<a href="http://www.plastic.com/article.html;sid=05/05/16/06402510;cmt=92" source="Plastic" title="Everyone Check Your Sources - Inaccurate Newsweek Article Sparks Violent Protests">Everyone Check Your Sources</a> shows that you just can't believe <i>anything</i> these days, even when it justifies your worldview perfectly --- perhaps especially then. Newsweek exposed US Army practices at Guantanamo, claiming that they were using psychological means of breaking the Muslim suspects by <iq>flush[ing] a holy book [the Quran] down the toilet.</iq> The article supposedly sparked protests <iq>throughout much of the Muslim world</iq> (wherever that is) which killed 16 people and included threats of <iq>a jihad against America</iq>. Newsweek later retracted the story, citing miscommunication with its source. The Pentagon, naturally, jumped on its high horse to comment that <iq>People are dead because of what this [anonymous Newsweek source] son of a bitch said.</iq> It's hard to imagine the Pentagon making a similar statement about President Bush and his WMD fairy tale. <a href="http://www.juancole.com/2005/05/guantanamo-controversies-bible-and.html" source="Informed Comment" author="Juan Cole">Guantanamo Controversies: the Bible and the Koran</a> quotes Newsweek's actual retraction, showing that they actually said that their <iq>source ... stands by his report of the incident, but is merely tracing it to other paperwork.</iq> That doesn't sound like a retraction at all --- merely an errata having credited the wrong report (<iq>the Southcom report</iq>) with providing the data. Corroboration of religion-targeted practices (read: torture) are well-documented by Amnesty International, the Christian Science Monitor and much of the foreign press. Cooler heads than those that throw jihads right and left (the selfsame people that murder people at anti-America riots, no doubt), note that: <bq>This is not an isolated act carried out by an American soldier but is part of an American program...of contempt for Islam, to disfigure its image in the minds of American.' (sic) Shaikh Muhammad Sayyid al-Tantawi, the rector of al-Azhar seminary and the chief Sunni authority in Egypt, called the desecration of the Koran 'a great crime.' But he dismissed it as the work of 'a bunch of kids, criminals ...'</bq> Cole's fascinating coverage continues with a first-person account from a former US officer detailing the <iq>SERE school---Search, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape ... course [he] attended . . . [which had] a mock POW camp</iq>. At the camp, officers leading the experiment trashed the Bible in front of the God-fearing soldiers as psychological torture. Gitmo is seen as a perfect training ground for further experiments, even more advanced ones, performed on subjects who basically don't exist anyway. <bq>Looking at Gitmo in the 'big picture', you have to wonder why it is still in operation though they know so many are innocent of major charges. A look through history at the various 'experimentation' programs of the DOD gives a ready answer. The camp provides a major opportunity to expose a population to various psychological control techniques.</bq> The discussion on Plastic was thought-provoking in its own right, if only to show who thinks they're in the liberal club these days. First up, there's <a href="http://www.plastic.com/comments.html;sid=05/05/16/06402510;cid=34" source="Plastic">the reader</a> who claims to be <iq>as eager as the next liberal to blame everything on Bush</iq>, but who goes on to say that <iq>[t]he idea that islamic radicals would start killing people over a random unconfirmed news report doesn't surprise me in the slightest bit and doesn't seem like anything new or unusual to me.</iq> That comment was rating 2.5/5 Astute. Boom, baby! <a href="http://www.plastic.com/comments.html;sid=05/05/16/06402510;cid=6" source="Plastic">Another reader</a> described the Muslim world as a <iq>culture that is bent towards declaring "jihad" at the drop of a hat.</iq> That one was rated 4/5 Astute. Booyah! Despite an espoused deeply-entrenched hatred of Bush, they've still managed to walk away from a lifetime ensconced in US propaganda with a massively limited worldview. They're right when they go on to say that the murders are to be blamed on the murderers. The riot, however, can firmly be blamed on the lack of deniability the Bush administration has steadily built up. In fact, what the hell, Bush isn't exactly the first US president to condone torturing foreigners on his watch --- only perhaps the most blatant about it. To followers of US history (or any empire's history), this is not new. This is just different details fillout out the same basic plot. On to more reader comments! Another fool described the differences between "us" and "them" as <bq>Here in the US we call people who think the cleanliness of copies of books about religion are more important than human lives either "murderers" or "mentally ill", and either way we lock them up to protect the public...</bq> To which a reader named Tenebreux offered this <a href="http://www.plastic.com/comments.html;sid=05/05/16/06402510;cid=70" source="Plastic">exquisite riposte</a>*: <bq>No you don't. You vote them into office, let them rail against anything they don't like as being "Unamerican" and "against what the founding fathers would have wanted" on TV and radio. <b>If Osama posted a video of him ripping out pages of the bible and making joints out of them</b>, the average American wouldn't be sighing and saying "Those Crazy Arabs. Haha. Good thing we had the enlightenment and all, otherwise our backwardassed devotion to religion would make us as crazy as them. And please.. who can smuggle weed into Saudi Arabia? Thats just oregano", Hell no, you'd be jumping up and down, freaking the fuck out like you invented Christianity. (emphasis added for the awesome mental image)</bq> <n>*I call it exquisite because it's pretty much what I was going to write until I found that someone had already written it and, just as an aside, has anyone ever gotten into a forum conversation when it was still going on? They always seem to be over by the time I get to them</n> <a href="http://www.plastic.com/comments.html;sid=05/05/16/06402510;cid=9" source="Plastic">BatGuano</a> also has trouble knowing what to believe, firmly believing that <iq>our boys and girls have too much respect for other people's religion</iq> (with tongue firmly planted in cheek). <a href="http://www.plastic.com/comments.html;sid=05/05/16/06402510;cid=79" source="Plastic">Another reader</a> avoids the sarcastic route and shrieks: <bq>What kind of insane cognitive dissonance does one have to engage in to believe that our troops would never ever desecrate the Koran after seeing pictures of torture specifically targetted at the cultural pecadilloes of the Muslims? WTF is wrong with you people?</bq> The United States has earned all of the bad press it gets. Period. Even if some of it turns out to be false, the US deserves it because denial comes down to a form of lawyering anyway ... "No way did we ever flush Korans down the toilet ... never ... what was that? Oh yeah, maybe we did smear fake menstrual blood on some prisoners and then refuse to let them bathe, or dragged them around by leashes, or set dogs loose on them, or made naked pyramids out of them after they were forced to sodomize each other six ways to Sunday. But the whole thing about the Koran? Completely overblown. Completely. ... Trust us."