The Washington Post has a big story about the charges of Koran desecration at Guantanamo and how they appear in an FBI report. Big deal. All this means is that the terrorists at Guantanamo were retailing the story about a Koran flushed down the toilet and told interrogators about it. There are a few possibilities here. One is that the allegation is true, which seems to be a common presumption even though there is no evidence for it but the same prisoner tales repeated over and over until they sound like a cascade of differing reports. It seems at least as likely that the whole allegation is a gigantic game of telephone where the prisoners exchanged stories, the stories got retold and this is where it all ended up. It’s also very possible that the whole thing is an Al Qaeda distortion game of the sort discussed in the infamous training manual uncovered in Manchester, England — in which terrorists were instructed to use the softness of liberal democracies against liberal democracies should they get captured.
These are sociopaths we’re talking about here. Andrew Sullivan would do well to remember that. As would the Washington Post. And Newsweek. And Amnesty International.