Muslims stage anti-US rallies over Koran abuse report

Anti-US demonstrations continue in Afghan cities

KABUL, May 14 (Xinhuanet) -- The condemnation of reported desecration of Holy Quran by US military has entered its fifth day Saturday in Afghanistan as people in several cities and towns staged demonstrations to register their anger, Afghan sources said.

　　"Hundreds of people in northeast Kunduz province came out to the streets and demanded the punishment of those responsible for the offence," a protestor Karim Hamayon told Xinhua from Kunduz city.

The demonstration, he added, was held under tight security and the protestors after two hours of chanting slogans and delivering speeches were peacefully dispersed.

Similar demonstrations, according to local sources, were also held in parts of the neighboring Baghlan province today but all have ended peacefully.

Newsweek, the US-based magazine in a report last week disclosedthat US servicemen in their tactics to rattle Taliban and al-Qaedainmates at Guantanamo Bay had defiled copies of Muslim holy book, the Quran and flushed it down into toilet.

The report sparked violent demonstrations in the post-Taliban conservative Afghanistan and some 27 persons have been killed and more than 100 others wounded since Wednesday.

The protestors warned to continue their demonstrations until the US government offer apology and punish those behind desecration.

In the meantime, the Afghan government has put the police and other law enforcing agencies in high alert to cope with any eventuality.

Afghan clerics threaten Muslim holy war over Koran

May 15, 2005 ?- By Qurban Ali Hamzi

FAIZABAD, Afghanistan (Reuters) - A group of Afghan Muslim clerics threatened on Sunday to call for a holy war against the United States in three days unless it hands over military interrogators reported to have desecrated the Koran.

The warning came after 16 Afghans were killed and more than 100 hurt last week in the worst anti-U.S. protests across the country since U.S. forces invaded in 2001 to oust the Taliban for sheltering Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network.

The clerics in the northeastern province of Badakhshan said they wanted President Bush to handle the matter honestly "and hand the culprits over to an Islamic country for punishment."

"If that does not happen within three days, we will launch a jihad against America," said a statement issued by about 300 clerics, referring to Muslim holy war, after meeting in the main mosque in the provincial capital, Faizabad.

The statement was read out by Abdul Fatah Fayeq, the top judicial official in the mountainous, conservative province near the borders of Tajikistan and China.

Muslim clerics have traditionally been teachers and leaders in Afghan society and throughout its history they have rallied public opinion and sometimes led uprisings against unpopular rulers and foreign occupiers.

...

I would predict that the imams and mullahs of Afghanistan will have a certain degree of difficulty to overcome in boarding international flights with their mujahadin . . . so if anyone suffers ill effects from this, it will be the international military contingent in Afghanistan.

I would also point out that even a cursory review of the history of Afghanistan suggests that if there were not this alleged incident for causus belli, the Afghans would readily find another excuse to fight the outsider.

It has the value of:

Once again, it seems that some people are continuing to overreact by placing inflated value on the accusations of those with no credibility, if the reports are untrue.

If this didn't take place at all, the select rabble rousers, who prefer to believe anything negative about US forces do their country a great injustice in blindly falling in line with any and all US criicism, if that's what they're doing....

Looks as if Revel is very hot to buy it--while poking disclaimers throughout her post.

Rice knows what she's supposed to say.

Nobody's book is of more value than anyone else's.

That does not quite explain, however, why the protest and rioting over Qur'an desecration spread throughout the Islamic region. After so many gruesome reports of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, the vehemence of feeling around this case came as something of a surprise.

Not a good time (is there ever?) for this sort of allegation.

Newsweek responds...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7857407/site/newsweek/

...with yet more anonymous sources and allegations.

"Internal FBI E-mails," which Newsweek doesn't provide. It's a good guess that we'll never know the source of those E-mails either.

A "SouthCom investigation that found that Gitmo interrogators had flushed a Qur'an down a toilet." According to the Military, they're still looking for those findings. So where is this investigative report? Newsweek doesn't have it. [Perfect]

A phalanx of "senior government," "defense," and "military" officials and "diplomats" who, of course, will forever be incognito (or in Newsweek's imagination)

And by my reading, here's the kicker: Now that his article has come under heavy scrutiny with Real military investigations determining whether he's lying, Mr. Isikoff now decides to find a lawyer defending 13 Yemeni prisoners, who by the way, stand accused of terrorism and links to Al Qaeda (he didn't mention that, of course). And what do you think these innocent-till-proven-guilty terrorists said (as if Isikoff intends to give our SERVICEMEN that benefit of the doubt!).

