When Newsweek retracted the Quran-in-the-toilet story, the White House joined the fanatic drumbeat. Instead of condemning killings in any religion's name for whatever reason, it condemned Newsweek for provoking the riots and conducted a little savvy media lynching of its own. It's any goof's standard way to divert attention from what the media report accurately 99 percent of the time. That, too, was unsurprising. The Bush administration is a bit dense when it comes to figuring out who and where America's enemies are. The fact that the administration has a conflict of interest in the equation is not a small part of the explanation.

Relatively speaking, the Bill of Rights has done more to ensure the dignity of human life and safeguard individual liberties in the United States than any "divinely"-inspired book ever has. The administration has been flushing the Bill of Rights down the toilet pretty much every day for the last four years without provoking more than a few isolated protests, usually in those chicken-wired "free-speech zones" that have made echo chambers of the First Amendment. That's the surprise, or at least the shame.

Even the administration's critics over the Newsweek story, both "liberal" and conservative, still come out chanting apologies for the overall strategy that mucked us into these corruptive circumstances to begin with. Thomas Friedman, a White-Man's-Burden evangelist in liberal clothing, is upset that Muslims aren't condemning Iraq's suicide bombers and cheering "the power shift the U.S. and its allies are trying to engineer there," which he idiotically compares to "how whites in Alabama would have felt about a black governor's being installed there in 1920," as if one could even be "installed" in 2006. It'll be nice, but unlikely, that a black governor will rule over Alabama sometime in the next century. And if one did, white and black Alabamans would revolt if, say, Senegal or Canada were doing the installing as opposed to Alabamans. That's the larger picture Friedman's adorable analogies usually miss (kind of like a dazzling $3 million Bradley Fighting Vehicle getting blindsided by a $30 IED -- those Improvised Explosive Devices decimating American lives in Iraq).

Last week The New York Times ran an 8,000-word report detailing the torture and death of two Afghans in December 2002 at the hands of American soldiers in Afghanistan. One of the two men, a 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was innocent, but fell victim to the still-prevalent assumption that all Arabs and Afghans are terrorists until proven otherwise. Here's how The Times describes some of Dilawar's torture: "When one of the First Platoon M.P.s, Specialist Corey E. Jones, was sent to Mr. Dilawar's cell to give him some water, he said the prisoner spit in his face and started kicking him. Specialist Jones responded, he said, with a couple of knee strikes to the leg of the shackled man. 'He screamed out, "Allah! Allah! Allah!" and my first reaction was that he was crying out to his god,' Specialist Jones said to investigators. 'Everybody heard him cry out and thought it was funny.' Other Third Platoon M.P.s later came by the detention center and stopped at the isolation cells to see for themselves, Specialist Jones said. It became a kind of running joke, and people kept showing up to give this detainee a common peroneal strike just to hear him scream out 'Allah,' " he said. "It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes.' " A peroneal strike is a particularly violent blow to the side of the leg, above the knee, that can eventually pulpify the leg.

One week after his arrest, Dilawar was dead, and his death ruled a homicide by a military coroner. Those facts are not in dispute, and they're more obscene than any act of desecration has the right to be: You can always print another book. You cannot bring back Dilawar (or the 26 others who, by the Army's count, have died so far in American custody). The facts should offend religious and constitutional sensibilities. If they do, the offense is mild, fleeting, excused as an aberration. But the true aberration is the neo-colonial occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and the same-old imperial atrocities such occupations entail -- not because we're a bad people, but because good people inevitably do bad things where they're not wanted, where they ought not to be, where they understand nothing. The desecration of a Quran, real or not, is the least of it.

Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. Reach him at ptristam@att.net.

© 2005 News-Journal Corporation

###