History
There were over a dozen pre-Newsweek reports in the mainstream media alleging U.S. Quran abuse, including the following:
- Several times in 2002 and in early 2003, the International Committee of the Red Cross reported complaints by detainees at Guantanamo Bay prison of desecration of the Quran by U.S. guards in Guantanamo.
- In 2003, an Afghan former prisoner told the Washington Post that U.S. soldiers tormented him by throwing the Quran in the toilet.
- The BBC reported on December 30, 2004 that the former Guantánamo prisoner Abdallah Tabarak maintained that "American soldiers used to tear up copies of the Quran and throw them in the toilet."
- In a book review dated January 16, 2005, the Hartford Courant reported that five British detainees, after their release, claimed that they "had seen other prisoners sexually humiliated, had been hooded, and were forced to watch copies of the Koran being flushed down toilets."
- The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on January 20, 2005 that there were complaints concerning guards who had "defaced their copies of the Koran and, in one case, had thrown it in a toilet."
- The Miami Herald reported on March 6, 2005 that three Guantánamo captives — Fawzi al Odah, 27, Fouad al Rabiah, 45, and Khalid al Mutairi, 29 — "separately complained to their lawyer that military police threw their Quran into the toilet."
- The Miami Herald also reported on March 9, 2005 that Guantánamo Base staff insulted Allah and "threw Qurans into toilets."
Read more about this topic: 2005 Quran Desecration Controversy
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“[Men say:] “Don’t you know that we are your natural protectors?” But what is a woman afraid of on a lonely road after dark? The bears and wolves are all gone; there is nothing to be afraid of now but our natural protectors.”
—Frances A. Griffin, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 19, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)