called moderate governments, the rest of the world frets in well-intentioned angst. Moderates everywhere now seem terrified of making missteps that might upset the extremists, while they obsess over the question, "What can we do to avoid offending Muslims?" Standing Pentagon orders instruct those touching the Koran that "clean gloves will be put on" and that 'two hands will be used at all times.'"

"The truth about Guantanamo Bay" (Michelle Malkin, Town Hall, 2005/06/01)
"The mainstream media and international human rights organizations have relentlessly portrayed the Guantanamo Bay detention facility as a depraved torture chamber operated by sadistic American military officials defiling Islam at every turn. It's the "gulag of our time," wails Amnesty International. It's the "anti-Statue of Liberty," bemoans New York Times columnist Tom Friedman.
Have there been abuses? Yes. But here is the rest of the story -- the story that the Islamists and their sympathizers don't want you to hear.
According to recently released FBI documents, which are inaccurately heralded by civil liberties activists and military-bashers as irrefutable evidence of widespread "atrocities" at Gitmo:
A significant number of detainees' complaints were either exaggerated or fabricated (no surprise given al Qaeda's explicit instructions to trainees to lie). One detainee who claimed to have been "beaten, spit upon and treated worse than a dog" could not provide a single detail pertaining to mistreatment by U.S. military personnel. Another detainee claimed that guards were physically abusive, but admitted he hadn't seen it.
Another detainee disputed one of the now-globally infamous claims that American guards had mistreated the Koran. The detainee said that riots resulted from claims that a guard dropped the Koran. In actuality, the detainee said, a detainee dropped the Koran then blamed a guard. Other detainees who complained about abuse of the Koran admitted they had never personally witnessed any such abuse, but one said he had heard that non-Muslim soldiers touched the Koran when searching it for contraband."

"Amnesty International's irresponsible charges" (Dennis Byrne, Chicago Tribune, 2005/05/30)
Gulag II: "Either Amnesty International isn't aware of this history, or it knows of it but is lying for the sake of a good sound bite. In either case, the group has lost credibility to speak on behalf of the victims of human-rights violations. Moreover, Amnesty International has dishonored millions of gulag victims.
Of course, the media took the bait. Mindlessly and without hesitation, they repeated the gulag charge, as if Amnesty International says it is so, it must be so. If the media felt compelled to report that kind of remark, at least in the interests of balance and accuracy, they should have added a brief sentence noting that the gulag was a network of old Soviet concentration camps to which millions were sent to suffer and die. An Associated Press report, found on The New York Times Web site, took that course, but only made matters worse by asserting that "thousands," not millions, died in the gulag. Haven't Times editors read the newspaper's own review of Applebaum's book? No wonder the media deserve such public contempt. ...
On this Memorial Day, it might be worth a moment to remember that Guantanamo Bay is run by Americans who do not deserve to be lumped together with a mass slaughter of historic proportions. Certainly, we must be vigilant to prevent any human-rights violations committed by all nations, including ours. But, we need not tolerate this slander against the men and women of the American military and the citizens who support them."

"General slams Amnesty report" (Audrey Hudson, The Washington Times, 2005/05/30)
Gulag I: "Gen. Richard B. Myers yesterday condemned as "absolutely irresponsible" an Amnesty International report that compared prisoner treatment at Guantanamo Bay to the Soviet gulag, adding that 100 out of 68,000 detainees held in the war against terrorism were abused.
"It's very small compared to the population of detainees we've handled," said Gen. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He also noted that many of the abuses have produced courts-martial and other punishments.
The London-based human rights organization called the U.S. facility in Guantanamo Bay "the gulag of our time," comparing it to the Soviet Union's slave-labor camps where millions of people died. ...
"I think it's irresponsible. I think it's absolutely irresponsible," Gen. Myers told "Fox News Sunday."
"I think I'd ask them to go look up the definition of gulag as commonly understood. We've had 68,000 detainees since this conflict against violent extremism started. We've had 325 investigations into alleged abuse. We've had 100 cases of substantiated abuse and there are 100 individuals that have had some sort of action taken, either court-martial or administrative action," Gen. Myers said." (See also: "Amnesty Takes Aim at 'Gulag' in Guantanamo" (Paisley Dodds, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/05/25))

"Amnesty's 'Gulag'" (The Wall Street Journal, 2005/05/28)
"At a press conference Wednesday releasing its annual human rights report, William Schultz, the executive director of Amnesty's U.S. branch, called the U.S. a "leading purveyor and practitioner" of torture. He urged foreign governments to investigate and arrest U.S. officials. "The apparent high-level architects of torture should think twice before planning their next vacation to places like Acapulco or the French Riviera," he said, "because they may find themselves under arrest as Augusto Pinochet famously did in London in 1998." The "apparent" is a nice touch, perhaps an unconscious bow to the fact that multiple probes and courts martial have found no evidence that the U.S. condones or encourages torture.
"Our list," as Mr. Orwell--er, Mr. Schultz--puts it, is too long to print in full. But it includes Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith and William Haynes at Defense; Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, Jack Goldsmith, and Patrick Philbin from Justice; Tim Flanigan, just nominated to be Deputy Attorney General; George Tenet, former head of the CIA; and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.
It's old news that Amnesty International is a highly politicized pressure group, but these latest accusations amount to pro-al Qaeda propaganda. A "human rights" group that can't distinguish between Stalin's death camps and detention centers for terrorists who kill civilians can't be taken seriously." (See also: "Republican crisis biggest in US since Second World War. Well, almost" (Gerard Baker, The Times, 2005/05/27), "'American Gulag'" (The Washington Post, 2005/05/26) and "Amnesty Takes Aim at 'Gulag' in Guantanamo" (Paisley Dodds, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/05/25))

