I'm not buying the Pentagon's spin on this Koran thing. From Beliefnet news

Speaking at a Pentagon news briefing, Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, commander of the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, said allegations of persistent defilement and desecration of the Qur'an were found to be mostly incidents of accidental contact with the Qur'an by interrogators and guards.

The investigation identified 13 "incidents of alleged mishandling of the Qur'an by Joint Task Force personnel," Hood said.

Of those, only five "could be broadly defined as mishandling of a Qur'an," Hood said. Six additional episodes were "accidental incidents involving guards, that the guard either accidentally touched a Qur'an, touched it within the scope of his duties or did not actually touch the Qur'an at all," he said.

So, evidently the Pentagon and the soldiers in Guantanamo knew that this was going to be an issue in advance. Why else would they have come up with all these categories of Qur'an interaction? Why would anyone bother to count each time a guard touched the Qur'an, and then bother to distinguish that from 'touching within the scope of duties' or 'mishandling'.

The six incidents involving 'accidental touching' are considered resolved. By the Pentagon. Hmm.

I'm not buying that all of these incidents of reported abuses are fabrications. It's too many sources in too many places. And I'm not buying that it's just the actions of individual soldiers, either. There is a climate that exists in the military that fosters this kind of attitude toward prisoners and their possessions, and it goes right up to the very top leadership, with Alberto Gonzalez and his torture memo, and Bush and his equivocations about who the Geneva Convention needs to apply to. It sets a tone, and it sets the wrong one.

The Geneva Convention needs to be applied to any prisoner of the United States, whether they "deserve" it or not. After all, we're supposedly more moral than these terrorists. Shouldn't we be the ones that are a bit reluctant to beat someone into a bloody pulp?

Amnesty International recently released a report comparing US practices to 'gulags' and saying that our permissive attitude is leading to human rights abuses in other countries like Haiti. I don't know that I buy that, but this issue is not one where we can afford the normal maneuvering and 'he started it, no she started it' type finger-pointing and blame shoving. This is something that we need to seriously address right now, or lose whatever claim we might have had to the 'moral authority' necessary to impose democracy on Iraq and (by extension) the world.

So, what do we need to do?

First we need to end the practice of indefinite imprisonment. This violates US principles and the fact that it's likely that nothing will ever come up before a judge or public scrutiny leads to abuse. Perhaps we're not Constitutionally required to extend some form of 'due process' to these men, but if we really believe in this stuff as ideals, we should be more than willing to spread our ideals all over the world, which is what Bush is ostensibly trying to do anyway.