Kudos to E.J. Dionne for dressing down Amnesty International for using the loaded word “gulag” to describe Gitmo, even if he hates the way Bush is allowed to call their charges “absurd.” Better yet is Charles Krauthammer, who soundly rejects the Amnesty tilt:
Under the rules the Pentagon later instituted at Guantanamo, proper handling of the Koran means using two hands and wearing gloves when touching it. Which means that if any guard held the Koran with one hand or had neglected to put on gloves, this would be considered mishandling.
On the scale of human crimes, where, say, 10 is the killing of 2,973 innocent people in one day and 0 is jaywalking, this ranks as perhaps a 0.01.
Moreover, what were the Korans doing there in the first place? The very possibility of mishandling Korans arose because we gave them to each prisoner. What kind of crazy tolerance is this? Is there any other country that would give a prisoner precisely the religious text that that prisoner and those affiliated with him invoke to justify the slaughter of innocents? If the prisoners had to have reading material, I would have given them the book “Portraits 9/11/01″ — vignettes of the lives of those massacred on Sept. 11.