"Amnesty gets Bushwhacked" (Tony Parkinson, The Age, 2005/05/27)
Gulag II: "It is another example of the sad loss of perspective among some global opinion leaders opposed to US policy in Afghanistan and Iraq. This has become a debate in which intellectual rigour takes a back seat to ideological prejudice, where souped-up assertions portraying the US and its allies in the worst possible light override calm contemplation of the facts.
How many people, for example, still swear blind that 100,000 civilians have been killed in the war in Iraq? For some, it has become an article of faith that this is the cost of an illegal war of aggression waged by a ruthless imperial power. ...
Having consistently campaigned against unlawful detention and torture, Amnesty is right to demand a thorough investigation. And, yes, the United States, Australia and other strong, successful democracies should always be treated as exemplars on human rights, and be held to the highest standards possible, including in times of conflict.
Even if that means allowing legal counsel and other basic rights for men who have never raised a glass to liberty, and who believe they have a licence from God to kill all who do not submit to the will of Allah.
Even if it means probing allegations of prisoner abuse, despite knowing that Rule One, Lesson Eighteen, of the al-Qaeda training manual instructs that any brothers taken captive "must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them". Even when it means taking TV cameras, international media, and foreign diplomats to Guantanamo for occasional inspections - an unusual practice, it has to be said, for any government intent on hiding guilty secrets of crimes against humanity." (Hat tip: Tim Blair. See also: "Amnesty Takes Aim at 'Gulag' in Guantanamo" (Paisley Dodds, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/05/25))

"Republican crisis biggest in US since Second World War. Well, almost" (Gerard Baker, The Times, 2005/05/27)
Gulag I: "We no longer live in the real world. We have all been forced to inhabit the semi-fictional world of the headline writer, in which every incremental nudge forward in humanity’s progress is Epoch-Making, in which the banal setbacks of everyday life are Catastrophic Defeats.
This hyperbole addiction can impair our moral discernment, dim our sense of history, and render us insensitive to genuinely important events. In this world Amnesty International can, as it did this week, call Guantanamo Bay “the gulag of our times”.
Perhaps my own sense of history has already been impaired too much by life in the headline world but I seem to recall that the gulag was a Soviet slave labour camp system in which millions died simply because they were deemed in some way injurious to the communist project.
Guantanamo has hosted a thousand or so men, almost all of them captured in the middle of plotting acts of terror, and an unlucky few who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. No one has died. No one has suffered grievous injury. In the gulag system, the innocent were starved to death or mercifully executed while the West had a lively debate about the merits of communism. At Guantanamo someone might have flushed a few pages from the Koran down a lavatory and the civilised world is in uproar." (See also: "Amnesty Takes Aim at 'Gulag' in Guantanamo" (Paisley Dodds, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/05/25))

"Pentagon Confirms Koran Incidents" (Josh White and Dan Eggen, The Washington Post, 2005/05/27)
Apparently, Andrew Sullivan can't count beyond single digits, as he describes "a dozen allegations" as "countless". He then proceeds to use "the sheer scope" of allegations as a proof in itself that the "U.S. has deliberately and consciously had a policy of using religious faith as a lever in interrogation of terror suspects."
Perhaps, but the accidental bumping into the Koran can hardly be used as a proof of this. Or of "torture" or "psychological abuse" for that matter. Unless, of course, you are spinning this out of all proportions:
"Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, said investigators have looked into 13 specific allegations of Koran desecration at the prison dating to early 2002 and have determined eight of them to be unfounded, lacking credibility or the result of accidental touching of the holy book. Of the five cases of mishandling, three were "very likely" deliberate and two were "very likely accidental," he said. But Hood declined to provide details, citing an ongoing investigation. ...
He said most of the 13 cases involved accidental or inadvertent touching of the Koran by guards and interrogators -- such as someone bumping into the holy book, or one case in which an interrogator stacked two Korans on a television set." (See also: "Inmates Alleged Koran Abuse" (Dan Eggen and Josh White, The Washington Post, 2005/05/26))

"Just Shut It Down" (Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times/Der Spiegel, 2005/05/27)
Friedman argues that foreign columnists should dictate American policy. But if the goal is to placate the staff at the Guardian, shutting down Gitmo would of course just wet their avaricious appetites. Prepare for a complete Borg assimilation:
"Shut it down. Just shut it down.
I am talking about the war-on-terrorism P.O.W. camp at Guantánamo Bay. Just shut it down and then plow it under. It has become worse than an embarrassment. I am convinced that more Americans are dying and will die if we keep the Gitmo prison open than if we shut it down. So, please, Mr. President, just shut it down.
If you want to appreciate how corrosive Guantánamo has become for America's standing abroad, don't read the Arab press. Don't read the Pakistani press. Don't read the Afghan press. Hop over here to London or go online and just read the British press! See what our closest allies are saying about Gitmo. And when you get done with that, read the Australian press and the Canadian press and the German press."

