Name: Religious desecration

Source: Not an authorized tactic. However, some evidence from an Army employee suggests it may have been used during interrogation in Afghanistan. Other reports indicate Quran desecration as punishment in Guantanamo Bay.

Description: A sworn statement to the Fay-Jones investigators by an Army civilian employee, released on May 19, 2005, by the ACLU via a FOIA request, relays a second-hand account of Quran desecration. The employee gave the statement on June 30, 2004, when he was assigned to the Army's intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, Ariz. He said that on a visit to Abu Ghraib in October 2003, he had an "offline conversation" with an interrogator at the prison, who asked "for ideas as to how to get 'these detainees to talk.' " The employee recalled, "I told him of a story of an interrogator using a Pride and Ego Down approach. The interrogator took a copy of a Koran and threw it on the ground and stepped on the Koran, which resulted in a detainee riot." The employee was speaking of an account he'd heard in Afghanistan, which he'd visited the week before he arrived at Abu Ghraib. In an earlier sworn statement from June 10, 2004, the same employee says he used this story of Quran desecration from Afghanistan as an example of what not to do, in the context of a discussion with interrogators at Abu Ghraib about which techniques were prohibited or restricted. At Guantanamo, reports indicate that alleged desecration of the Quran in 2002 led to a detainee hunger strike there and induced the International Committee of the Red Cross to formally express concern to the United States. The Pentagon subsequently developed guidelines in January 2003 for handling the holy book, although it officially denies a link between the desecration reports and the policy's promulgation.

Additional FBI documents made public by the ACLU on May 25, 2005, include multiple allegations by detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The FBI interviewed one detainee on April 6, 2002, who said that Military Police "have been mistreating the detainees by pushing them around and throwing their waste bucket to them in the cell, sometimes with waste still in the bucket and kicking the Koran." A detainee interviewed on April 11, 2002, said that "some unknown detainees are not talking in retaliation to an incident where a guard kicked the Koran." A third detainee interviewed on Aug. 1, 2002, said of guards at Guantanamo five months earlier, "They flushed a Koran in the toilet." A detainee interviewed in March 2003—two months after the Pentagon promulgated its policy for respecting the Quran—said that "he would not provide any information until the U.S. government and interrogators in Camp Delta changed the way it treated the Muslim holy book, the Koran." According to the FBI document, the detainee said "he understood the United States to support the freedom of religion. Why was it then, he asked, that the Koran was used as a weapon." (For the detainee's statement, click here and go to Pages 59-61).

Physical, Psychological, or Other Effects: None

Locations Allegedly Used: Afghanistan and Guantanamo

Legal Opinion: Under The Hague and Geneva Conventions, "the personal convictions and religious practices of the detained must be respected," subject to reasonable regulation designed to maintain military "order and discipline."  

During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued the following order: "The United States acknowledge and protect, in hostile countries occupied by them, religion and morality. ... Offenses to the contrary shall be rigorously punished." Section 110 of the Army field manual on the law of war reproduces that language.  

Quran desecration in itself probably does not violate the UCMJ's provision against cruelty and maltreatment of a detainee. However, violation of the Pentagon's policy mandating "respect and reverence" for the Quran may trigger criminal liability under the UCMJ statute governing disobedience of orders.