Detainees repeatedly said Quran was abused

WASHINGTON -- Newly released documents show that detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, complained repeatedly to FBI agents about disrespectful handling of the Quran by soldiers and, in one case in 2002, said that guards had flushed a Quran down a toilet.

The prisoners' accounts are described by the agents in detailed summaries of interrogations at Guantanamo in 2002 and 2003. The documents were among more than 300 pages turned over by the FBI to the American Civil Liberties Union in recent days and publicly disclosed on Wednesday.

Unlike FBI documents previously disclosed in a lawsuit brought by the civil liberties union, in which agents reported that they had witnessed harsh and possibly illegal interrogation techniques, the new documents do not say that the FBI agents witnessed the episodes themselves. Rather, they are accounts of unsubstantiated allegations made by the prisoners under interrogation.

Wednesday, the Pentagon dismissed the reports as containing no new evidence that abuses of the Quran had actually occurred, and said that on May 14 military investigators had interviewed the prisoner who mentioned the toilet episode to the FBI, and that he was not able to substantiate the charge.

The allegation that soldiers had put a Quran in a toilet, which has been made by former and current inmates over the past two years, stirred violence early this month that killed at least 17 people in Muslim countries after Newsweek magazine reported that a military investigation was expected to confirm that it had, in fact, occurred.

No document released Wednesday indicates any such confirmation.

One of the documents released on Wednesday is an Aug. 1, 2002, memo from an agent whose name is deleted that recounts a pair of interviews the previous month with a prisoner whose name is also deleted. The agent writes that the prisoner said that "the guards in the detention facility do not treat him well. Their behavior is bad. About five months ago, the guards beat the detainees. They flushed a Quran in the toilet. The guards dance around when the detainees are trying to pray. The guards still do these things." The document does not provide any information as to whether the agent believed the account.

The documents also provide several other accounts of complaints by detainees about disrespectful handling of the Quran, but none of the others describe a book being flushed in a toilet.

Bryan Whitman, the deputy Pentagon spokesman, said Wednesday night that the newly released document, a summary of an interrogation, "does not include any new allegations, nor does it include any new sources for previous allegations." Whitman said that the source of the accusation "is an enemy combatant."

Since the Newsweek article was published, the Pentagon has been reviewing records, but "we still have found no credible allegations that a Quran was flushed down a toilet at Guantanamo," Whitman said.

Until the new batch of documents was released Wednesday, no previously released FBI documents were known to have mentioned abuse of the Quran of the kind Newsweek reported.

Earlier complaints came in statements of inmates after they were released from custody or, more recently, in statements of current inmates to their lawyers.

Another memo released Wednesday dated March 18, 2003, is an account by an agent whose name is deleted who writes that another detainee told him of purposely disrespectful handling of the Quran. The detainee acknowledged, according to the memo, that he did not witness any of the incidents he had recounted to the agent.

The agent tells his superiors in the memo that the detainee asserted that the use of the Quran as a tool in interrogation was a mistake. "Interrogators who had taken the Quran from individual detainees as a reprisal or incentive to cooperate had failed," the detainee said, adding that the only result would be "the damage caused to the reputation of the United States once what had occurred was released to the world."

Jameel Jaffer, a senior lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union who is coordinating the review of documents obtained in the group's civil suit against the military, said that the documents were part of more than three hundred new pages received last Thursday evening from the FBI. He said staff members spent the ensuing days reviewing the new documents.

Ken Weine, a spokesman for Newsweek, said the magazine would have no comment on the new disclosures.

The disclosures Wednesday did not lend any new support to the specific assertions in the original Newsweek item about military investigators having concluded that a Quran was flushed down a toilet. They do, however, reinforce the contentions of several people, including human rights advocates and lawyers for detainees that allegations of purposeful mishandling of the Quran were common.

One former interrogator told The Times in a recent interview that friction over handling of the Quran began with regular searches of cells conducted by guards. "Some of it was just ignorance," the former interrogator said, insisting on anonymity because soldiers are prohibited from discussing camp operations. "They didn't realize you shouldn't handle the book roughly."

Although complaints about the handling of the Quran were routine, the former interrogator said, the situation eventually escalated. "It was two things that brought the desecration issue to a higher level," the former interrogator said. "The rumor spread that a Quran had been flushed down a toilet and that some interrogators brought Qurans to the interrogation sessions and stood on them, kicked them around." The former interrogator had never witnessed either of those occurrences.

Erik Saar, co-author of "Inside the Wire" (Penguin Press, 2005) who was an Arabic language translator in 2003 in Guantanamo said in a recent interview that "the detainees actually liked to complain about how the Quran was handled because they viewed it as a cause to rally around" and one that would get the attention of the camp's authorities.

Jaffer of the civil liberties union said that the errors in the Newsweek report were improperly used to discredit other information about abusive practices at Guantanamo "that were not based on anonymous sources, but government documents, reports written by FBI agents."

The new documents and 30,000 pages previously released were disclosed as part of a lawsuit brought by the ACLU and other groups attempting to learn whether and what kinds of coercive tactics were used at Guantanamo.

The earlier release of reports in which bureau agents recounted witnessing harsh interrogations resulted in an investigation by an Air Force general of interrogation practices. The report, which was completed at the end of March, has not yet been released by the Pentagon.

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