Gitmo Detainee Withdraws Quran Abuse Allegation

I’m almost at a loss for words to describe how I feel about this story. I can’t give it the justice that Boo or Susan would, but it’s something you need to know about:

The Guantanamo detainee who told an FBI agent in 2002 that U.S. personnel there had flushed a Koran in a toilet retracted his allegation when questioned this month by military investigators, the Pentagon said on Thursday.

“We’ve gone back to the detainee who allegedly made the allegation and he has said it didn’t happen. So the underlying allegation, the detainee himself, within the last two weeks, said that didn’t happen,” chief Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita told a briefing.

Gone back to the detainee have they? I wonder what was the line of questioning used to extract that retraction.

Another senior Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said the detainee “indicated, when asked about the desecration, that he was not knowledgeable of anything.”

How much sleep deprivation did the Gitmo guards employ? What stress positions did they utilize? Did any of the press gaggle at DeRita’s news conference inquire about the “environmental manipulations” that resulted in the retraction, the disavowal of knowledge? How can we be expected to believe anything that the Pentagon or the boy-who-cried-wolf Bush administration puts forth as fact?

These people are disgusting.