Detainees interviewed by FBI agents at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba complained repeatedly that military guards and interrogators mistreated the Koran, with one alleging that the Muslim holy book had been flushed in a toilet, documents made public Wednesday show.
The documents -- FBI summaries of interviews with detainees at the military-run prison in 2002 and 2003 -- show that the treatment of the Koran was a key point of contention between detainees and their guards, one that prompted hunger strikes and threats of mass suicide.
PATTERN OF ABUSE?
Most complaints dealt with the handling of the Koran by guards or its being taken away from detainees as a form of punishment. In some cases, the detainees admitted to not having witnessed the alleged mistreatment themselves.
But detainees also alleged that the Koran had been thrown or kicked by guards, and one said it had been flushed in a toilet, according to the documents.
In a summary dated Aug. 1, 2002, a detainee told his FBI interviewer that he personally had nothing against the US but that the guards at the detention facility "do not treat him well."
"Their behavior is bad. About five months ago, the guards beat the detainees. They flushed a Koran in the toilet. The guards dance around when the detainees are trying to pray. The guards still do these things," the summary said.
Lawrence DiRita, the Pentagon spokesman, said investigators conducting a "commanders inquiry" into a Newsweek report of a Koran being flushed down a toilet recently found a log entry from August 2002 that recorded a similar allegation by the same detainee.
Brigadier General Jay Hood, the military commander in Guantanamo, questioned the detainee who had made the allegation on around May 14, he said.
"Apparently the inmate was very cooperative and would not reassert this particular allegation," DiRita told reporters.
He said other allegations of mistreatment of the Koran were looked into at the time by the commander of the guards, but he insisted "they just weren't credible on their face" because they ran counter to the policies in place at the prison.
Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander in Guantanamo at the time, said there was a small group of hardcore detainees who knew that allegations of the Koran being mistreated would agitate other detainees, DiRita said.
"They were very aware that this was a sensitive issue, and the practice was to be sensitive about it," he said.
LITANY OF ALLEGATIONS
The latest FBI documents were released in response to a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, which posted them on its Web site. The names and other information were blacked out by censors.
The interview summaries contain a litany of other allegations by detainees -- that they were beaten by guards, sexually molested by female interrogators, shown pornographic images or had their heads and beards shaved as punishment.
The theme that the detainees' religion or culture was under assault by guards runs through many of the summaries.
In an FBI interview on March 6 last year, a detainee charged that military police "have been mistreating the detainees by pushing them around and throwing their waste bucket to them in the cell, sometimes with waste still in the bucket, and kicking the Koran."
Another on July 30, 2002 said an uprising at the prison earlier that month started when a detainee claimed a guard had dropped a Koran.
"In actuality, the detainee dropped the Koran and then blamed the guard. Many other detainees reacted to this claim, and this initiated the uprising," the summary said.
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