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http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5056273,00.htmlU.S.: No Outrage Over Quran Mishandling
By ROBERT BURNS
AP Military Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - The disclosure that U.S. guards or interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay prison kicked, stepped on and splashed urine on the Quran has not triggered the kind of public outrage that erupted after an earlier news report of a Quran being flushed in a toilet, a Pentagon official said Monday.
``It's not playing at all'' as a catalyst for violent protest in Muslim nations, said Bryan Whitman, a senior Pentagon spokesman.
Whitman said he based his comment on conversations Monday and over the weekend with U.S. officials in Iraq and Afghanistan, where much of the earlier protest violence had happened. The Bush administration had blamed the earlier violence on a Newsweek report - later retracted by the magazine - that U.S. investigators at Guantanamo Bay had confirmed that a guard had deliberately flushed a prisoner's Quran down a toilet.
Whitman said it was too early to know for sure how the latest disclosures will be seen in the Muslim world.
``What this inquiry has demonstrated is that there have been procedures in place ever since the beginning of operations at Guantanamo that reflected a sensitivity to cultural and religious aspects of the detainees that were there,'' he said, and that in the vast majority of instances the Quran was not mishandled.
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