c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) The Pentagon on Friday (June 3) called the intentional mishandling of the Quran a “rare occurrence” at the Guantanamo Bay prison, but it did little to placate many U.S. Muslims’ concerns about the integrity of the facility and U.S. policy towards Muslim prisoners.

In the wake of the report, and the ever-escalating allegations that preceded it, the Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) has called for a congressional hearing on Pentagon practices, as well as an interfaith presidential commission to conduct an independent investigation of the allegations.

The American public and Muslims worldwide need “to be reassured that the findings were done by the best measures we have available to us, by individuals that carry the integrity that is necessary to convince them that this is a handful of people as opposed to a systemic problem,” said Salam Al-Marayati, MPAC’s executive director.

The allegation that a Quran was flushed down a toilet by a Guantanamo Bay interrogator has been conclusively proven false, said Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, commander of the Joint Task Force Guantanamo, in the report.

But five other incidents were confirmed in which guards and interrogators mishandled the Muslim holy book.

The confirmed incident that is most discussed, making headlines on Muslim e-mail lists and action alerts in the U.S. and worldwide, is a March 2005 episode in which a guard urinated near an air vent and the wind blew his urine through the vent into a cell block, splashing a detainee and his Quran.

Other confirmed incidents listed in the report include a guard kicking a detainee’s Quran, a water balloon fight among guards soaking detainees’ Qurans, a two-word English obscenity written in an English translation of the Quran, and an interrogator stepping on a detainee’s Quran.

To the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims, the Quran is so respected and revered that it is forbidden to even touch the holy book without ritually washing one’s hands.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Washington-based civil liberties group, responded to the report by renewing its call that the U.S. shut down the Guantanamo Bay facility.

The Quran allegations are part of “a climate of abuse that needs to be addressed by higher-level officials,” said CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper. CAIR has also called for a bipartisan commission to independently investigate the treatment of prisoners at U.S. facilities.

Outside of the U.S., some scholars say, Muslim leaders are learning to harness the power of the American press to advance political goals like protesting the war in Iraq.

“Leaders in the Muslim world are trying to keep this issue alive to put pressure on the United States,” said Muqtedar Khan, a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies Islam and international politics.

Meanwhile, Khan said, mistrust of the Pentagon among U.S. Muslims has been high, particularly following episodes of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

“The Quran episode has only confirmed the worst images that have developed about the Pentagon,” he said.

Not all U.S. Muslims are upset by the Pentagon’s handling of the situation.

“Missteps” at Guantanamo Bay prison, as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan, are “not systematic malice or directions for mistreatment by our own (U.S.) president,” said Muhammad Ali Hasan, co-founder and co-president of Muslims for America, an organization that supported President Bush in his 2004 re-election campaign, in a statement.

“The cause of these abominations is a few uncouth individuals, who are wrongdoers within a system that has sometimes lacked the command structure necessary to keep these abuses in check.”

Hasan said it was important to “remember that, to its core, the United States of America does not have an imperialist history, nor one of a police state,” Hasan said. “Therefore, measures of detention are going to have missteps.”

KRE/RB END ROSSI