Okay, as my wife, who knows him, points out, Mark Whittaker of Newsweek might find his job in jeopardy becaue of the story from which Newsweek is now backing away about the Quran being ripped up and flushed down the toilet. The military says it investigated and that did not happen.
But that is not the issue, and that is not the question that needs to be asked.
Go below the fold for my theory, and it’s only my theory.
The book author who is the source may be recounting something else, and something that would be almost as bad. Bear with me.
The female guard did NOT smear the prisoner with menstrual blood. Instead She pretended it was menstrual blood. Thus were you to ask the army if she smeared him with mestrual blood to defile him the answer would be that they had investigated, but she had not. But the act she did had exactly the same psychological effect, and defilement is what you want the prisoner to think, so it does not matter how you achieve it, so long as the thought is there.
Let us return to the Quran. Have a guard tell the prisoner that this is a Quran, start ripping out pages and flushing them down the toilet. Does it really matter that in fact the guard did not actually defile a Quran? Is this not identical to the female guard and the “menstrual blood” incident?
I acknowledge that I am speculating. But it would be very interesting to me, given the patterns of interrogation which we have already seen, to have someone ask directly of the military authorities if guards ripped up something other than a Quran while telling the prisoners that it was a Quran. And I would guess that for the Muslim world it would not matter whether or not it was in fact a Quran — that such — even in simulation – was used as an interrogation technique to break the will fo the prisoners would be considered unconscionable.
Let me state my position — if my guess is correct, I think who ever did such action and whoever authroized such action should be brought up on criminal charges. If this -even in simulation — is considered acceptable behavior, thatn the violent reactions so far are the least of our worries.
