It would at least be nice if more people were honest enough to say"so what, this is not torture, these folks deserve it" as Tom argued to me on the phone yesterday (while still maintaining that he believed the FBI and other government spokesmen were believable while those allegations from prisoners were not). But now the Pentagon is admitting that there were at least five incidents of"mishandling" (nice euphemism, that, as if it was a mere accident) the Koran. Apparently the prisoners were right, the spokesmen wrong. I guess I am just more cynical than Tom, (or perhaps the part of me that is a Civil Rights historian knows far too much about FBI perfidy to be sanguine about their assertions when those assertions happen to relate to covering their own rear ends) but I am afraid that I suspected all along that that smoke would eventually lead to fire.

So far, to be fair, none of the allegations of toilet flushing have proven to be true And by the way, I love that some people think it is a brilliant insight to ask where one can find the toilet where an entire Koran can be flushed down, the preposition being apparently more important a reed on which to hang an argument than the verb that is really the issue.