|
New York Times - May 21, 2005
Guantánamo Comes to Define U.S. to Muslims
By Somini Sengupta and Salman Masood
…….Accounts of abuses at the actual American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, including Newsweek magazine's now-retracted article on the desecration of the Koran, ricochet around the world, instilling ideas about American power and justice, and sowing distrust of the United States. Even more than the written accounts are the images that flash on television screens throughout the Muslim world: caged men, in orange prison jumpsuits, on their knees. On Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, two satellite networks, images of the prisoners appear in station promos.
For many Muslims, Guantánamo stands as a confirmation of the low regard in which they believe the United States holds them. For many non-Muslims, regardless of their feelings toward the United States, it has emerged as a symbol of American hypocrisy.
"The cages, the orange suits, the shackles - it's as if they're dealing with something that's like a germ they don't want to touch," said Daoud Kuttab, director of the Institute of Modern Media at Al Quds University in Ramallah, in the West Bank. "That's the nastiness of it."
The Bush administration's response to the Newsweek article - a general condemnation of prison abuses, coupled with an attack on the magazine - apparently did little to allay the concerns of many Muslims. Then on Thursday, the International Committee of the Red Cross issued a report detailing the many complaints from detainees at Guantánamo about desecrations of the Koran between early 2002 and mid-2003.
In India, a secular country by law whose people and government are growing increasingly close to the United States, a cartoon appeared in Midday, an afternoon tabloid, on Friday showing a panic-stricken Uncle Sam flushing copies of Newsweek magazine down a toilet.
To the cartoonist, Hemant Morparia, it appeared as though the Bush administration's answer to the problem was to bury the truth. "People suspect American intentions," Mr. Morparia, a Mumbai-based radiologist who doubles as a cartoonist, said. "It has nothing to do with being Muslim."
From Mumbai, India, to Amman, Jordan, to London, Guantánamo is a continuing subject for discussion, from television talk shows to sermons to everyday conversations. In countries like Afghanistan, Britain and Pakistan, released detainees often return home and relate their experiences on television news programs. Accusations of egregious abuse sometimes prompt violence, as in last week's demonstrations in Afghanistan.
Guantánamo provides rhetorical fodder for politicians seeking to bring down United States-allied rulers in their own countries, and it offers a ready rallying point against American dominance, even in countries whose own police and military have been known for severe violations of human rights.
"Even illiterate people pronounce it in a perfect manner, which surprises me a bit, quite frankly," said Irfan Siddiqui, a columnist for Pakistan's popular Urdu-language daily, Nawa-i-Waqt. "But it shows the significance this issue has attained."
In Europe, accusations of abuse at Guantánamo, as much as the war in Iraq, have become a symbol of what many see as America's dangerous drift away from the ideals that made it a moral beacon in the post-World War II era. There is a persistent and uneasy sense that the United States fundamentally changed after September 11, and not for the better.
"The simple truth is that America's leaders have constructed at Guantánamo Bay a legal monster," the French daily, Le Monde, said in a January editorial…..
In Britain, Guantánamo has entered the political lexicon along with Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad as an emblem of American injustice and abuse. During the London marathon in April this year, David Nicholl, a neurologist, ran the race in an orange jumpsuit to protest the detention of five former British residents at Guantánamo…….
In India, one human rights advocate who routinely takes the Indian military to task for its alleged abuses against insurgents in Kashmir and the northeast, said the United States stance on things like torture and interrogation of suspects at Guantánamo signaled what he called "a human rights disaster" for everyone.
On Friday afternoon in an Islamabad bookshop, Maheen Asif, 33, leafed through a women's magazine, and paused for only a moment when asked for her impression of Guantánamo Bay. "Torture," she said, as her daughters, 8 and 5, scampered through the stalls. "The first word that comes to my mind is 'torture' - a place where Americans lock up and torture Muslims in the name of terrorism."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/21/international/asia/21gitmo.html?hp&ex=1116734400&en=a7ee3f336b4069f3&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Los Angeles Times - May 22, 2005
LA Times: Dozens have alleged Quran's mishandling
Complaints by inmates in Afghanistan, Iraq and Cuba emerged early in 2003
The Los Angeles Times on May 22, 2005 reported that dozens of prisoners have alleged mishandling of the Quran by US interrogators in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan and Iraq. The paper said the complaints by inmates in Afghanistan, Iraq and Cuba emerged as early as 2003.
The LA Times enumerated the following graphic details of the desecration of the Quran:
In one instance, an Iraqi detainee alleged that a soldier had a guard dog carry a copy of the Quran in its mouth. In another, guards at Guantanamo were said to have scrawled obscenities inside Qurans.
Other prisoners said Qurans were kicked across floors, stomped on and thrown against walls. One said a soldier urinated on his copy, and others said guards ridiculed the religious text, declaring that Allah's words would not save detainees.
"They tore it and threw it on the floor," former detainee Mohammed Mazouz said of guards at Guantanamo Bay. "They urinated on it. They walked on top of the Quran. They used the Quran like a carpet."
"We told them not to do it. We begged. And then they did it some more," said Mazouz, a Moroccan who was seized in Pakistan soon after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Recently released, he described the alleged incidents in a telephone interview from his home in Marrakech.
Ahmad Naji Abid Ali Dulaymi, who was held at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq for 10 months, singled out a soldier or noncommissioned officer known to detainees only as "Fox." He said prisoners were forced to sit naked, were licked by dogs, and were soaked in cold water and then forced to sit in front of a powerful air-conditioner.
"But frankly," he said, "the worst insult and humiliation they were doing to us, especially for the religious ones among us, is when they, especially Fox, tore up holy books of Quran and threw them away into the trash or into dirty water.