"'American Gulag'" (The Washington Post, 2005/05/26)
"IT'S ALWAYS SAD when a solid, trustworthy institution loses its bearings and joins in the partisan fracas that nowadays passes for political discourse. It's particularly sad when the institution is Amnesty International, which for more than 40 years has been a tough, single-minded defender of political prisoners around the world and a scourge of left- and right-wing dictators alike. True, Amnesty continues to keep track of the world's political prisoners, as it has always done, and its reports remain a vital source of human rights information. But lately the organization has tended to save its most vitriolic condemnations not for the world's dictators but for the United States.
That vitriol reached a new level this week when, at a news conference held to mark the publication of Amnesty's annual report, the organization's secretary general, Irene Khan, called the U.S. detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the "gulag of our times." ...
Worrying about the use of a word may seem like mere semantics, but it is not. Turning a report on prisoner detention into another excuse for Bush-bashing or America-bashing undermines Amnesty's legitimate criticisms of U.S. policies and weakens the force of its investigations of prison systems in closed societies. It also gives the administration another excuse to dismiss valid objections to its policies as 'hysterical.'" (See also: "Amnesty Takes Aim at 'Gulag' in Guantanamo" (Paisley Dodds, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/05/25))

"Inmates Alleged Koran Abuse" (Dan Eggen and Josh White, The Washington Post, 2005/05/26)
"Detainees told FBI interrogators as early as April 2002 that mistreatment of the Koran was widespread at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and many said they were severely beaten by captors there or in Afghanistan, according to FBI documents released yesterday.
The summaries of FBI interviews, obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union as part of an ongoing lawsuit, include a dozen allegations that the Koran was kicked, thrown to the floor or withheld as punishment. One prisoner said in August 2002 that guards had "flushed a Koran in the toilet" and had beaten some detainees.
But the Pentagon said yesterday that the same prisoner, who is still in custody, was reinterviewed on May 14 and "did not corroborate" his earlier claim about the Koran.
"We still have found no credible allegations that a Koran was flushed down a toilet at Guantanamo," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said in a statement last night." (See also: "Guantánamo Prisoners Told FBI of Koran Desecration in 2002, New Documents Reveal" (ACLU, 2005/05/25))

"Amnesty Takes Aim at 'Gulag' in Guantanamo" (Paisley Dodds, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/05/25)
So according to Amnesty, 500 emprisoned enemy combatants and (correct me if I'm wrong) zero deaths at Guantanamo equal 29 million prisoners and three million deaths in the Gulag?*
Personally, given the enormity of the crimes, I think it is quite obscene to compare anything in our time with either the Gulag or the Holocaust, but if Amnesty necessarily wants to name "the gulag of our time", they should perhaps rather focus on North Korea: "It is estimated that the system of political prisons and labor camps in North Korea holds more than 200,000 people, and that, given the harsh conditions in these camps, some 400,000 prisoners have perished in the past three decades.":
"'Guantanamo has become the gulag of our time,' Amnesty Secretary General Irene Khan said as the London-based group issued a 308-page annual report that accused the United States of shirking its responsibility to set the bar for human rights protections.
The prison camp has been in the spotlight over the past year since the FBI cited cases of aggressive interrogation techniques and detainee mistreatment. The U.S. government has also been criticized for not charging or trying prisoners who are classified as enemy combatants, a vague distinction with fewer legal protections than prisoner of wars get under the Geneva Conventions.
Some prisoners have challenged their detentions in U.S. courts but their cases are stalled by appeals filed by the U.S. government and subsequent arguments.
"Not a single case from some 500 men has reached the courts," Khan said." (*Note that these are conservative estimates. R.J. Rummel's estimation is 39,000,000 deaths "due to lethal forced labor in gulag and transit thereto." See also: "Amnesty International Report 2005" (Amnesty International, 2005/05/25))

"Stop the Masochistic Insanity" (Christopher Hitchens, Slate, 2005/05/23)
"The violent response to the report of "Quranic abuse" isn't about faith, it's about intolerance":
"That great religion expert Kenneth Woodward, who used to write with extreme lenience on such subjects as miracles (for Newsweek, as it happens), has now written a solemn article for the Wall Street Journal saying that Muslims revere the Quran, or "recitation," much, much more than Christians revere the Bible. The Bible is only a first draft of God's will, set down by mere mortals, whereas the Quran is the unmediated word of God himself. No wonder, then, that pious Muslims will hear of a Newsweek capsule story, assume it to be infallible, and immediately begin to kill and burn. What could be more understandable?
Well, first, most Muslims did not do any such thing, and those who did should not be indulged in the Wall Street Journal. ...
A Wahhabist version of the Quran, containing distortions of the original and calling for war against "unbelievers" of all sorts, is now handed out by imams in our very own prison system! Do we demand in return that Saudi Arabia allow churches and synagogues and free-thought centers on soil where the smallest heresy is punishable by death? No, we do not. Instead, we saturate ourselves in masochism and invent the silly, shallow term "Quran abuse." ...
Some of us can be offended at insults to our culture, and we, too, possess unalterable convictions and principles. Many people take the same view of the desecration of Old Glory. But we would never dream of venting ourselves in random assaults on mosques or Muslims, and if anyone on our soil did dare to commit such atrocities, I hope and believe that they would not receive moist and sympathetic treatment in the pages of the American press." (See also: "Newsweek and the Quran" (Kenneth L. Woodward, The Wall Street Journal, 2005/05/21))

