Red Cross: Quran/Koran WAS Trashed

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Friday May 20, 2005 · 11:18 AM PDT

2005/05/20 · 11:18

Even as BushCo forces Newsweek to grovel, and even as papers like the NYT report that US military personnel have confirmed stories of Koran abuse, the International Red Cross chimes in.

(More below the fold.)

I wonder if the frothing right-wingers will now blame the IRC for everything that goes wrong in the Middle East?

The international Red Cross told U.S. authorities about allegations that American personnel at the Guantanamo Bay detention center showed disrespect to Islam's holy book, the Quran, a spokesman said Thursday.
Delegates from the International Committee of the Red Cross informed U.S. authorities, who took action to stop the alleged abuse, said spokesman Simon Schorno. He declined to specify the nature of the incidents.
[...]
Red Cross delegates, who have visited Guantanamo regularly since the arrival in January 2002 of the first of about 600 detainees, did not personally witness any instances of disrespect toward the Quran. Instead, Schorno said, they received an unspecified number of reports from detainees that this had occurred.
Schorno told the Chicago Tribune, which first reported the story Thursday, that the delegates gathered and corroborated enough similar, independent reports from detainees to raise the issue on numerous occasions with Guantanamo commanders and Pentagon officials.
"All information we received were corroborated allegations," he told the newspaper. "Obviously, it is not just one person telling us something happened and we just fire up." It was unclear what the Red Cross' corroboration process consisted of.

The interesting thing is that these stories have been out there for years, and have been published even in the "Support Our ~~Republicans~~ Troops" corporate US media. But it's only now that the Bushistas choose to go ballistic over what turns out to be the false linkage of Newsweek story to current riots. (As General Myers said before BushCo yanked his leash, the riots started BEFORE the Newsweek story saw print.)

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