Newsweak

Bowing to America’s Enemies

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson

5/18/05

http://zeppscommentaries.com/VRWC/newsweak.htm

As soon as I heard that Newsweak had retracted its story alleging disrespectful treatment of the Q’uran at Guantánamo Bay Gulag, I knew the final decision had been made, not by the managing editor or even the editorial board, but by corporate suits.

You see, here’s the thing about suits, and it’s why having them own journalistic endeavors is such a grotesque travesty. They are timid. They are easily cowed by an uproar, by a bunch of complaints, by anything that can hurt profits. The media needs to be fair and fearless, and corporate suits are neither. Corporate suits can make a nation strong, but they can never make a nation great.

Timid.

The truly pathetic thing here is that reliable reports of such slimy tactics as tossing the Q’uran in toilets and other misuses of an inmate’s religious beliefs for purposes of torture have been widespread right along. Why this particular report stirred a response in Afghanistan and Pakistan when all the others didn’t is something of a mystery. It’s pretty unlikely that the Moslem world holds Newsweak in higher regard than, say, al-Jazeera, or the Egypt Times, both of which have reported on American atrocities against prisoners in which the prisoner’s religious beliefs were used as a cudgel.

Back in the middle of the 1800's, long after England had colonized India, there was wide-spread hatred of the invaders among the native population. The English were arrogant, overbearing, dismissive, racist, and just generally a bloody bunch of bastards who deserved to be hated. The English weren’t as bad as some colonial powers, but they were still pretty vile.

The English managed to maintain a semblance of control, mostly by making damned sure that incidents where that control slipped were never allowed to get out into general gossip.

But then, one day in May, 1857, after hundreds of incidents of English pith heads casually beating and whipping "wogs" and raping their wives and children, with the Indians generally tolerating the abuse of the invaders in stoic silence, a rumor made the rounds that the cartridges for the English Enfield rifles were packed in cow grease. To Hindus the cow is a sacred animal, and such use of the fat of the animal was considered desecration. The Sepoys, Indian trustees who acted as provincial police/army under British command, mutinied. Entire cities, including Delhi, fell to the mutineers as riots flashed across the subcontinent. It took the British six months of harsh repression and unspeakable atrocities to bring the captive population to heel, and there were sporadic outbreaks of violence sparked by that same, almost certainly false, rumor for decades to come.

Why this particular item caused a spark when so many others, including many undoubtedly more outrageous to Indian sensibilities, didn’t is a mystery of sociodynamics. That’s the way it works. A spark causes an inferno, but there may be a shower of sparks before a fire is lit. In America, there were thousands of provocations between pro- and anti-slavery forces during the era of slavery, but it took the actions of one madman and his small band of followers – John Brown – to really galvanize the two sides.

In the case of affronts to Islam by American jailers, reports were widespread, and corroborated by evidence furnished by the International Red Cross, Amnesty International, and even the jailers themselves, who gleefully passed around computer images of themselves torturing and molesting prisoners, and even desecrating a corpse of a Moslem prisoner. Congress viewed hundreds of other images and deemed them far too incendiary for public release.

At the bottom of this essay I’ll include links to many other sources of such mistreatment and so on, by way of demonstrating why I believe that the Newsweak story by Isikoff was almost certainly factually correct, and that Isikoff’s source was solid, and the story a genuine one.

It’s easy to understand why the Administration wants the story to go away. They have no control over Iraq at all, and can sense they are losing their grip on Afghanistan, even as other trouble spots emerge, such as North Korea. The last thing they want is massive anti-government riots in Pakistan and Uzbekistan, two of the few remaining areas in the middle east where the Americans can find safe enclaves.

The fascist right is overcome with glee, because not only does this enrage the middle east even more (and the fascist right seems to want this at all levels, from the cold calculation of the corporate suits who want a power vacuum in the middle east that they can exploit down to the nasty little dittoheads, who think that waggling their tongues and going "nyah, nyah!" at other countries somehow makes America stronger), but it gives them yet another chance to vilify and tear down what little remains of America’s free press.

Matt Drudge, the unpaid Jeff Gannon of the White House, is already referring to the riots sparked by the Newsweak piece as "The Newsweek Riots" and the White House is clucking that Newsweak shouldn’t be saying things that could stir up discontent against America in the middle east – as if invading countries, occupying them, subjecting the populations to torture and indeterminate imprisonment, bombing the cities and trashing the infrastructure wasn’t likely to cause some talk. The right is pretending that nothing like Q’uran desecration ever took place, and it was just rabid America-hating libruls trying to tear down Putsch who were behind the story.

Anyone who remembers the Monica Lewinsky affair knows that the notion that Isikoff is liberal or pro-Democratic is pretty laughable. He’s the one who broke that story, folks.

So the fascist right, including the White House, is attacking Newsweak with everything they have, for three reasons: 1) to create the impression that hatred of America in the middle east stems, not from administration policies, but irresponsible journalism 2) to discredit Newsweak and Isikoff and 3) to further cow the rest of the media in America.

It’s hard to feel a lot of sympathy for Newsweak. They are a pretty shabby endeavor these days, and their owners are abject cowards.

