Sacred Texts and Psychological Warfare

Who would be stupid enough to think that flushing a Koran down the toilet was a good idea?

We don’t know and you don’t know if the interrogators of Camp X-ray actually put a Koran in the toilet as a way eliciting…something (compliance? information?)…from the prisoners there. All we do know is that, thanks to the Abu Ghraib fiasco, it seems like something they would do down there, and that’s going to be good enough to keep the demonstrations going for a few weeks.

But we might be able to make some headway in addressing why such a thing might happen.

Torture as an interrogation technique sometimes takes a physical form, like the way Franco’s secret police used to flog people on the bottoms of their feet, and sometimes takes psychological form, like this alleged flushing of the holy book. It’s easy to see why you’d think that the flogging would make a reluctant detainee talk, but there are significant questions about how flushing the Koran achieves any purpose.

What would the interrogators hope to gain through such an act? Presumably the idea would be to get someone to talk with the promise that if they did talk, the Koran would no longer be so abused. The prisoner would be so eager to protect the Koran from further abuse that he would start to talk.

We at the Blasphemy Blog have a hard time believing that anyone, no matter how devout, would respond to such torture. How deep is any attachment to a document, however holy? Frankly, we suspect that just about any human being would be glad in such a situation that his interrogators were taking it out on pieces of paper, and not him. It’s not that we think it wouldn’t be painful for a Muslim to witness the flushing of the Koran; it’s just that, when compared to physical torture, we think it would be easier to get over. Assuming that these were not valuable antique copies of the Koran, well…our feeling would be, Go ahead, Mr. Interrogator! Throw it in the toilet! I can buy another at Barnes & Noble, not to mention that I have most of it memorized!

If confronted, God forbid, with a similar situation, that is how we at the Blasphemy Blog would feel about the writings we hold dear, such as the Bible, the Bill of Rights, and Daredevil: Born Again. We like having a copy of each on hand, but we’ll endure their destruction with the knowledge that the memory of having read them cannot be erased from our minds.

It seems plausible that the people marching against the desecration of the Koran feel differently (though we at the Blasphemy Blog tend to believe that this is much more a case of religious clerics whipping up anti-American sentiment for political gain). But we’re not talking about them. We’re talking about a detained person, whose primary concern is life and limb. Does such an unfortunate, terrified person really care about a book?

What we are getting at here is the following point: we don’t think it would work. We don’t think putting the Koran in the toilet would cause anyone to reveal secret terrorist information. Especially not if beatings have already been tried.

What’s more, we think the interrogators at Guantanomo knew this. We think they did it, if they did it, because they were frustrated, malicious, or bored. Or possibly all three.

The question is: which would be worse? If they did it as part of a strategy? Or if it happened spontaneously?

That’s another one of those questions that turns the stomach to contemplate.