Washington – Newly released documents show that detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, complained repeatedly to FBI agents about disrespectful handling of the Koran by soldiers and, in one case in 2002, said that guards had flushed a Koran down a toilet.
The prisoners’ accounts are described by the agents in detailed summaries of interrogations at Guantanamo in 2002 and 2003. The documents were among more than 300 pages turned over by the FBI to the American Civil Liberties Union in recent days and publicly disclosed on Wednesday.
Unlike FBI documents previously disclosed in a lawsuit brought by the ACLU, in which agents reported that they had witnessed harsh and possibly illegal interrogation techniques, the new documents do not say that the FBI agents witnessed the episodes themselves. Rather, they are accounts of unsubstantiated allegations made by the prisoners under interrogation.
On Wednesday, the Pentagon dismissed the reports as containing no new evidence that abuses of the Koran had actually occurred, and said that on May 14 military investigators had interviewed the prisoner who mentioned the toilet episode to the FBI and that he was not able to substantiate the charge.
The allegation that soldiers had put a Koran in a toilet, which has been made by former and current inmates over the past two years, stirred violence early this month that killed at least 17 people in Muslim countries after Newsweek magazine reported that a military investigation was expected to confirm that it had, in fact, occurred.
None of the documents released Wednesday indicate any such confirmation.
One of the documents released Wednesday is an Aug. 1, 2002, memo from an agent whose name is deleted that recounts a pair of interviews the previous month with a prisoner whose name is also deleted.
The agent writes that the prisoner said that “the guards in 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 document does not provide any information as to whether the agent believed the account.
The documents also provide several other accounts of complaints by detainees about disrespectful handling of the Koran, but none of the others describe a book being flushed in a toilet.
Bryan Whitman, the deputy Pentagon spokesman, said Wednesday night that the newly released document, a summary of an interrogation, “does not include any new allegations, nor does it include any new sources for previous allegations.”
Whitman said that the source of the accusation “is an enemy combatant.”
Since the Newsweek article was published, the Pentagon has been reviewing records, but “we still have found no credible allegations that a Koran was flushed down a toilet at Guantanamo,” Whitman said.
Until the new batch of documents was released Wednesday, no previously released FBI documents were known to have mentioned abuse of the Koran of the kind Newsweek reported.
The disclosures Wednesday did not lend any new support to the specific assertions in the original Newsweek item about military investigators having concluded that a Koran was flushed down a toilet.
They do, however, reinforce the contentions of several people, including human-rights advocates and lawyers for detainees, that allegations of purposeful mishandling of the Koran were common.
One former interrogator told The Times in a recent interview that friction over handling of the Koran began with regular searches of cells conducted by guards.
“Some of it was just ignorance,” the former interrogator said, insisting on anonymity because soldiers are prohibited from discussing camp operations. “They didn’t realize you shouldn’t handle the book roughly.”