As temperatures rise regarding the Newsweek story in which the magazine quoted an anonymous source describing the desecration of a copy of the Koran, the Bush administration appear divided over both the impact that the brief item had on riots in Afghanistan and Pakistan and on the US image in the Muslim world, and on whether the allegation has, as the White House says, been discredited.

It’s not unusual for officials of an administration to be at odds with one another over particular policies or events, although the current Bush administration maintain better message discipline than most.

In this instance, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita and White House press secretary Scott McClellan are contradicting the US commander in Afghanistan, a spokesman for the Army’s Southern Command, and each other.

In a May 12 Department of Defense briefing, several days after rioting had broken out in Afghanistan and spread to Pakistan, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Richard Meyers said that General Karl Eikenberry believed the rioting was unrelated to the Newsweek article.

It’s the — it’s the judgment of our commander in Afghanistan, General Eikenberry, that in fact the violence that we saw in Jalalabad was not necessarily the result of the allegations about disrespect for the Koran — and I’ll get to that in just a minute — but more tied up in the political process and the reconciliation process that President Karzai and his Cabinet is conducting in Afghanistan. So that’s — that was his judgment today in an after- action of that violence. He didn’t — he thought it was not at all tied to the article in the magazine.

Eikenberry’s judgement has since been discarded as both the Pentagon and the White House explicitly blame the rioting on the Newsweek item. DiRita is quoted by Newsweek as saying, when the magazine informed him that their source still stood behind his allegation but was no longer certain where he had seen it, “People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said. How could he be credible now?”

Two days prior to the Meyers briefing, on May 10, DiRita responded to a question about the Newsweek item by saying that an investigation into the allegations was underway and would probably be completed in several weeks. But six days later, press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters that he knew of no incidents where US personnel put Korans in toilets, and that “the Department of Defense said last week that they could find no credible evidence of it either. They have looked into it.”

The implication in McClellan’s statement is that sometime between May 10, when DiRita said that because of the number of agencies involved in investigating allegations of abuse at Guantanamo, “I think we’re probably several weeks away from being able to say that the commander has made his final assessments there,” and May 16, when McClellan made his remark, the Pentagon and Justice Department had concluded and reviewed their several investigations and were certain that the allegations were false.

But yet another spokesman, US Southern Command’s Lt. Col. Jim Marshall, told USA Today on May 16, the same day McClellan made his categorical statement, that “the military did not start looking at allegations of Koran desecration until last week after the Newsweek article was published” and he didn’t know how long the investigation would take.

Taken in sum, the various government and military statements offer wildly contradictory images of what the government and military know, or think they know, about the accuracy of the Newsweek allegation. One thing upon which everyone now seems agreed, including Newsweek but with the possible exception of General Eikenberry (who hasn’t been heard from in some time), is that the allegation helped trigger the rioting in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Regardless the provenance of the Newsweek item, it’s certain that reports of interrogators abusing copies of the Koran have been circulating for more than two years, including, most recently, a New York Times story about Newsweek’s retraction of its item that includes an on the record interview with a former translator at Guantanamo.

Last month, a former American interrogator confirmed to The New York Times an account given in an interview by a former Kuwaiti detainee, Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi, who said that mishandling of the Koran once led to a major hunger strike. The strike ended only after a senior officer expressed regret over the camp’s loudspeaker system, which was simultaneously translated by linguists at the end of each cell block, the former interrogator said.

In that case, the accusations were of copies of the Koran being tossed on the floor in a pile and treated roughly, but there was no assertion that any had been put in the toilet.

Erik Saar, a co-author of the book “Inside the Wire” and an Arabic language translator at Guantánamo from January to June 2003, said in an interview Monday that while he “never saw anything along the lines of a Koran being flushed down a toilet,” the issue of how guards and interrogators handled the book was a chronic problem.

In November of 2004, New Press published “Guantánamo: The War on Human Rights,” by David Rose. Rose describes statements made by five British men who were released from Guantanamo in March of 2004, in which they claimed to have been punched, slapped, denied sleep, sexually humiliated, hooded and forced to watch copies of the Koran being flushed down toilets.

The Guardian newspaper in England, for which Rose writes, maintains a large archive of Guantanamo-related stories, many of which include allegations of torture and other crimes committed by US personnel there. In June of 2004, The San Francisco Chronicle published an overview of allegations and investigations.

Prisoners have been forced to strip naked — nudity is a violation of Muslim principles; forced to commit actual or simulated sex acts; prevented from sleeping; threatened with dogs; hooded; given electric shocks; beaten with fists, chains, boots and other objects; forced to maintain painful positions for hours; kept in frigid isolation rooms; subjected to loud music, strobe lights and diets of bread and water; urinated on and prevented from praying or reading the Koran.

…

Based on official data available, there are 107 separate military inquiries, involving at least 111 Iraqis and Afghans. Eighty-five investigations are being conducted by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division into detainee deaths and alleged assaults and thefts by U.S. soldiers since the beginning of 2003.

And in March of 2003, The Washington Post’s Mark Kaufman interviewed a group of Afghan men recently released from Guantanamo, some of whom complained that US soldiers in Afghanistan had abused the Koran.

Some of the men released today were close-shaven, but most kept their beards. The men who wore their beards in the long fashion of the Taliban complained most about poor treatment at the hands of Americans and insults against Islam.

Ehsannullah, 29, said American soldiers who initially questioned him in Kandahar before shipping him to Guantanamo hit him and taunted him by dumping the Koran in a toilet.

“It was a very bad situation for us,” said Ehsannullah, who comes from the home region of the Taliban leader, Mohammad Omar. “We cried so much and shouted, ‘Please do not do that to the Holy Koran.’”

Merza Khan, who had been captured in northern Afghanistan while fighting for the Taliban, said Americans in Kandahar tied him up and alternately forced him to lie face down on the ground, then squat with his hands on his head for hours. He also said he saw American soldiers throw the Koran on the ground and sit on it while in Kandahar.

Obviously, reports of US soldiers and other personnel treating the Koran with a lack of respect — not to mention the people to whom the copies belonged — have been circulating throughout the Muslim world and the western one for several years, a fact that makes questionable the contention that Newsweek has damaged our country’s image among Muslims. As a number of polls have shown, our image is already very close to being as damaged as it can possibly get.

What does seem to have happened is that various actors in Afghanistan and Pakistan seized upon the Newsweek item to further inflame existing unrest in the two countries, and that the Newsweek reporters were ill served by their source, by the Pentagon official who reviewed the item before it was published and by their own reliance on their previous relationship with their source.

And at the end of it all, we’re still left with questions about what investigations have been completed and reviewed by whom, and whether or not the allegations made by numerous Guantanamo detainees and a US government official, are true. Somewhere, behind the smoke and the heat, lie the answers.

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