What Quran abuse?

American jailers at the Guantanamo prison for foreign terrorism suspects splashed a Koran with urine, kicked and stepped on the Islamic holy book and soaked it with water, the U.S. military said on Friday.

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In the incident involving urine, which took place this past March, Southern Command said a guard left his post and urinated near an air vent and "the wind blew his urine through the vent" and into a cell block.

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In the fifth "confirmed incident" of mishandling a Koran, Southern Command said a prisoner in August 2003 complained that "a two-word obscenity" had been written in English in his Koran. Southern Command said it was "possible" a guard had written the words but "equally possible" the prisoner himself had done it.
  Yahoo.com article

WIIIAI comments:

The Pentagon, which has been allowed to get away with not specifying just how Korans were defiled in Guantanamo, releases — gee, is it Friday already? — details of one of the incidents, in which a guard accidentally urinated on a Koran when he was trying to urinate on a prisoner. So that’s ok then. (Actually, he claims the whole thing was an accident, he just happened to pee near an air vent.)

In case you don't get the Friday reference, it is that the administration always waits until Friday to release any bad news because the weekends are notoriously news-free zones for most Americans.

Billmon comments:

This is obviously speculative, not to mention highly paranoid, but the Pentagon's decision to take the limited hangout road (to borrow a Deep Throat-era term) also reinforces my suspicion that the original leak to Newsweek might have been an attempt at information warfare -- what the old KGB used to call dezinformatsiya -- designed to discredit the Quran abuse stories before they reached critical mass in the media.

Certainly, the fact that the original leak was run past the powers that be in the Pentagon, who remained conveniently silent about the story's alleged inaccuracy, suggests somebody up high saw a chance to turn the tables -- both on the tough questions being asked about the gulags, and (as a fringe benefit) on the hated liberal media.

That doesn't relieve Newsweek and Michael Isikoff of their responsibility for blowing the story, but it does highlight the fact that the media are dealing with more than the customary level of official mendacity these days. I doubt few "mainstream" journalists are prepared to consider -- much less cope with -- the possibility that the U.S. government is waging information warfare against them (and, by extension, against the American people), even though Rummy and company long ago all but declared their intention of doing just that.

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Information warfare? Or simply an opportunistic bid by the Mayberry Machiavellis to capitalize on Newsweek's mistake? I'm quite certain we'll never know the answer to that, just as I'm sure we'll never really know how exactly much damage has been done to U.S. national security -- real security, not imperial ambition -- by the administration's brutal blunders in the war against Al Qaeda.