That's right. They just happen to remember that there was an incident about a Koran in the toilet. Only Mr. Newsweek forgot to ask them about this BEFORE he printed his story about the Koran in the toilet. [The Cart comes AFTER the horse, buddy]

And just so we get the right idea, the rest is yet more agonizing over America's insensitivity towards the Koran. The biased tone is also a little much. ("cryptically"?, give me a break)

And by the way, if you don't already know: The author of this list of explanations/allegations is the editor of Mr. Isikoff's piece. I might have been willing to overlook this. But then he slithers out of responsibility with Anonymous sources to avoid explaining how Newsweek could have made these charges with so little to go on.

Well, draw your own conclusions...


"This is what the U.S. is doing," exclaimed Khan, "desecrating the Qur'an."

Revel said: "It looks like there may be a reason to buy the story."


Give me a break...

I find it quite possible that the incident never happened.

While various released detainees have made allegations about Qur'an desecration, the Pentagon has, according to DiRita, found no credible evidence to support them.

How did NEWSWEEK get its facts wrong? And how did the story feed into serious international unrest?

More allegations, credible or not, are sure to come. Bader Zaman Bader, a 35-year-old former editor of a fundamentalist English-language magazine in Peshawar, was released from more than two years' lockup in Guantánamo seven months ago. Arrested by Pakistani security as a suspected Qaeda militant in November 2001, he was handed over to the U.S. military and held at a tent at the Kandahar airfield. One day, Bader claims, as the inmates' latrines were being emptied, a U.S. soldier threw in a Qur'an. After the inmates screamed and protested, a U.S. commander apologized. Bader says he still has nightmares about the incident.

Such stories may spark more trouble. Though decrepit and still run largely by warlords, Afghanistan was not considered by U.S. officials to be a candidate for serious anti-American riots. But Westerners, including those at NEWSWEEK, may underestimate how severely Muslims resent the American presence, especially when it in any way interferes with Islamic religious faith.

NewsWeek: "Ooops! Did we do that? Sorry we screwed up and got caught falling for our own agenda"
May 23 issue - Did a report in NEWSWEEK set off a wave of deadly anti-American riots in Afghanistan? That's what numerous news accounts suggested last week as angry Afghans took to the streets to protest reports, linked to us, that U.S. interrogators had desecrated the Qur'an while interrogating Muslim terror suspects. We were as alarmed as anyone to hear of the violence, which left at least 15 Afghans dead and scores injured. But I think it's important for the public to know exactly what we reported, why, and how subsequent events unfolded.

Two weeks ago, in our issue dated May 9, Michael Isikoff and John Barry reported in a brief item in our periscope section that U.S. military investigators had found evidence that American guards at the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had committed infractions in trying to get terror suspects to talk, including in one case flushing a Qur'an down a toilet. Their information came from a knowledgeable U.S. government source, and before deciding whether to publish it we approached two separate Defense Department officials for comment. One declined to give us a response; the other challenged another aspect of the story but did not dispute the Qur'an charge.

Although other major news organizations had aired charges of Qur'an desecration based only on the testimony of detainees, we believed our story was newsworthy because a U.S. official said government investigators turned up this evidence. So we published the item. After several days, newspapers in Pakistan and Afghan-istan began running accounts of our story. At that point, as Evan Thomas, Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai report this week, the riots started and spread across the country, fanned by extremists and unhappiness over the economy.

Last Friday, a top Pentagon spokesman told us that a review of the probe cited in our story showed that it was never meant to look into charges of Qur'an desecration. The spokesman also said the Pentagon had investigated other desecration charges by detainees and found them "not credible." Our original source later said he couldn't be certain about reading of the alleged Qur'an incident in the report we cited, and said it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts. Top administration officials have promised to continue looking into the charges, and so will we. But we regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst.

?-Mark Whitaker

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.