But they were right to report the story, and claims that they caused hatred of America in the middle east are absolute bullshit.

By way of example, the NY Times reported on May 1^st – the same day the Isikoff piece was published – that the commandant of the Gitmo Gulag got on the PA and apologized to the prisoners for descration of the Q’uran.* The middle east is widely aware of the ongoing American atrocities in Iraq, and to a lesser degree, in Afghanistan.

So no, Newsweek didn’t cause the middle east to hate America. America caused the middle east to hate America.

But the people in the middle east who hate America aren’t the real danger to America. The grinning gargoyles of the American right, including the neo-fascists in the White House, who are not so secretly delighted with the way the Isikoff story has played out . . .

They are the real danger. They hate America, too.

* (NATIONAL DESK, new York Times, May 1, 2005, Sunday, "Inquiry

Finds Abuses at Guantánamo Bay", NEIL A. LEWIS AND ERIC SCHMITT,

Section 1, Page 35, Column 1)

http://hrw.org/backgrounder/usa/gitmo1004/9.htm

http://cageprisoners.com/articles.php?id=7282&PHPSESSID=36f57f9c1f8926eeca43696d4f63f741

The reports details how the US forces systematically in numerous

different incidents, throughout the entire lengths of their detention

up till their release, variously:

. stamped on the Qur'an,

. placed the Qur'an in buckets and faeces and urine,

. sat on the Qur'an,

. shredded the Qur'an in interrogations,

. dropped and threw it on the floor,

. belittled the Qur'an calling it a guide on 'how to kill

Americans'and

. mistranslated the copies they gave to Prisoners

all in their bid to break the will of the detainees used it as a

means tomaliciously abuse and mentally damage the prisoners.

Also reported is

. Proselytisation attempts to Christianity by the US Military forces

including distribution of Bibles.

. Systematic and endemic derision and abuse of Islamic religious

rituals and supplications such as

o Mocking and deriding the Adhaan (the call to Prayer),

o Forced shaving of the beard (which many Muslim's hold as

obligatory),

o Withholding food during Ramadhan (the month of Fasting from Dawn to

Dusk)

o Prohibition of Qur'ranic recitation

o Prohibition of congregational prayer.

Feroz states that a US interpreter of Lebanese Maronite origin

repeatedly slapped and physically degraded the Qur'an whilst calling

it 'Shit', how copies of the Qur'an were placed in 'Shit' buckets by

US forces and details how the interrogators used the Qur'an as a tool

to humiliate and abuse the detainees.

Moazzam Begg corroborates Feroz's account and exposes the duplicity of

the US Spokesman Richard Boucher's statement that the detainees were

given the Qur'an and the opportunity to worship. Detailing a raft of

examples of religious abuses by US military personnel.

Jamal Al Harith confirms that 'the US has desecrated the Quran on a

number of occasions.' Detailing 'the reason for the first hunger

strike in Camp X-ray, which involved about 75% of the detainees was

over a guard who kicked the Quran onto the floor from its perch

hanging on the side of the cage. Numerous hunger strikes in Camp Delta

were over another guard who threw it into the toilet. When searching

our cages the guards would sometimes throw the Quran onto the floor.

During interrogation, an interrogator jumped up and down on the Quran

and taunted a prisoner. In Afghanistan, in the American concentration

camps, a Quran was thrown in a waste bucket by a guard.... '

Tarek Dergoul describes the modus operandi of the interrogators which

consisted of 'swearing at Allah, swearing at the Prophet and the

Qur'an .and mocking [it]' and how Military Police wrote obscentities

in copies of the Qur'an scrawling 'F*** off, F*** you' in them.

Mohammes Mazouz states: 'The Americans went [through procedures] to

humiliate us and flout our most elementary principles. It concerns the

treatment inflicted to the Quran. Anything that could reduce it to

nothing was used. They urinated over it, they ripped it; they cut it

with scissors in front of us. They defecated on it and painted our

faces with it. Yes, all this should be said so that the Muslim world

understands which degree of hate this sacred Book inspires in them.'

Cageprisoner's spokesman Dr Adnan Siddiqui states 'It should be clear

to any thinking person that all these detainees could not have

colluded, especially since some were in solitary confinement for their

duration in Guantanamo Bay; and the US is guilty of a systematic and

horrific assault on Islam and the religious beliefs and practices of a

fifth of Humanity in their so-called 'war on terror. The prolonged

period of the abuse from the beginning to the end of their detention

clearly shows that it is institutionalised and authorised by the chain

of command headed by Donald Rumsfeld and George W.Bush.'

http://www.cageprisoners.com/downloads/USQuranDesecration.pdf

www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/2005/05/14/news/world/11635065.htm

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/zone0/viewtopic.php?t=34567

Israeli Interrogators desecrated Koran at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba?:

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/zone0/viewtopic.php?t=34604

Galloway arrives for US showdown

http://www.itszone.co.uk/zone0/viewtopic.php?t=34691

Bush-Bolton Plan to Bomb Bushehr (for Israel):

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/zone0/viewtopic.php?t=34657

http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/051305Madsen/051305Madsen/051305madsen.html