"Painted With Horns That Won't Retract" (Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post, 2005/05/23)
"The bashing of Newsweek over its horribly handled item on Koran desecration has mushroomed into a sweeping indictment of the media, which some conservatives now accuse of deliberately slandering the military.
Newsweek "wanted the story to be true," says Rush Limbaugh, because the media "have an adversarial relationship with America" and "end up siding with the bad guys."
Some news outlets "magnify every mistake the military makes in order to hammer the Bush administration," says Bill O'Reilly.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page blames "a basic media mistrust of the military that goes back to Vietnam." Columnist Jonah Goldberg decries "the media's unreflective willingness to undermine the war on terror." ...
National Review Editor Rich Lowry [says] there is a "media culture, set during Vietnam," aimed at "exposing wrongdoing and failures of the U.S. military. Instead of tending to give the military the benefit of the doubt, there's a tendency to believe the worst."
Michael Isikoff, the primary author of the Newsweek item, "reflected that culture," Lowry says. 'That doesn't mean Mike has anything personal against the military, and it doesn't mean he's not in most circumstances a great reporter. But especially after Abu Ghraib, everyone in the media is panting after every possible prison abuse.'"

"The Qur'an Question" (Evan Thomas and Michael Isikoff, Newsweek, from the 2005/05/30 issue)
"In fewer than a dozen log entries from the 31,000 documents reviewed so far, said Di Rita, there is a mention of detainees' complaining that guards or interrogators mishandled their Qur'ans. In one case, a female guard allegedly knocked a Qur'an from its pouch onto the detainee's bed. In another alleged case, said Di Rita, detainees became upset after two MPs, looking for contraband, felt the pouch containing a prisoner's Qur'an. While questioning a detainee, an interrogator allegedly put a Qur'an on top of a TV set, took it off when the detainee complained, then put it back on. In another alleged instance, guards somehow sprayed water on a detainee's Qur'an. This handful of alleged cases came out of thousands of daily interactions between guards and prisoners, said Di Rita. None has been substantiated yet, he said.
In December 2002, a guard inadvertently knocked a Qur'an from its pouch onto the floor of a detainee's cell, Di Rita said. A number of detainees protested. That January, partly in response to the incident and partly to provide precise guidelines for new guards and interrogators, the Guantanamo commanders issued precise rules to respect the "cultural dignity of the Koran thereby reducing the friction over the searching of the Korans." Only chaplains or Muslim interpreters were allowed to inspect detainees' Qur'ans. "Two hands will be used at all times when handling Korans in a manner signaling respect and reverence," the rules state. 'Ensure that the Koran is not placed in offensive areas such as the floor, near the toilet or sink, near the feet, or dirty/wet areas...'"

"Muslims take part in a demonstration..."
(Dylan Martinez, Reuters, 2005/05/20)
"Muslims take part in a demonstration outside the U.S. Embassy in central London May 20, 2005."

"Protesters chant 'bomb New York'" (The Evening Standard, 2005/05/20)
"A crowd of hardline Islamic protesters chanted the name of Osama bin Laden outside the US Embassy in London today.
The protesters included many men whose faces were covered by their headscarves and at least a number of women.
Their demonstration "against the desecration of the Koran" was being held yards from the steps of the Embassy in Grosvenor Square, which was guarded by a small detail of police.
The crowd, led by a man on a megaphone, chanted "USA watch your back, Osama is coming back" and "Kill, kill USA, kill, kill George Bush".
They also chanted "Bomb, bomb New York" and "George Bush, you will pay, with your blood, with your head".
Angry demonstrators waved placards which included the message: 'Desecrate today and see another 9/11 tomorrow.'"

"Our Two-Front Struggle" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2005/05/20)
Newsweek III: "So we do not dare remind the world that we have nothing to apologize for, given that we have expended lives and treasure in Afghanistan to improve a country that once helped to butcher us. Most of those rioting and killing idolize bin Laden. The problem is not that they are confused, but that they express exactly what they feel — and that is a deep hatred for Western liberalism, manifested on their now sacred day of September 11. We don't say such rude things, not only because it would be stupid politics, but because we don't quite believe them ourselves anymore. ...
America was once a country that demolished Hitler and Tojo combined in less than four years and broke the nuclear Soviet Union — and now frets and whines that a few thousand deranged fascists want an apology.
Abroad, we battle Islamic fascists who hate us for our success and want to kill us with the tools of the modern world they despise. But at home, we are also at odds with our own privileged guilt-ridden aristocracy, whose very munificence has made them misunderstand why they are hated.
The Islamists insist, "We kill you for being soft." Westerners in response feel, "We are killed because we are not being soft enough."
And so they riot and kill in Afghanistan over a stupid rumor, and we seek to apologize that it somehow spread.
How truly sad."

