Faith-based initiatives.
Just posted: the cover story of the December 5 issue, Michael Peppard’s “The Secret Weapon: Religious Abuse in the ‘War on Terror.’”
“One time there was a long, tortured cry. I turned around. There was a second and then a third cry, but they sounded different from the cries of people being beaten. It was the long and frightening wail of death. Through the chain-link fencing I could see a guard in the cage of one of the Arab prisoners. I immediately knew what had happened.”
Reading these lines for the first time, you might imagine, as I did, that these cries signaled some extreme form of physical abuse—electrocution, waterboarding, or rape, something reserved for Donald Rumsfeld’s “worst of the worst.” I certainly couldn’t have guessed what Murnaz actually saw that day:
We were searched every day. They even searched the Qur’ans. The guards grabbed the books by their spines and shook them to see if anything was concealed in the pages. This guard must have thrown the Qur’an on the ground-otherwise the prisoner wouldn’t have howled like that. I saw the guard trampling on something. Some of the prisoners sprang to their feet. A terrible wailing arose. One by one, all the prisoners were losing their cool. “Allahu akbar!” they yelled. “Don’t do that!” I screamed. The guard continued trampling on the Qur’an. It was as though lightning had struck in a zoo.
Read the rest right here.
I found this Slate article by Reza Aslan a helpful read in conjunction with the Commonweal piece Grant linked to above. It talks about how the Qur’an is distinctive among religious writings, and how that affects how it is read and regarded.
The practice itself is fully reprehensible and uncivilized at the very least. It is the ultimate shame of the axiom: “All is fair in love and war.”
What will be most significant is the response of religious leaders. (Even W, at least publicly, always distinguished between good Muslims and terrorist ones. I suppose he was aware of this terrible practice.) What will we see from Chaput or George with reference to these shameful acts.” How strongly will Benedict condemn these inhuman practices? If one Catholic is persecuted the Vatican is all over the place with it, forgetting that the hated Samaritan is the eternal Christian symbol of one’s real neighbor.
Has this story been verified? When? By whom? Documentation please.
Bob: You mean aside from the sources noted in the article?
Bob Schwartz: Are you referring to Mr. Peppard’s allegations that Secretary Rumsfeld authorized the use of rape and electrocution as interrogation methods? This is the first I saw of those myself.
Regarding the Koran, I believe the DOJ OIG put out a fairly comprehensive report in May 2008 regarding the allegations of mistreatment of the Koran, especially the Muhammed al-Qahtani reports. The OIG report was based on the DOJ’s FBI involvement and observations in interrogations at Gitmo, Afghanistan, and Iraq and use new information to supplement the information obtained in the Church Report and the Schmidt-Furlow Report. The OIG report can be found here: http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/special/s0805/final.pdf. It’s long but quite thorough.
MAT,
Where does Mr. Peppard allege that Rumsfeld authorized the use of rape or electrocution? Certainly not in the passage Grant quoted in this post, where the only thing attributed to Rumsfeld is the phrase “worst of the worst.” Do you or Mr. Schwartz need a source for that?
Matthew Boudway: I cannot speak for Mr. Schwartz, but I do not need a source for the “worst of the worst” reference. I believe – at least according to the DoD – it originated with Rear Adm. Stufflebeem who, to my knowledge, first used the phrase in a 28 January 2002 press conference (found here: http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=43813) and it has since been used more notably by General Meyers and Secretary Rumsfeld and often attributed to the later.
As to Mr. Peppard’s allegations of rape and electrocution, it is self-evident from the passage Mr. Gallicho quoted that Mr. Peppard is saying that “electrocution, waterboarding, or rape” were interrogation techniques “reserved” for the detainees at Gitmo by Mr. Rumsfeld. I read it the way I think you did at first also, but then I saw that the “or” conjunction was in fact before “rape” and not before the clause “something reserved for Donald Rumsfeld’s “worst of the worst.””, so the “something…” is not part of the serial list. Unless you are saying the “something…” clause is part of the serial list and yet has no conjunction, but that would be a very strange construction of an English sentence.
Anyway, Strunk and White aside, I am very familiar with the allegations regarding waterboarding and feigned electrocutions and have read extensively the non-partisan literature on the topics, but, for me at least, this was the first time I have seen allegations regarding actual electrocution or rape. The OIG report I link to above makes no mention of the later two, so to the extent there is some reading material on it, I would like to familiarize myself with it. As the OIG report was quite exhaustive in my opinion – took me severals days to read all of it – I would be disappointed to learn that these allegations were out there and not mentioned by the OIG.
MAT,
I concede that the syntax is slightly ambiguous — ambiguous enough that if you want to misread the sentence you can. In context, however, the intended meaning is also the most plausible. The author means (only) that he assumed the cries were caused by some kind of physical torture — such as electrocution, waterboarding, or rape — rather than by the kind of psychological abuse his article describes. In passing, he adds that the kind of physical torture he imagined would have been reserved for the “worst of the worst.” In this sentence, “something” is not a definite apposition for rape or electrocution or waterboarding; it is an open-ended term referring back to the hypothetical “physical abuse.” Another dash would have made that clearer, but I think it’s clear enough as it is.
Well, frankly, men, I’d rather be brutalized than have my God desecrated… I don’t know about you–and that is the point of the article. No use getting all tied-up with punctuation marks and semantics. What was done WAS the worst! God means more to me than my lowly body, for heaven’s sake! (and to those devout men who had nothing else, I’d rather suppose, too, even if they WERE terrorists and had done awful things–which wasn’t the case with all of them.)