The Truth About Koran Abuse.

The MSM, in its tireless circling of the wagons around Newsweek's fake, but accurate, story about a Koran being flushed has been gleefully chirping about all the instances of "Koran mishandling" in the papers and on the tele and going, "Aha!!! Told you Americans were evil torturers running a gulag at Gitmo!!!"

Spare me.

If an "infidel" so much as TOUCHS a Koran with bare hands or one hand instead of two, that counts as "mishandling". We're not even flushing the Koran! Nope, just one-hand it and Amnesty International declares us to be the bad guys, even though they admit themselves they don't know for sure what happened! (Thanks, asstacklers.)

Hindrocket from Power Line has his Weekly Standard colum, "A Study in Abuse", up with all sorts of log entries detailing just how lousy a cover-up of our torture methods is going on down in Gitmo.

(BTW: That was sarcasm.)

Here's the punchline:

Anti-Americanism in foreign news coverage is perhaps not surprising. Here at home, however, the slant was not much different. The San Francisco Chronicle, not previously known for its solicitude for things spiritual, headlined: "U.S. Tells How Koran Was Defiled". The Los Angeles Times echoed, "Pentagon: Koran Defiled". Newsday wrote, "Quran Abuses Verified", while ABC headlined, "U.S. Confirms Gitmo Soldier Kicked Quran". Such headlines could be multiplied indefinitely. Many papers dwelt especially on the few drops of urine that inadvertently landed on a Koran, which inevitably prompts the recollection that only 16 years ago, the federal government not only tolerated the immersion of a crucifix in a jar of urine as a work of "art," but actually paid for it.

It seems that the Army--or maybe it's the United States--just can't win. It is almost inconceivable that the Hood report could have been more favorable to the Guantanamo guards and interrogators, yet the international and American press treated it as a confession of wrongdoing, at times with a hint that the Newsweek allegation had proven true after all. Little (frequently, nothing) was made of the fact that it was the Muslim detainees, not American guards or interrogators, who had perpetrated precisely the acts that were the excuse for anti-American riots in the Muslim world.

No matter how virtuous American conduct may be, the many members of the press raise the bar higher, with no regard for the realities of warfare, the inevitable sordidness of prison life, or the frailties of human nature. It is hard to see any purpose in this hypercriticism--no other country, except perhaps Israel, is held to such an extraordinary standard--other than to make it impossible for the United States to detain and interrogate prisoners. Or to fight a war.

Why is "24" such a popular show? Because it shows a fantasy version of the world in which the American agents are fighting to SAVE America, not DESTROY it.