[1] The Newsweek article, parts of which were subsequently retracted, alleged that government sources had confirmed that United States personnel at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp had deliberately damaged a copy of the book by flushing it in a toilet in order to torment the prison's Muslim captives.
In 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union, suing under the Freedom of Information Act, secured the release of a 2002 FBI report containing a detainee's accusation of ill-treatment, including throwing a Quran into a toilet.
[2][3] This specific accusation had been made on several occasions by other Guantanamo detainees since 2002; Newsweek's initial account of a government report confirming it sparked protests throughout the Islamic world and riots in Afghanistan, where pre-planned demonstrations turned deadly.
Among the previously unreported cases that sources reportedly told Newsweek: interrogators, in an attempt to rattle suspects, flushed a Quran down a toilet and led a detainee around with a collar and dog leash.
But we regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst.The New York Times quoted Isikoff as saying: Neither Newsweek nor the Pentagon foresaw that a reference to the desecration of the Quran was going to create the kind of response that it did.
The United Nations, as a precautionary measure, withdrew all its foreign staff from Jalalabad, where two of its guest houses were attacked, government buildings and shops were targeted, and the offices of two international aid groups were destroyed.
The New York Times reported that U.S. flags were burned at some demonstrations, and that, although most of the protests were peaceful, overt calls for an "Islamic revolution" were loudly supported by the crowds in Pakistan, further complicating a difficult political situation for General Musharraf.
A Red Cross spokesperson Simon Schorno confirmed that U.S. personnel at Camp X-Ray[citation needed] had displayed "disrespect" to the Quran, and that U.S. officials knew of this activity.
"[21] On June 3, 2005, a U.S. military investigation by the base commander, Brigadier General Jay Hood, reported four (possibly five) incidents of "mishandling" of the Quran by U.S. personnel at Guantánamo Bay.
"[27] CBC News reported: The U.S. Pentagon confirmed Friday a list of abuses involving the Qur'an, Islam's holy book, by American personnel at Guantanamo Bay, but said the incidents were relatively minor.
After a verdict by a federal court on May 25, 2005, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) obtained documents from the FBI interrogations of Guantánamo Bay detainees dating back to August 2002.
[35] The ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said, in a news release, that "The United States government continues to turn a blind eye to mounting evidence of widespread abuse of detainees held in its custody."
For its part, the Pentagon, through its spokesman Lawrence Di Rita, appeared to have transitioned from flat denials to vagueness and unsettled syntax: "There have been instances, and we'll have more to say about it as we learn more, but where a Quran may have fallen to the floor in the course of searching a cell."
James Jaffer, an attorney working for the ACLU, was quoted by the New York Times as stating that errors in the Newsweek story had been used to discredit other investigative efforts conducted by his organization and other groups "that were not based on anonymous sources, but [on] government documents, reports written by FBI agents."
In July 2005, an article in The New Yorker magazine suggested that the SERE program involved a number of techniques which paralleled those allegedly used at Guantánamo Bay, including the desecration of religious texts.
However, General James T. Hill, chief of the U.S. Southern Command, confirmed that a team from Guantanamo went "up to our SERE school and developed a list of techniques" for "high-profile, high-value" detainees.
According to an op-ed in the November 14, 2005 The New York Times by M. Gregg Bloche and Jonathan H. Marks, two lawyers with no first-hand knowledge of SERE, "General Hill had sent this list – which included prolonged isolation and sleep deprivation, stress positions, physical assault and the exploitation of detainees' phobias – to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who approved most of the tactics in December 2002.