Washington Times - An al Qaeda handbook preaches to operatives to level charges of torture once captured, a training regime that administration officials say explains some of the charges of abuse at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

The American Civil Liberties Union last week posted on its Web site 2002 FBI documents regarding accusations from suspected al Qaeda and Taliban detainees at the detention center. The organization had won a court decision that forced the administration to release scores of e-mails between agents who had interviewed captives.

U.S. Southern Command, which oversees the prison, is investigating interrogation techniques at "GTMO," as the naval base in Cuba is called, as well as the FBI-conveyed, unsubstantiated complaints. The U.S. Justice Department inspector general has begun a separate probe.

One investigator, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, said last week that the most explosive charge so far -- that guards flushed the Koran Muslim holy book down a toilet -- is not true. The Pentagon tabbed Gen. Hood to conduct a probe into how Islam is treated at the prison in the aftermath of a since-retracted report by Newsweek on the Koran claim.

U.S. officials think the Koran story -- told by a detainee who did not see the purported event -- might be part of an al Qaeda campaign to spread disinformation.

"There have been allegations made by detainees," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters. "We know that members of al Qaeda are trained to mislead and to provide false reports. We know that's one of their tactics that they use. And so I think you have to keep that in mind."

So, in summary, the unsubstantiated Koran desecration story first run by Newsweek and continually perpetuated (even to this day) by some in the mainstream media as "fake but accurate" is patently false. On top of that we learn that false accusations like this are a common tactic used by terrorists to cause problems for their enemies.

Meanwhile, most in the media and on the anti-war left continue to swallow every unfounded accusation of abuse the detainees at Guantanamo Bay and other places care to aim in their direction.

(via The Jawa Report)