Editorial by the writer, published in Dawn, May 23, 2005


Truth about sacrilege



NEWSWEEK’S retraction of a small report in which it had cited a “senior US government official” who claimed seeing a US military report containing instances of alleged desecration of the Holy Quran by US guards at Guantanamo Bay raises more questions than it answers. The magazine did this after calls from the Bush administration to mend the “damage” done to America’s image. For its part, on Thursday the US government reiterated its “strong commitment” to respecting the religious rights of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Newsweek, however, recanted on the article on what seems to be a technicality involving the naming of an anonymous government source — which does not necessarily mean that the alleged desecration never took place. After the report’s publication (and the deaths of 15 people in Afghanistan that it caused), the source retracted the claim of seeing a US military report that confirmed the desecration, forcing the magazine to retract the story.

However, what seems to have gone largely unnoticed is the fact that prior to publication, the article was vetted by a senior Pentagon official. Also, the allegations regarding the desecration of the Holy Quran are nothing new and have been reported in newspapers worldwide since 2003 quoting prisoners released from US military custody. In fact, one prisoner had alleged that similar acts of desecration had occurred at a US military prison in Afghanistan as well. The proportion of prisoners released from US military prisons who have made such allegations cannot be a coincidence or an accident. However, whenever such allegations surfaced in the media, Washington always dismissed them as baseless. If America really wants to clear the doubts that persist in the minds of many in the Muslim world, it should make public its internal reports on the alleged prisoner abuse and hold senior civilian and military officials accountable.