"The Best P.R.: Straight Talk" (Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times, 2005/05/20)
Newsweek II: "The fact that the White House spokesman Scott McClellan spent part of his briefing on Tuesday excoriating Newsweek - and telling its editors that they had a responsibility to "help repair the damage" to America's standing in the Arab-Muslim world - while not offering a single word of condemnation for those who went out and killed 16 people in Afghanistan in riots linked to a Newsweek report, pretty much explains why we're struggling to win the war of ideas in the Muslim world today. We are spending way too much time debating with ourselves, or playing defense, and way too little time actually looking Arab Muslims in the eye and telling them the truth as we see it. ...
The greatest respect we can show to Arabs and Muslims - and the best way to help Muslim progressives win the war of ideas - is to take them seriously and stop gazing at our own navels. That means demanding that they answer for their lies, hypocrisy and profane behavior, just as much as we must answer for ours."

"Hypocrisy Most Holy" (Ali Al-Ahmed, The Wall Street Journal, 2005/05/20)
Newsweek I: "As a Muslim, I am able to purchase copies of the Quran in any bookstore in any American city, and study its contents in countless American universities. American museums spend millions to exhibit and celebrate Muslim arts and heritage. On the other hand, my Christian and other non-Muslim brothers and sisters in Saudi Arabia -- where I come from -- are not even allowed to own a copy of their holy books. Indeed, the Saudi government desecrates and burns Bibles that its security forces confiscate at immigration points into the kingdom or during raids on Christian expatriates worshiping privately.
Soon after Newsweek published an account, later retracted, of an American soldier flushing a copy of the Quran down the toilet, the Saudi government voiced its strenuous disapproval. More specifically, the Saudi Embassy in Washington expressed "great concern" and urged the U.S. to "conduct a quick investigation."
Although considered as holy in Islam and mentioned in the Quran dozens of times, the Bible is banned in Saudi Arabia. This would seem curious to most people because of the fact that to most Muslims, the Bible is a holy book. But when it comes to Saudi Arabia we are not talking about most Muslims, but a tiny minority of hard-liners who constitute the Wahhabi Sect.
The Bible in Saudi Arabia may get a person killed, arrested, or deported. In September 1993, Sadeq Mallallah, 23, was beheaded in Qateef on a charge of apostasy for owning a Bible."

"Why Islam is disrespected" (Jeff Jacoby, The Boston Globe, 2005/05/19)
Newsweek II: "But what ''Muslims in America and throughout the world" most need to hear is not pandering sweet-talk. What they need is a blunt reminder that the real desecration of Islam is not what some interrogator in Guantanamo might have done to the Koran. It is what totalitarian Muslim zealots have been doing to innocent human beings in the name of Islam. It is 9/11 and Beslan and Bali and Daniel Pearl and the USS Cole. It is trains in Madrid and schoolbuses in Israel and an ''insurgency" in Iraq that slaughters Muslims as they pray and vote and line up for work. It is Hamas and Al Qaeda and sermons filled with infidel-hatred and exhortations to ''martyrdom."
But what disgraces Islam above all is the vast majority of the planet's Muslims saying nothing and doing nothing about the jihadist cancer eating away at their religion. It is Free Muslims Against Terrorism, a pro-democracy organization, calling on Muslims and Middle Easterners to ''converge on our nation's capital for a rally against terrorism" -- and having only 50 people show up.
Yes, Islam is disrespected. That will only change when throngs of passionate Muslims show up for rallies against terrorism, and when rabble-rousers trying to gin up a riot over a defiled Koran can't get the time of day."

"Bashing Newsweek" (David Brooks, The New York Times, 2005/05/19)
Newsweek I: "Countless conservatives say the folks at Newsweek were quick to believe the atrocity tales because they share the left-wing, post-Vietnam mentality. On his influential blog, Austin Bay writes that the coastal media "presume the worst about the U.S. military - always make that presumption."
Excuse me, guys, but this is craziness. I used to write for Newsweek. I know Mike Isikoff and the editors. And I know about liberals in the media. The people who run Newsweek are not a bunch of Noam Chomskys with laptops. Not even close. Whatever might have been the cause of their mistakes, liberalism had nothing to do with it.
Meanwhile, the left side of the blogosphere has erupted with fury over the possibility that American interrogators might not have flushed a Koran down the toilet. The Nation and leftish Web sites are in a frenzy to prove that the story is probably true even if Newsweek is retracting it.
This, too, is unhinged. Would it be illegal for more people on the left to actually be happy that a story slurring Americans may turn out to be unproven? Could there be a few more liberals willing to admit that prisoners routinely lie about their treatment? (Do we expect them to say their time in captivity wasn't so bad?)
Then I click my mouse over to the transcripts of administration statements and I can't believe what I'm seeing. We're in the middle of an ideological war against people who want to destroy us, and what have the most powerful people on earth become? Whining media bashers. They're attacking Newsweek while bending over backward to show sensitivity to the Afghans who just went on a murderous rampage.
Talk about the bigotry of low expectations."

