That's not a Qur'an In the Shitter! Don't Be Ridiculous, That's just the Geneva Conventions.

It's now officially Newsweek's fault that the Middle East is really fucked up. An article in last week's issue of the magazine reported that US interrogators in Guantanamo Bay put copies of the Qur'an in a place normally reserved for poopie and peepee, in an attempt to do... you know, whatever fucked up thing US interrogators were doing that week. According to some reports, this little factoid is what pushed some Muslim Fundamentalists over the edge (approx. 4 millimeters) sparking riots where 15 Afghanis died and over a hundred were wounded. All told, Newsweek proved to be a far more effective Afghani killing machine than Pat Tillman ever was.

A few days after the carnage, Newsweek admitted that their source couldn't confirm that any Qur'ans were harmed, and retracted the story. White House white guy Scott McClellan thinks they can do more.

McClellan said Newsweek would have to decide what it should do to set the record straight. "All we're saying is that we would encourage them to help undo the damage that has been done," he said. "Some of it's not going to be able to be undone, some of it is lasting." He said that Newsweek "certainly has the ability" to help repair the damage. "They are a widely-published magazine."

I'm a little less optimistic than McClellan. Newsweek may be able to make a nice infographic pie chart on Attention Deficit Disorder in Adolescents, but that probably won't undo thousands of years of sectarian violence in Afghanistan. McClellan defended that position by saying "Look, this report caused serious damage to the image of the United States abroad. And Newsweek has said that they got it wrong." Yeah. Whatever. The US Army causes more damage to the image of the United States before 8am than most people cause all day. Maybe Newsweek got sick of being left out of the White House's "damage to the image of the United States" games and decided to take matters into their own hands. By blinking and retracting their story, Newsweek proved they weren't bringing their A Game to destroying Americas good name, if such a name ever existed in the first place.

Now smug pricks all over the "blogosphere"(ugh) are claiming victory. The alpha dog of conservative intellectuals Glenn Reynolds thinks the Newsweek flap is "the press's Abu Ghraib." That seems pretty reasonable, since Newsweek's editor Fareed Zakaria did beat an innocent person to death, and personal finance columnist Jane Bryant Quinn smeared shit on a shackled prisoner and led him around on a dog leash. Oh they didn't? Then shut the fuck up.

Meanwhile, despite the proclamations from "new media" douchebags, and Newsweek cracking under the political pressure their story is ACTUALLY FUCKING TRUE!

"The behavior of the guards towards our religious practices as well as the Koran was also, in my view, designed to cause us as much distress as possible. They would kick the Koran, throw it into the toilet and generally disrespect it." (Center for Constitution Rights, Detention in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay)
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"We were not subjected to any physical torture as such but even shaving our beards and taking off our clothes is a form of cruelty," said Abdul Rahim.

He said a number of Arab prisoners had still not spoken to their investigators after three years to protest at the desecration of the Koran by guards.(Ex-inmates share Guantanamo ordeal, Haroon Rashid, BBC News World edition)
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They were never given prayer mats and initially they didn't get a Koran. When the Korans were provided, they were kicked and thrown about by the guards and on occasion thrown in the buckets used for the toilets. This kept happening. When it happened it was always said to be an accident but it was a recurrent theme(Center for Constitutional Rights, New York City)
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The disrespect of the Koran by guards at Camp X-Ray was one of the factors prompting a hunger strike.(Center for Constitutional Rights, New York City, NY)
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Contrary to White House assertions, the allegations of religious desecration at Guantanamo published by Newsweek May 6 are common among ex-prisoners and have been widely reported outside the United States(Raw Story, May 16, 2005)

There's more citations at the link above. Honestly though, Fuck the Qur'an. I really don't see why a stupid mass market trade paperback edition of some book is more sacred than the actual human beings we torture on a daily basis. That's where religious fundamentalists lose me. It's a book, motherfuckers, get over it. I threw my copy of "Atlas Shrugged" in the toilet in 1999 and I haven't faced protests from any egotistical libertarian assholes, yet. Or for fucks sake, if you are that pissed off mount an assault on Guantanamo Bay, like in that movie Bad Boys II. Don't shit in your own backyard, Afghanistan has already reached its fucked-up quota for the next 17,000 years.