posted on May 26, 2005 03:34:10 PM new
WASHINGTON — U.S. officials have substantiated five cases in which military guards or interrogators mishandled the Quran of Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo Bay but found "no credible evidence" to confirm a prisoner's report that a holy book was flushed in a toilet, the prison's commander said today.
Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, who commands the detention center in Cuba, told a Pentagon news conference that a prisoner who was reported to have complained to an FBI agent in 2002 that a military guard threw a Quran in the toilet has told Hood's investigators that he never witnessed any form of Quran desecration.
The prisoner, who made his complaint in an FBI interrogation in July 2002, is one of several quoted in newly released documents as saying that U.S. military personnel desecrated the Qurans of Muslim detainees at the prison.
Allegations of Quran abuse have led to heated discussion — and even deadly demonstrations in Afghanistan — since a Newsweek magazine report, later retracted, that U.S. officials had confirmed a Quran was flushed in a toilet.
"Their behavior is bad," one detainee is quoted as saying of his guards during an interrogation by an FBI special agent on July 22, 2002. "About five months ago the guards beat the detainees. They flushed a Quran in the toilet."
Lawrence Di Rita, spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, told reporters that U.S. investigators had re-interviewed the unidentified prisoner on May 14.
"He has said it didn't happen," Di Rita said. A day earlier the spokesman had said the detainee had not corroborated his original story when he was re-questioned, but today the spokesman went a step further.
"So the underlying allegation, the detainee himself within the last two weeks said that didn't happen," Di Rita said.
Another spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said the detainee "indicated, when asked about the desecration, that he was not knowledgeable of anything."
In a fresh disclosure today, the ACLU released copies of an FBI document dated Nov. 25, 2003, that referred to "information concerning impersonation by (Defense Department) interrogators at Guantanamo representing themselves to be officials of the FBI and U.S. State Department."
Most of the rest of the document was blacked out by censors before it was released to the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act.
FBI e-mails released to the ACLU last December had indicated that military interrogators had impersonated FBI agents, but this was the first time that impersonation of State Department officials was alleged.
Di Rita said this was being checked as part of a broader investigation of known FBI records on misconduct at Guantanamo.
The Pentagon has been under fire from a number of critics for alleged mistreatment of Muslims held prisoner at Guantanamo Bay since January 2002 and in Iraq and Afghanistan more recently. Di Rita insisted today that although investigations at Guantanamo Bay are not yet complete, it appears that many of the charges are groundless.
"Most of them are nonsense," he said, referring specifically to those related to alleged desecration of the Quran at Guantanamo Bay.
Di Rita said it was not reasonable to believe that U.S. guards or interrogators would intentionally abuse the Quran.
"As we understand it at the moment, we know that they have been extremely cautious, that the interrogators and the police are trained to know that this is a high-sensitivity issue so don't use it because it's too sensitive," he said. "And then what we're trying to determine is: Are there people who violated that? And so far we haven't been able to develop any chain of indications that would suggest that."
