The Red Cross is saying that it informed U.S. authorities of credible reports of Gitmo personnel disrespecting the Koran.

Although Red Cross employees did not personally witness any mishandling of Qurans, Schorno said, they documented and corroborated enough reports from detainees to share them with Pentagon and Guantanamo officials in confidential reports.

[ICRC spokesman Simon] Schorno said the Red Cross would not have raised the issue if it had been an isolated incident, but he would not offer specifics about the number of complaints.

"The very fact that we brought up the issue speaks for itself," he said. "We don't make such reports for minor problems."

U.S. officials have often downplayed such complaints about Quran desecration because they came from detainees.

And the "narrative counterpart" to Abu Ghraib seems to be shaping up at Bagram Collection Point:

Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him. . .

Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two interrogators, Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle. But first he punched a hole in the bottom, the interpreter said, so as the prisoner fumbled weakly with the cap, the water poured out over his orange prison scrubs. The soldier then grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water forcefully into Mr. Dilawar's face.

"Come on, drink!" the interpreter said Specialist Claus had shouted, as the prisoner gagged on the spray. "Drink!"

At the interrogators' behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.

"Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying.

Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time. . .

In sworn statements to Army investigators, soldiers describe one female interrogator with a taste for humiliation stepping on the neck of one prostrate detainee and kicking another in the genitals. They tell of a shackled prisoner being forced to roll back and forth on the floor of a cell, kissing the boots of his two interrogators as he went. Yet another prisoner is made to pick plastic bottle caps out of a drum mixed with excrement and water as part of a strategy to soften him up for questioning. . .

Some of the same M.P.'s took a particular interest in an emotionally disturbed Afghan detainee who was known to eat his feces and mutilate himself with concertina wire. The soldiers kneed the man repeatedly in the legs and, at one point, chained him with his arms straight up in the air, Specialist Callaway told investigators. They also nicknamed him "Timmy," after a disabled child in the animated television series "South Park." One of the guards who beat the prisoner also taught him to screech like the cartoon character, Specialist Callaway said.

Sickening.

But, then again, it's all really Newsweek's fault, isn't it?

Comments

[Camille]

Jesus. It's that thing again where the Bush administration manages to change the story from what was reported to who reported it. The discussion should be about the behavior of soldiers at Gitmo, not this stupid Newsweek-causes-roadside-bombs stuff. Maybe further investigation will repudiate Newsweek's article. I personally don't see that happening, but we have to have have that discussion, to face reality. The attention to that actual issue has been deflected-- have we as citizens allowed it to be deflected?