perfidy

In today's Washington Post, this story: "FBI Reports Duct-Taping, 'Baptizing' at Guantanamo"

Duct-taping a guy's head? That's kind of harsh.

In another incident that month, interrogators wrapped a bearded prisoner's head in duct tape "because he would not stop quoting the Koran," according to an FBI agent, the documents show. The agent, whose account was corroborated by a colleague, said that a civilian contractor laughed about the treatment and was eager to show it off.

The "civilian contractor" sounds like an asshole, and a mildly sadistic one, to boot. I'd bet it hurt like a bitch when the tape was taken off. At least they didn't cut his head off with a dull hacksaw. But if he wouldn't stop quoting the Koran (which I'm sure got quite old & tiresome for the interrogators to hear), why didn't they just spray alum in his mouth? That's seemed to work in the Looney Toons episodes I've seen where it's been used.

The parts of the story that make me scratch my head, however, are those where the circumstances are more comical.

FBI agents witnessed possible mistreatment of the Koran at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, including at least one instance in which an interrogator squatted over Islam's holy text in an apparent attempt to offend a captive, according to bureau documents released yesterday.

In October 2002, a Marine captain allegedly squatted over a copy of the Koran during intensive questioning of a Muslim prisoner, who was "incensed" by the tactic, according to an FBI agent. A second agent described similar events, but it is unclear from the documents whether it was a separate case.

Sounds to me like the Marine captain can claim his mission accomplished, and good for him. At least he didn't cut his subject's head off with a dull hacksaw.

The "baptism" sounds like comedy gold to me.

In a previously unreported allegation, one interrogator bragged to an FBI agent that he had forced a prisoner to listen to "Satanic black metal music for hours," then dressed as a Catholic priest before "baptizing" him.

The "Satanic black metal music", like the duct tape, seems a bit much, and bragging about it is bush-league, but putting your collar on backwards and spraying a guy with water that, by that guy's belief system, is just water, while telling him he's been put through a ritual he clearly believes has no meaning, and having this amount to some sort of an outrage is cartoonish. At least they didn't baptize him with pig's blood. Or cut his head off with a dull hacksaw.

This story is a continuation of an older theme, of course:

The reports amount to new and separate allegations of religiously oriented tactics used against Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. After an erroneous report of Koran abuse prompted deadly protests overseas in 2005, the U.S. military conducted an investigation that confirmed five incidents of intentional and unintentional mishandling the book at the detention facility. They acknowledged that soldiers and interrogators had kicked the Koran, had stood on it and, in one case, had inadvertently sprayed urine on a copy.

Poor bunnies! These incidents, along with those in earlier reports of "sexually suggestive" interrogation techniques, help me to better understand some of the concern about more physically coercive methods of questioning that have been used.

If all it takes to get these detainees to go off the rails is to fake dropping a deuce on their "holy book", or to violate the "three foot rule" one might find in a low-grade Atlanta gentlemen's club, then of course one could question physical coercion - who needs such extreme tactics in the face of detainees with severe critical thinking deficits and unresolved "mommie issues"?

The fact that such things, particularly the absurd veneration of copies of the Koran, (copies, mind you - I'd cut them some slack for their outrage if someone took a leak on the original) can so easily trigger "deadly protests" is by itself an indication of a belief system that's seriously askew. For clarification, I'd point the interested reader to a scholarly essay from September 2001, "God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule".

I question, pretty aggressively, the perceived need to apologize for, or to even explain, any of the reported incidents. And, on the bright side, I remind myself again that in each case, at least nobody got his head cut off with a dull hacksaw.