1) The US condemns it, but the investigation of whether it happened has only begun.

2) Only "hundreds" of people are involved in the latest demonstrations. [link|http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4547413.stm|BBC]:

In Baghlan, officials said hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets.

They said five people had been arrested and that explosive materials were also seized.

Realizing that numbers can be shaded either way, it does not seem to be a major showing of discontent at this point. Don't give up on millions of people due to the actions of a tiny minority.

Yes, the US should get to the bottom of what happened there ASAP, and if it happened, then those who did it should receive training on what is and is not permitted in interrogations and why. If they broke the rules they should be reprimanded or worse and transferred. If they didn't break the rules, then the rules should be changed.

Crap like this will always inflame people who hear about it, to varying degrees. Unless the US plans on holding everyone there forever and never allowing communication from Guantanamo or inspection of the facility, then they need to end practices like this. If it occurred.

Leaving Afghanistan to the militants isn't an option.

My $0.02.

Cheers,
Scott.

lots of stupid stuff. Remember the [link|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=204840|happy slapping] thread?

Do you think the "amateur" pr0n "models" think about what they're doing for more than a few minutes? That photographs on the internet are never really gone and you can't know who will look at them?

How about people who [link|http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/04/AR2005050401914.html|attack an 83 year old woman] at loading dock with video cameras present?

There are a lot of naive and even stupid people out there who don't seem to realize that photographic evidence can be pretty damning.

It might be widespread. I have no way of knowing; but I don't take the existence of photographs as being indicative of it being condoned or being known about by superiors. It's more likely to be correlated with stupidity, IMO.

My $0.02.

Cheers,
Scott.

[link|http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/25/AR2005052501395.html|Washington Post]:

Numerous detainees at the Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba told FBI interrogators that guards had mistreated copies of the Koran, including one who said in 2002 that guards "flushed a Koran in the toilet," according to new FBI documents released today.

The summaries of FBI interviews, obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union as part of an ongoing lawsuit, also include allegations that the Koran was kicked, thrown to the floor and withheld as punishment and that guards mocked Muslim prisoners during prayers.

[...]

Nearly all of the hundreds of pages of documents consist of FBI summaries of detainee interrogations, and therefore do not generally provide corroboration of the allegations. At least two detainees also conceded that they had not personally witnessed mistreatment of the Koran but had heard about incidents from other inmates, the records show.

But the records, many of which were heavily edited by the government, further underscore the widespread nature of allegations related to the Koran and Islam among detainees at Guantanamo. Red Cross investigators in 2002 and 2003 documented what they considered reliable allegations of Koran mistreatment at the facility, and some detainees have made similar allegations through their attorneys.

I didn't see the original Newsweek blurb (wasn't it just one sentence?), but [link|http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/15/AR2005051500605.html|Howard Kurtz's] article says it said:

The report, in the issue dated May 9, said U.S. military investigators had found that American interrogators at the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had flushed a copy of the Koran, the sacred Muslim text, down a toilet. A week later, when newspapers in Afghanistan and Pakistan picked up the item, it sparked anti-American demonstrations in the Afghan city of Jalalabad in which four protesters were killed and more than 60 injured. About a dozen more protesters were killed in the following days when the demonstrations spread across Afghanistan and to Pakistan and other countries.

"There had been previous reports about the Koran being defiled, but they always seemed to be rumors or allegations made by sources without evidence," Whitaker said, referring to reporting by British and Russian news agencies and by the Qatar-based satellite network al-Jazeera. The Washington Post, whose parent company owns Newsweek, reported a similar account in March 2003, attributing it to a group of former detainees. "The fact that a knowledgeable source within the U.S. government was telling us the government itself had knowledge of this was newsworthy," Whitaker said in an interview.

The FBI/ACLU documents apparently don't conclude that the allegations are unequivocally factual, but one has to wonder.

Cheers,
Scott.