Report finds Koran was mishandled
Commander sees no evidence of toilet incident
WASHINGTON -- US military investigators poring through 30,000 pages of records at Guantanamo Bay have found 13 incidents in which a guard or an interrogator allegedly mishandled the Koran, but none of those cases involved putting the Muslim holy book in a toilet or other waste bucket, the top commander of the interrogation prison said yesterday.
''I'd like you to know that we have found no credible evidence that a member of the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay ever flushed a Koran down a toilet," said Brigadier General Jay Hood.
He said investigators have substantiated that Korans were mishandled in only five of the 13 instances found in the base's records and in none of the cases was the mishandling deliberately done to upset detainees for interrogation.
In the first full public airing of what the military's investigation into Koran abuse allegations have found, Hood also disclosed new details about why the Defense Department decided it did not believe an FBI report about a detainee who mentioned a Koran being thrown into a toilet was credible.
The FBI report, based on interrogations of the detainee in July 2002, was made public Wednesday through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. The FBI report is a summary of the detainee's claims, not what agents witnessed.
When military investigators viewed the report and reinterviewed the detainee on May 14, Hood said, the detainee told them that he was only repeating a rumor he had heard, not recounting an incident he had personally seen.
''We then proceeded to ask him about any incidents where he had seen the Koran defiled, desecrated or mishandled, and he allowed as how he hadn't but he heard that guards at some other point and time had done this," said Hood, who has commanded the interrogation prison operation since March 2004.
A Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, added that the FBI did not inform the military about the allegation at the time.
Hood shied away, however, from accusing the FBI of getting the report wrong, answering ''no" when asked if he was saying its agents misreported what the detainee had told them. He noted that the report was a summary of two interrogations that had taken place a week before the report was written.
Devout Muslims consider it blasphemy for a non-Muslim to touch a Koran or otherwise show disrespect to it. Of the 13 alleged mishandling incidents investigators identified, Hood said, most were ''inadvertent" touching of the Koran by military personnel. Ten instances involved guards and three involved interrogators, he said.
''We found that in only five of those 13 incidents, four by guards and one by an interrogator, there was what could be broadly defined as mishandling of a Koran," Hood said.
He declined to answer repeated questions about the nature of the ''mishandling" because the investigation -- which Hood said started 13 days ago -- was not yet complete.
In two instances, he said, a trooper was ''disciplined" for his or her action. He provided only one example of discipline, saying a guard was recently reassigned to different duties.
Investigators concluded that the other eight Koran incidents identified in records, no mishandling occurred. Six involved a guard accidentally touching a Koran or touching it ''within the scope of his duties." The other two involved interrogators who touched a Koran in order to put it on a television set, or accidentally stood over it.
Hood said investigators are now looking beyond official Guantanamo records for Koran abuse allegations to examine, including those found in court filings by lawyers who are representing the detainees or in newspaper accounts.
Questions about how US military personnel have handled the Koran have been raised for two years, as current and former detainees alleged that guards sometimes abused their copies of the book in an effort to rattle them. Multiple detainees from different countries and backgrounds have mentioned guards putting Korans into toilets, especially in 2002.
The military has long denied the charge, saying allegations of abuse by detainees cannot be believed because Al Qaeda trains its members to make false accusations of mistreatment if they are captured.
The US is currently holding about 540 prisoners without trial at Guantanamo, and several hundred more have been released.
Koran questions have taken on a new urgency in the past two weeks, after Newsweek published a brief item in its May 9 issue citing an anonymous source who said that US Southern Command investigators would confirm that an interrogator flushed a Koran down a toilet in a report into abuse allegations at Guantanamo Bay contained in FBI memos made public in December 2004.
An anti-American politician in Pakistan used the report to denounce the United States. The fiery press conference clips were replayed by media throughout the Muslim world, sparking anti-American protest riots in which at least 17 people were killed.
As the riots continued to grow, Newsweek retracted its report, saying its source was no longer certain that Koran abuse was mentioned in the Southcom report. The report has been finished for two months, and Southcom lawyers have been editing it. Hood's investigation started after the Newsweek article appeared. 