"Suicidal Tendencies in the West" (Bruce Thornton, VDH's Private Papers, 2005/05/18)
"In short, like the hand wringing of the administration over an obvious lie only the irrational and ignorant would believe, this willingness to demonize the culture that created you and to extol as superior the culture that wants to destroy you can only be described as suicidal.":
"Increasingly we Westerners resemble the Eloi of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, beautiful, gentle, highly civilized hedonists whose fate is to be devoured raw by the brutal Morlocks. We are the beneficiaries of a culture created by those before us who forged European civilization in the fires of resistance to Islamic jihad: in Spain, in Sicily, in Eastern Europe, in Greece — the plunder, rape, slaughter, massacres, sacks, kidnapping, and enslavement perpetrated by the armies of Allah were for centuries fought by those whose names now most Westerners have forgotten or would be embarrassed to claim as their own. Don John, Charles Martel, Leo the Isaurian, Prince Eugene, Montecuccoli, Andrea Doria, El Cid, Sobieski, Charlemagne, Suvorov, Boucicaut,, Hunyadi, Fernando II of Castile, Alfonso I of Aragon, Guiscard, Harold Hardrada — who among us knows anything about the men who fought and killed so that Europe, and Europe's offspring America, today looks like Europe and America instead of looking like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or Syria?
Because of the brutal violence of those warriors against jihad, we in the West today enjoy the luxury of cynicism, cheap irony, effete tolerance, and hedonism. We moral dwarves stand on the shoulders of those giants and spit on their heads, thinking our ingratitude is really an intellectual sophistication superior to the primitive superstitions and naïve ideals that have made our lives of freedom and prosperity possible. Meanwhile jihad by other means — demography, immigration, terrorism, the oil weapon — continues apace, at least until the time when a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon falls into the hands of a modern jihadist and we are returned to the sort of slaughter our ancestors suffered for centuries. Maybe then we'll wake up." (Hat tip: Melanie Phillips.)

"Seeking sanity in the asylum" (Kathleen Parker, Chicago Tribune, 2005/05/18)
Newsweek IV: "Reaction to an inaccurate Newsweek report that led recently to rioting and death in Afghanistan suggests that hysteria is, indeed, contagious. ...
What we need here is a little perspective.
First, we all can agree that flushing a Koran down a toilet, if physically possible, would be both insensitive and rude, though Westerners generally have a higher tolerance threshold for such offenses. Put it this way: You could flush a Bible down the toilet in front of Goober in Kabul, and it's unlikely that Mayberry suddenly would be awash in blood.
Without disrespecting true believers of Islam, one also could debate the relative miseries of seeing our favorite scripture disappear into the plumbing versus, say, watching airplanes fly into buildings, killing thousands of innocents. Remember, these are terrorist suspects captured after 9/11, not kidnapped members of an Afghan boys choir.
The apparent Newsweek mistake was regrettable, but we should beware of allowing ourselves to mirror the emotional reactions of people who were by no measure justified in their response -- even if the story had been proven true.
The same people foaming over a reported act of blasphemy didn't flinch while executing women for stepping outside sans burqa. I'm afraid my moral outrage in favor of the morally outrageous is tapped out."

"The Real Lesson of Newsweekgate" (Robert Spencer, FrontPageMagazine, 2005/05/18)
Newsweek III: "There is no excusing Newsweek’s irresponsibility in this. But this is not really a story about media bias or carelessness at all. There is a much larger story that is getting hardly any attention at all. The gorilla in the living room that no one wants to notice, is that flushing a Qur’an down the toilet should not be grounds to commit murder.
This aspect of the story is being ignored by spokesmen on both the Left and the Right. After the initial reports of rioting, Juan Cole sputtered, “Whatever goddam military genius came up with the bright idea of flushing the Koran down the toilet at Guantanamo should be court-martialed, and Bush had better get out there apologizing before this thing spirals further out of control.” On the other side of the political spectrum, Paul Marshall wrung his hands in National Review: “Even if Newsweek publishes a full retraction, the damage is done. Much of the Muslim world will regard it merely as a cover-up and feel reconfirmed in the view that America is at war with Islam.”
Neither Cole nor Marshall, however, made any moral judgment about the rioters. ...
Neither one says anything whatsoever about a culture that condones — celebrates — wanton murder of innocent people, mayhem, and destruction in response to the alleged and unproven destruction of a book."

