Through the Looking Glass

Let me see if I have this straight. Newsweek runs a story, from an anonymous source, to the effect that a guard at Gitmo flushed, or tried to, a Koran down the toilet. This lead to widespread rioting in the Muslim world. The administration blamed the rioting on the unsubstantianted story in Newsweek, and the magazine said the source would "neither confirm or deny" the story. (Shades of the Glomar Explorer!) Newsweek retracted the story, and calls have come from some quarters for a ban on all use of anonymous sources.

But major stories such as the whole list of Watergate crimes, and relatively minor (albeit juicy) stories like Bill Clinton's dalliances, would not come to the public's attention without the interplay of the goverment spokespersons, witnesses, actors, and - yes - anonymous sources. Of course, anonymous sources usually are a threat more to the powerful than to the weak - otherwise, they wouldn't have to be anonymous. So under cover of indignant outrage, the White House gets to intimidate the press, and the press hastens to censor itself.
Here the story takes a kooky turn. The Defense Department's "Hood Inquiry", which was set up as a result of the Newsweek article, has released it's findings (after business hours on Friday) regarding abuse of the Koran at Gitmo. Five incidents were repored and confirmed (among a general finding that respect for the Koran has been consistently good). A detainee alleged that a Koran was thrown into a bag of wet towels, and another guard said that the Koran belonged in the toilet. In the wierdest incident, a prisoner and his Koran were splashed with urine from a guard who left his post to relieve himself next to an airvent, and the wind blew his urine into the air vent, and the prisoner was splashed. Can anyone believe this malarkey?
The report then continues to detail where the real abuse occurred - at the hands of the detainees themselves! The detainees, the report said, used the Koran as a pillow, ripped pages out of it, tried to flush it down the toilet (!), and urinated on it. The detainees!
Does anyone else get that feeling of slipping through the looking glass again?

Duck and Cover

When I was in grammar school, we had to duck under our desks when we had a "bomb drill" to protect us from atomic attack. The following year, we had to go into the hall and crouch down with our heads toward the wall. The year after that, we had to crouch with our heads toward the center of the hall. Shortly after that, we stopped having them at all. In retrospect, it seems pretty pathetic, even idiotic. The odds of such excercises having any benefit were vanishingly small.
And so it is with the new security regime this country is under. We're going to look back at the airport screenings, pass badges, security guards, etc., etc., as brummagem attempts to make the populace feel they can do something against terrorism. The problem is that we're in a war of (religious) ideas - something everyone seems reluctant to say out loud - which cannot be won be force of arms (or security). There is a certain proportion of religious zealots who will spend the rest of their days trying to bring down everything non-Islam. They would only be thwarted by demonstrating to them that their religion is a myth invented to control adherents, like all religions. In order to persuade them of that (assuming they would even entertain the idea), you would have to trot out history, science and logic. But of course, any tool one could employ to demonstrate that Islam is based on myth could be used to demonstrate any other religion is a myth - like Christiantity, Judaism, Mormonism and all the rest. And nobody wants to go there! Instead, we wage war and engage in these silly security exercises - silly because they have no hope of making us secure. How much safer am I, or the country, now that I have to wave a photo ID to get into the building I have worked in for nearly thirty years? It has been widely conceded that the security measures have been a colossal waste of money. Yet, we are paralyzed, as a country, by the lock religion has on our national outlook. Religous zealotry dooms us all to war. Again.