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MOSCOW (AP) - A Muslim cleric formerly held at Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba said Tuesday U.S. guards there regularly desecrated the Qur'an by putting it into a toilet, although he added he never witnessed it himself. Airat Vakhitov, who described himself as a former imam of a mosque in Tatarstan, a majority Muslim republic in southern Russia, is one of seven men released from Guantanamo in 2004 and returned to Russia. He and the six others were held in Russia for three months, then released a year ago. Vakhitov said at a news conference organized by the state RIA-Novosti...

Newsweek magazine and reporter-writers, Mark Isikoff and John Barry forgot the most important and one of the oldest clichés in the business, “You can’t unring a bell.” They also forgot one of the most memorable slogans in WW II, “Loose Lips Sink Ships.” As a result, over 15 people are dead in Afghanistan and many hurt. Riots continue in Muslim countries. All this is due to that fact that Newsweek reported that U.S. investigators found evidence that interrogators had flushed a copy of Muslim's holy book down a toilet in an attempt to rattle detainees. Just the thought that it...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Guantanamo detainee who told an FBI agent in 2002 that U.S. personnel there had flushed a Koran in a toilet retracted his allegation when questioned this month by military investigators, the Pentagon said on Thursday. "We've gone back to the detainee who allegedly made the allegation and he has said it didn't happen. So the underlying allegation, the detainee himself, within the last two weeks, said that didn't happen," chief Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita told a briefing. An FBI document, dated Aug. 1, 2002, contained a summary of statements made by the detainee in two...

Last week, you probably heard all about Newsweek’s inadvertent little faux pas regarding Gitmo, the Noble Qur’an, and a popular porcelain fixture. The story wasn’t true, although the lib/dem/soc/commie media are playing the “let’s pretend it really is true anyway” game. Oddly enough, they didn’t learn their lesson from the last time they tried that (see also: CBS, 60 Minutes, document forgery, etc.) so they trotted it out for another go. Folks are lamenting the 15 to 18 people who apparently died in the ensuing riots. Nobody knows the names of these people so far, or exactly where and how...

First it was the Los Angeles Times who published the “Koran flushing story”, after the Newsweek story had been discredited. In an apparent attempt to help Newsweek find some of its lost credibility (and to take their own swipes at the US Military), now the rest of our leftist mainstream press has decided to print additional “Koran mishandling” stories. Hey! If a story is fake continue to print it, or other similar ones, so that maybe some of the uneducated will begin to believe them. Relying on a 2002 FBI report, notably one which merely referred to “allegations from detainees”,...

Prisoner Abuse: Self-flagellation over alleged human rights violations is not a foreign policy, but a recipe for long-term disaster. Some who now complain about Guantanamo had a key hand in making it necessary. Newsweek's retraction of its story on the alleged flushing of pages from the Quran down a Guantanamo commode has not dissuaded critics convinced that Guantanamo is, as Amnesty International put it, a modern-day "gulag." One of those who believe the human rights of prisoners at Guantanamo are being violated is former President Carter. Speaking in September 2003, two short years after 9-11, he opined as to how...