"Our Insular Media" (Claudia Rosett, The Wall Street Journal, 2005/05/18)
Newsweek II: "What produced these particular riots was the intersection of Islamic-world furies and that brand of U.S. self-absorption in which no subject is more fascinating to the American media than any possible misdeeds of the U.S. itself. ...
The tragedy in all this is that while the entire world is by now acquainted with tales -- true and false -- about Abu Ghraib and Guantanomo Bay, the information pretty much ends there. When it comes to the Islamic world's most despotic states, almost no one outside their borders can reel off the names of the prisons they run, let alone tales of what happens within. Afghanistan is still recovering from the Taliban blackout of the human soul--which at the time received almost no coverage. Saudi Arabia--whence the Arab News, in its disquisition on Newsweek's story, denounces the U.S. as "ignorant and insensitive"--provides no accounting to the world of its dungeons. Can anyone name a prison in Yemen? ...
But to whatever extent the press is engaged in the business of trying to report the truth, or contribute to the making of a better world, it would be a service not only to U.S. journalism, but to the wider world -- including Muslims -- to spend less effort dredging Guantanomo Bay, and more time wielding the huge resources at our disposal to report on the prisons of the Islamic world. It is in such places that the recent riots had their true origins."

"Outrage and Silence" (Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times, 2005/05/18)
Newsweek I: "It is hard not to notice two contrasting stories that have run side by side during the past week. One is the story about the violent protests in the Muslim world triggered by a report in Newsweek (which the magazine has now retracted) that U.S. interrogators at Guantánamo Bay desecrated a Koran by throwing it into a toilet. In Afghanistan alone, at least 16 people were killed and more than 100 wounded in anti-American rioting that has been linked to that report. I certainly hope that Newsweek story is incorrect, because it would be outrageous if U.S. interrogators behaved that way.
That said, though, in the same newspapers one can read the latest reports from Iraq, where Baathist and jihadist suicide bombers have killed 400 Iraqi Muslims in the past month - most of them Shiite and Kurdish civilians shopping in markets, walking in funerals, going to mosques or volunteering to join the police.
Yet these mass murders - this desecration and dismemberment of real Muslims by other Muslims - have not prompted a single protest march anywhere in the Muslim world. And I have not read of a single fatwa issued by any Muslim cleric outside Iraq condemning these indiscriminate mass murders of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds by these jihadist suicide bombers, many of whom, according to a Washington Post report, are coming from Saudi Arabia.
The Muslim world's silence about the real desecration of Iraqis, coupled with its outrage over the alleged desecration of a Koran, highlights what we are up against in trying to stabilize Iraq - as well as the only workable strategy going forward."

"The Smug Delusion of Base Expectations" (Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, 2005/05/17)
Newsweek IV. A welcome contrast to Andrew Sullivan, who focuses on other alleged cases of "mistreatment of the book" and thinks that the media should "Run long, detailed stories debriefing released Gitmo detainees and try to confirm or debunk their allegations of abuse.":
"Here's an actual newsflash — and one, yet again, that should be news to no one: The reason for the carnage here was, and is, militant Islam. Nothing more.
Newsweek merely gave the crazies their excuse du jour. But they didn't need a report of Koran desecration to fly jumbo jets into skyscrapers, to blow up embassies, or to behead hostages taken for the great sin of being Americans or Jews. They didn't need a report of Koran desecration to take to the streets and blame the United States while enthusiastically taking innocent lives. This is what they do. ...
What are we saying here? That the problem lies in the falsity of Newsweek's reporting? What if the report had been true? And, if you're being honest with yourself, you cannot say — based on common sense and even ignoring what we know happened at Abu Ghraib — that you didn't think it was conceivably possible the report could have been true. Flushing the Koran down a toilet (assuming for argument's sake that our environmentally correct, 3.6-liters-per-flush toilets are capable of such a feat) is a bad thing. But rioting? Seventeen people killed? That's a rational response? ...
Our cognate sense of the Islamic world has become the smug delusion of base expectations.
Someone alleges a Koran flushing and what do we do? We expect, accept, and silently tolerate militant Muslim savagery — lots of it. We become the hangin' judge for the imbeciles whose negligence "triggered" the violence, but offer no judgment about the societal dysfunction that allows this grade of offense to trigger so cataclysmic a reaction."

"Do Riots Save Islam's Honor?" (Irshad Manji, Los Angeles Times, 2005/05/17)
Newsweek III: "Still, at least one more question needs to be asked: Even if the Koran was mistreated, are violent riots justified? ...
By urging my fellow Muslims to consider these questions, I'm showing faith in their capacity to be thoughtful and humane. I'm appealing to their heads rather than only their hearts. Ultimately, I'm fighting not Islam but the routinely low expectations of those who practice it.
Contrast that with the strategy of Imran Khan, the Pakistani cricketer-turned-politician who rallied his countrymen to express rage based on one paragraph in Newsweek. A fierce rival of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, Khan objects to cooperating with the U.S. on security matters. He knew his comments about Newsweek would feed the most reflexive of Muslim impulses: to treat the Koran with uncritical veneration. ...
As I write, Muslims worldwide are scheduling demonstrations for the end of this month against those who insult Islam. They'll peacefully protest not just the possibility of the Koran's desecration at Guantanamo but the proven torture at Abu Ghraib as well as civil rights violations suffered by ordinary Muslims in the United States. They have every right to condemn these injuries.
Will they also speak out against the bloody, fiery riots that, in the name of honoring Islam, are killing an increasing number of Muslims and non-Muslims?
It's a question worth asking."

