http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=8007
June 05, 2005
When is Someone Going to Toss Rumsfeld into a Cage?
by Jason Leopold
If you want to ensure that the media doesn’t cover an important
political story, send out a press release on a Friday, preferably at
the end of the day.
By the time reporters return on Monday, the story will be old news and
will either be buried deep within a newspaper or not covered at all.
That’s what the Pentagon brass is praying for.
At the end of the day Friday, the Pentagon confirmed a pattern of
widespread abuse of the Muslim holy book, the Quran, by military
personnel dating back two and a half years.
Releasing the report when most beat reporters have left for the
weekend was a calculated move by White House and Pentagon spin doctors
to control media coverage of the explosive report.
Where’s the outrage?
Last month, Bush and his cronies publicly stated that a 10 sentence
item in Newsweek detailing that a prison guard flushed a Quran down a
toilet sparked an uprising in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Indonesia that
led to more than a dozen deaths, was flat out wrong.
Bush’s mouthpiece, Scott McClellan, hammered away during his daily
White House briefings, calling into question the veracity of the
story, until Newsweek caved and retracted the item.
The magazine’s editor claimed the source who tipped the publication to
the news recanted.
But even though more evidence turned up of defacing the Quran, White
House and Pentagon senior officials issued warnings to curious
reporters who dared to follow up on the Newsweek story.
A frightened press corps cowered and the story died.
Then Bush took a trip to Greece May 24 to talk about Social Security
and offered up this doozy that explained why he says what he says,
damn the facts.
"See, in my line of work, you got to keep repeating things over and
over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the
propaganda," Bush said.
Fast forward to the real truth.
Friday, June 03, 4:40 p.m.
The Pentagon identified more than a half-dozen cases where guards at
Guantanamo Bay defaced the Quran, including scribbling obscenities
inside one detainee’s holy book, urinating on another, kicking one and
tossing water balloons in the direction of others to cite just a few
examples.
To understand why defacing the Quran is such a serious matter it’s
important to know that for Muslims the Quran is considered to be the
literal word of God.
"Muslims believe the entire Quran is the word of God verbatim as
dictated by the Angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad," said Jamal
Badawi, Islamic scholar at St. Mary's University, Halifax, Nova
Scotia, in a June 2 interview with Knight Ridder News Service.
"Muslims believe the Quran has been preserved exactly as it was given
to the prophet, so that gives it special status."
Not one senior official in the Bush administration has ever lost his
or her job or been held responsible for the widespread mistreatment of
prisoners at Guantanamo Bay as well as the notorious Abu Ghraib prison
in Iraq where detainees were beaten, stripped and led around on
leashes.
Instead, what the public is being fed is a line of BS that the
ill-treatment of prisoners is an isolated case involving just a
handful of soldiers.
Sadly, a majority of Americans are eating that up.
The Bush administration is putting innocent American lives, here and
on the frontline of the war in Iraq, in harms way for its constant
refusal to hold people like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and
his most senior staff accountable for allowing the total breakdown of
military prison operations at Guantanamo and in Iraq.
This latest news about abuse at Guantanamo Bay is just another example
in the never ending saga of mistreatment of prisoners that has been
reported by human rights groups such as Amnesty International and the
Red Cross.
Which begs another question: when is someone going to toss Rumsfeld
into a cage?
__________________________________________________________
And please don't feed the animal.
Harry
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