WASHINGTON, May 29: The latest FBI documents detailing allegations of prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay are, like previous FBI documents, ‘highly disturbing’, says a Washington Post editorial published on Sunday. According to the paper, the documents contain prisoners’ descriptions of beatings and abuse of the Holy Quran. “Detainees variously claim the Muslim holy book has been thrown on the floor or thrown against a wall. There are also references to these kinds of events having led to an ‘altercation’ between detainees and guards,” the Post noted.

The newspaper argues that the status of these documents is nearly as disturbing as their content. They can be found, again like previous FBI documents, only on the Web site of the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained them by suing the government under the Freedom of Information Act.

“They did not, in other words, appear in the context of a government or military investigation.” The Post points out that after the ACLU released the documents on Wednesday, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence T. Di Rita implied that such an investigation would be unnecessary, since these ‘fantastic charges about our guys doing something willfully heinous to a Quran for the purposes of rattling detainees are not credible on their face.”

But then, on Thursday, the commander of the Guantanamo facility, Brig Gen Jay W. Hood, acknowledged that incidents ‘broadly defined as mishandling of a Quran’ had in fact taken place. Brig Gen Hood made this announcement following an investigation that he said had begun 12 days earlier – which points to the deeper problem, says the Post.

“For the fact remains that although one has been promised, no independent military, Pentagon or other body has yet published an extensive investigation into the multiple accounts of prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay. There have been verbal descriptions of investigations and summaries of investigations, but no documents.”

One consequence of the Bush administration’s failure to publish such a report, the newspaper says, “is that much of the world believes the misbehavior has been worse, and more extensive, than what has been documented, and people know little or nothing of the corrective action that has been taken.”

In the case of the Holy Quran, says the Post, most or all of the offenses appear to have occurred before Jan 2003, when the Pentagon responded to prisoner protests by issuing strict guidelines for handling the Holy Quran.