"Journalists and the Military" (The Wall Street Journal, 2005/05/17)
Newsweek II: "The more consequential question here, it seems to us, is why Newsweek was so ready to believe the story was true. The allegation after all repudiated explicit U.S. and Army policy to treat Muslim detainees with religious respect, including time to pray, honoring dietary preferences and access to the Koran. Yet the magazine readily printed a story suggesting that what our enemies claim about Guantanamo is essentially true. Why?
Our own answer is that this is part of a basic media mistrust of the military that goes back to Vietnam and has shown itself with a vengeance during the Iraq conflict and the war on terror. ...
We aren't saying that reporters shouldn't be skeptical, and they certainly have a duty to report when a war is going badly. Where the press corps goes wrong is in always assuming the worst about military and government motives. Thus U.S. intelligence wasn't merely wrong about Saddam Hussein's WMD, it intentionally "lied" about it to sell an illegitimate war. Thus, too, an antiwar partisan named Joe Wilson with a basically unimportant story about uranium and Niger is hailed as a truth-telling whistle-blower. And reports from Seymour Hersh in late 2001 that the U.S was losing in Afghanistan set off a "quagmire" theme only days before the fall of the Taliban. The readiness of Newsweek to believe a thinly sourced allegation about the Koran at Guantanamo is part of the same mindset."

"Newsweek Says It Is Retracting Koran Report" (Katharine Q. Seelye and Neil A. Lewis, The New York Times, 2005/05/17)
Newsweek I: "Still, damage-control experts said that Newsweek's handling of the story had created a public relations disaster.
"They tap-danced," said Robert K. Passikoff, president of Brand Keys Inc., a consumer loyalty firm based in New York. "They should have immediately bit the bullet and admitted they were wrong. There was no middle ground here.'"
Dr. Passikoff said that the retraction "seems like too little, too late" because of the nature of the error. "It had such far-reaching effects," he said. "People died because of this story."
Analysts said Newsweek was also damaged by the timing of this event, coming after a spate of high-profile journalistic scandals involving fabrications and plagiarism by reporters at other news organizations, including The New York Times.
"I think that this has the potential to be one of those so-called tipping points," said David Gergen, director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a senior aide to four presidents. Mr. Gergen also works for U.S. News & World Report, a competitor to Newsweek.
"There is a lot of anger, both here and abroad," Mr. Gergen added. "The Muslim world is going to continue to believe that this actually happened and that Newsweek is only issuing a retraction because of the reaction."
He said the magazine was smart to issue the retraction, but that it would not quell the outrage. "If anything, it is mushrooming and becoming uglier by the hour," he said."

"Newsweek retracts story on Koran under pressure" (Steve Holland, Reuters/My Way, 2005/05/16)
"Newsweek magazine on Monday retracted a report that U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had desecrated the Koran after the story triggered protests in Afghanistan that killed 16 people and the White House criticized it.
"Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Koran abuse at Guantanamo Bay," Newsweek Editor Mark Whitaker said in a statement, a day after apologizing for the report.
The retraction came as the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department all heavily criticized the report and said it had damaged the U.S. image abroad. White House spokesman Scott McClellan had said it was "puzzling" that Newsweek had not retracted the story a day after apologizing for it.
"A retraction is a good first step," McClellan said after Newsweek issued its statement. 'This allegation was unsubstantiated and it was contrary to everything that we value and all that our military works to uphold. We encourage Newsweek to now work diligently to help undo what damage can be undone.'"

"Activists of Pakistani religious group Pasban-e-Sahaba..."
(Tariq Mahmoud, AFP, 2005/05/15)
"Activists of Pakistani religious group Pasban-e-Sahaba burn a US flag during an anti-US demonstration in Peshawar, staged to condemn the alleged desecration of the Muslim holy book of Koran by US soldiers at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre. The US magazine whose story of alleged desecration of a Koran holy book sparked deadly protests in Muslim countries said that its report might have been wrong."

"The Press’ Abu Ghraib: Newsweek Apologizes, After 15 People Are Dead" (Austin Bay, austinbay.net, 2005/05/15)
Newsweek II: "History may see Newsweek’s fatal “Koran flushing” story as the US press’ Abu Ghraib.
Under any circumstances, Newsweek’s flagrant, tragic error is an error a long-time-coming. The magazine’s “apology” doesn’t begin to account for the damage. ...
But why might this be the press’ Abu Ghraib? Here’s the connection: globe-girdling technology has once again amplified foolish behavior, lack of professionalism, and disregard for consequences into a tragedy. Consider Abu Ghraib, without the fevered hyperbole of The Nation or The Guardian. The behavior of US troops at the prison was inexcuseable – frat rat hazing, trailer trash porn, street punk threat taken up ten quanta to felony prisoner abuse. But dump the hyperbole and call Abu Ghraib what it was: rank felony abuse, not deadly torture. The global dissemination of Lynndie England’s dog leash photos, etc., (and magnification of the abuse by anti-American critics) made Abu Ghraib the political and historical scar it is. The US soldiers committed a crime, but information technology made the crime an international fiasco. ...
There’s a war going on, a global war, and Newsweek acts like it’s trying to “Get Nixon.” (Heck, the Washington Post owns Newsweek, and the Post’s halcyon was Watergate.) The p