Breaking News - Quran abused

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Sunday, June 12, 2005

Big news: Quran abused - by terrorists

By Peter Bronson

Enquirer staff writer

Associated Press

A Muslim man walks past an anti-U.S. banner tied on a mosque in Bombay, India, in a type of protest that has become common lately in much of the Muslim world.

Former Gitmo guard Richard Riestenberg was driving a flatbed truck somewhere across Wisconsin when I tracked him down to ask about the Quran-touching scandal that has been all over the news.

"Personally, I think it's a bunch of horse . . . "

Well, let's just say he was not describing the load he was hauling.

"I think it's the media blowing up something totally irrelevant. Did we take them away sometimes? Yeah. Did we look through them? Yeah. It's a good place to hide something. If it comes down to me or my partner, or looking through your book, I'm gonna look through your book. But was anyone throwing it in the toilet? No. Was anyone blatantly disrespecting it? No."

Sgt. Riestenberg of the Army Reserves spent a year at Guantanamo, baby-sitting terrorists and Talibaners. "The U.S. troops' hands are just tied," he told me when he came home to Harrison, Ohio, in 2002. "The detainees pretty much ran the place."

He described prisoners who threw urine and feces on guards, while the military twisted itself into double knots of cultural sensitivity, such as arrows painted on cell floors to show the direction for prayers to Mecca.

The official investigation found the same story.

"A detainee refused recreation time and his cell was searched. A rock hidden in a canteen and a nail hidden in a bucket were found during the search. The detainee was returned to his cell after the search and he fell on the ground. He claimed that the guards hit him in the groin, threw him on the ground and then kicked his Quran."

Another detainee complained that an obscenity had been written in his Quran. "It is possible that a guard committed this act," the report said. "It is equally possible that the detainee wrote in his own Quran; however, we consider this a confirmed incident."

And that's about the best the press and the loony America-haters at Amnesty International could find. A holy book was touched. Stepped on. Desecrated. Some were thrown in toilets - by not by guards. Detainees did that. In several cases, inmates ripped and urinated on Qurans or tried to flush them, which is not so surprising when their al-Qaida "brothers" are blowing up mosques and desecrating real Muslims to death.

In an al-Qaida training manual captured last year, there are chilling instructions for assassinations, spying, hiding weapons and attacks "to make their women widows and their children orphans."

Some is almost comical. Al-Qaida "brothers" should "not talk with their wives about Jihad work." That might interfere with "overthrow of the godless regimes and their replacement with an Islamic regime."

But there's nothing funny about "guidelines for beating and killing hostages."

And here's what the manual tells terrorists who get captured and detained somewhere - say, Gitmo: "brothers must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them," and, "complain about mistreatment in prison."

Riestenberg says, "They are following it to a T. Call me crazy, but it seems to me to be evidence that they are probably al-Qaida. If they follow the manual, they've probably read it."

He can't understand why the American press is so eager to believe terrorists and amplify their accusations, rather than trust our military. I can't either.

And he makes the kind of meat-and-potatoes, truck-stop sense that's never on the menu in the elite media bistros.

"My personal opinion is it's a book. If you burn my Bible, or throw it on the floor and kick it, it's just a book, made by man.

"Get over it."

E-mail pbronson@enquirer.com or call(513) 768-8301.

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