Flushed with Pride

A-ha! The international intrigue continues!

We now know that apparently there was mishandling of the Koran by American interrogators at Gitmo, albeit incidents committed mostly out of ignorance.

Oh, yes, and we also know now that the Pentagon could not substantiate a single incident of aforementioned Islam holy book being flushed down Army-issued toilet.

The Boston Globe is among the media outlets hot on the case:

"US military investigators poring through 30,000 pages of records at Guantanamo Bay have found 13 incidents in which a guard or an interrogator allegedly mishandled the Koran, but none of those cases involved putting the Muslim holy book in a toilet or other waste bucket, the top commander of the interrogation prison said yesterday.

' ''I'd like you to know that we have found no credible evidence that a member of the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay ever flushed a Koran down a toilet,' said Brigadier General Jay Hood.

"He said investigators have substantiated that Korans were mishandled in only five of the 13 instances found in the base's records and in none of the cases was the mishandling deliberately done to upset detainees for interrogation."

This is the part of the story that baffles me: Just imagine what could have been the result if U.S. intelligence had been half as dogged in determining whether those pesky reports of Iraqi WMDs were true?

Alas, we are reminded again that the Bush Administration will always devote its energies to figurative and literal crap.