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Originally Posted by jaguar
Is there actually any evidence this happened or is this just some crazy rumour that got out of hand? Would've thought flushing a book would be difficult.
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From the article it appears that everyone is assuming it did happen. Whether they tore it apart, just put it in the bowl, etc, is beside the point.
Technically, it is not physical torture. It is incitement. If someone went to downtown Little Rock, threw a bible on the street, unzipped and peed on it, it would probably start a riot.
Whoever is doing the interrogations is crossing a very dangerous line when they go beyond personal abuse to denigrating a prisoners beliefs. Word of that kind of stuff gets out and makes us look bad.
In the movies, it is always the bad guy who is trashing the prisoners religion. When stuff like this is done in real life, the perpetrator looks bad in the eyes of the people in the middle, the swing voters. These are the people who will ultimately win the war one way or another. It's not the diehard insurgents or the rabidly pro-Coalition supporters who will make the difference.
The middle swinging is why the civil rights movement took hold in the South. It's why in less than a decade, segregation went from tradition to bad idea. A lot of this happened when one side overreached. People watched the beatings and bombings, and the people in the middle made up their minds. It's why the Klan are viewed as a hate group and not patriots.
The middle in Iraq and Afghanistan is still soft. The recent elections have resulted in more help being given to the coalition. They were just coming to believe that a coalition-supported democracy could take shape which would also respect their culture.
And then these assholes have to grandstand.
In programming we have a saying, that one 'aw shit' equals 100 'attaboys'. How many small acts of kindness by individual soldiers, how much goodwill built by civil affairs officers has been wiped out by one moron?
We have been trying to keep this war from being viewed as an attack on Islam ever since Bush used the word 'crusade'. Having a soldier deliberately trash a copy of the Koran is not helping.