"Almost every day, Fox used to take a brand new Quran, and tear off the plastic cover in front of us and then throw it away into the trash container."
Martin Mubanga, a Zambian who was detained at Guantanamo Bay, told The Times, two guards made him kneel and held his wrists in locked positions while others searched his cell. His Quran was thrown to the floor; "I saw it in the corner of my eye," he said….
Five former prisoners have told The Times of Quran desecration. Jamal Harith, a British Muslim, said interrogators at Guantanamo often kicked or knocked his Quran around. He said guards once deliberately targeted his holy book while hosing down his cell.
"Everybody was upset, but when you are in Cuba you learn to accept," Harith said after his return to Britain. "You accept it as the norm when you are in there."
Other accounts from former detainees have been posted on the Internet. Tarek Dergoul, another British Muslim who was held at Guantanamo Bay, recalled soldiers insulting Islam.
"They used to read the English translation of the Quran with their feet up, mocking, for example saying, 'There are more questions in it than answers,' " he said.
Other times, Dergoul said, they "ripped up" Qurans. When some soldiers were rotating out of Cuba they would write obscenities in the Qurans.
And some allegations are contained in lawsuits, such as one filed against Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld by seven men held in Iraq and Afghanistan.
One of the plaintiffs is Arkan M. Ali, who was held by U.S. authorities in Iraq for nearly a year, part of that time at Abu Ghraib. Ali listed 11 incidents of torture and abuse. He said he was twice beaten unconscious during interrogations. He said his arm was stabbed and sliced, his forearm shocked and burned. He said he was locked for several days in a wooden coffin-like box, sometimes naked except for a hood over his head.
But it is his 11th and final allegation that in today's clamor over the Quran that stands out. Ali said U.S. soldiers repeatedly desecrated the Quran in front of him and other prisoners, "including having a military dog pick up the Quran in its mouth."
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-Quran22may22,0,3328867.story?coll=la-home-headlines
May 22, 2005
Muslim lives are desecrated, not just the Quran
Did it dawn on anyone that the Afghan people might be
angry over years of American occupation?
By Ramzy Baroud
……It is ironic that Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is in fact the one speaking the unexamined words of truth. He said that Army Gen. Carl Eichenberry, the senior US commander in Afghanistan, reported that the violence “was not at all tied to the article in the (Newsweek) magazine.”
So to what could it possibly be tied?
Did it dawn on anyone in the mainstream media that the Afghan people might possibly be angry over years of American occupation? Perhaps this failed to cross anyone’s mind.
Could it possibly be that hundreds of millions of Muslims might have had enough common sense to connect the dots and to establish that the desecration of the Quran is only the latest episode of a consistent US military policy that hasn’t only dishonored religious symbols but the sanctity of human life, in fact hundreds of thousands of human lives?
Could the hypothesis be true that Muslims, despite their alleged backwardness, had access to TV news, print media, and the Internet and might have accidentally run into hundreds of vile photos of physically humiliated and sexually abused Iraqi prisoners? Could it be possible that these savages learned of harrowing testimonies of former prisoners at Guantanamo detailing what numerous human rights groups unhesitatingly described as “war crimes”?
But why confine the argument to over-generalized, rhetorical questions? In its response to the scandal, Human Rights Watch issued a statement on May 19, 2005 confirming that, sadly, the Guantanamo episode is the norm. “In detention centers around the world, the United States has been humiliating Muslim prisoners by offending their religious beliefs,” according to Reed Brody, a HRW special counsel.
The defilement of religious symbols like the Qur’an is part of the unfailing US foreign and military policy that has utilized every creative, albeit inhumane option to further its colonial designs throughout the Muslim world for an array of economic and strategic gains.
Thus, if Muslim fury is to be examined appropriately and truthfully, the desecration of the Quran must be analyzed together with the violent death of “at least” 100,000 Iraqi civilians, the greater majority of them at the hands of the “coalition,” according to “the first comprehensive investigation of civilian deaths in Iraq, published in the Lancet” and cited recently by respected Australian journalist John Pilger. Separating both issues is downright irresponsible……
Ramzy Baroud is a veteran Arab-American journalist and the author of the upcoming volume entitled A Force to Be Reckoned With: Writings on Al-Aqsa Intifada.
http://www.islamonline.org/English/Views/2005/05/article04.SHTML
Pakistan Link – May 20, 2005
Americans respect other faiths
Most Americans support and respect other peoples’ faiths as is borne out by a letter written to Professor Akbar Ahmed (Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies, American University, Washington) by Rabbi Kenneth Cohen, Executive Director of the Hillel Foundation:
Dear Professor Ahmed,
I read about this outrageous desecration of the Qur’an at Guantanamo and am both revolted and ashamed that Americans behaved in such a fashion.
This is an affront to all of us. Not only does it show shocking disregard for the feelings of Muslims but is an intolerable act of disregard for the God of Abraham/Ibrahim. I regard this as a desecration of my own religion.
I would ask Muslims to understand and appreciate that most Americans are disgusted by this sort of brutish behavior and find it both deeply offensive and incompatible with American ideas of freedom and tolerance. I fully understand Muslim anger at this provocation.
I would implore Muslims to resolutely affirm in heart, mind and deed the highest values that we all share as children of Abraham/Ibrahim and not to express their justifiable anger in such a manner which would endanger innocent Americans and other westerners. God/Allah will judge those who are guilty. Our duty -- all of us -- is to protect the innocent.
I cherish the Qur’an which you gave to me a few years ago and keep it with my own Jewish sacred texts. I deplore the destruction of any book, much less one which is of central and sacred value.
Please circulate this message to members of the Muslim community with my blessing for peace.
|
