June 11, 2005
Quran Flushing Gulag
Conservatives must have been positively giddy the last few days. First Newsweek takes back it’s Quran flushing story. Then Brigadier General Jay Hood’s report determined allegations of Quran abuse are greatly exaggerated. To top it off Amnesty International has second thoughts about calling Guantanamo Bay prison a gulag. My advice to Conservatives is have a few drinks, dance into the night, and then forget any of this ever happened.
Because it doesn’t count.
Far from being a death blow to the arguments of those who distrust and/or despise the military these events don’t even rise to the level of trivial inconvenience for the True Believer. When facts and logic do not support one’s beliefs they must be dismissed. And in this case they will. Here’s how things will play out.
Newsweek’s retraction will be ignored and forgotten. Simple, frightened innocent believers from foreign lands have been forced to watch all they regard as holy, desecrated. How dare anyone deny this level of inhumanity? Their pain (the liberals, not the prisoners) is just as real to them as if the atrocities had actually been committed. Newsweek said interrogators flushed Qurans down the toilet so interrogators flushed Qurans down the toilet. Just because the White House forced them into a retraction is no reason to deny Qurans got flushed down toilets. QED.
The Hood report will be dismissed as well. First and foremost they will use the "what did you expect the conclusion to be?" defense. This strategy says since the military is made up of bloodthirsty killers, liars and Muslim haters military investigators would quite naturally cover up their military brethren’s killing, lying and Muslim hating ways. This is a powerful defense precisely because it is true the prudent man should have some amount of skepticism when any organization investigates itself. This alone will keep a lot of the faithful from straying off the plantation.
Now I know some of you are going to point out Hood’s findings seem pretty compelling.
There have been 28,000 prisoner interrogations
There were only 19 allegations of Qurans being mishandled (about 1/20th of a percent)
Only 5 could be confirmed
In 4 incidents U.S. soldiers mishandled Qurans
In 3 separate incidents prisoners tried to flush the Quran down the toilet
There was no evidence U.S. soldiers attempted to flush the Muslim holy book down the toilet
To me, that seems like a more than decent record for prisoner treatment. Comparatively, about a million Jews, were murdered by George Bush’s fellow Nazis at Antwerp. At Guantanamo Bay a handful of Qurans got wet. Think all those dead Jews would trade places?
But it doesn’t count. Qurans got flushed and since the U.S. Military is a bunch of Quran flushing bastards they were the ones that did it.
So what about the Amnesty International saga? They called Guantanamo Bay a "gulag". But last week Executive Director William Schulz of Amnesty International USA said "We don't know for sure what all is happening at Guantanamo" and "It would be fascinating to find out. I have no idea" Having no idea has never prevented anyone from doing anything. And sure enough, it doesn’t prevent them from calling for a base shutdown. To the True Believer, Guantanamo Bay is a gulag regardless of whether it is or isn’t. And moving the prisoners to a different location will presumably prevent the atrocities that didn’t happen from happening again. In any case, AMI has since decided it is a gulag. So it’s extra safe to ignore this "kind-of-sort-of" retraction
And so Conservatives, and people in the military, enjoy this as long as you can. I wish you well. But as long as allegations are more important than events you can’t win. You may have the facts. But to the average world citizen, they just don’t count.
- Ed Powell