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WASHINGTON -- A prisoner at Guantanamo Bay who complained that a military guard threw a Quran holy book in the toilet has since recanted the story, senior Pentagon officials said Thursday. The prisoner, who made his complaint in an FBI interrogation in July 2002, is one of several quoted in newly released documents as saying that U.S. military personnel desecrated the Qurans of Muslim detainees at the prison. Allegations of Quran abuse have led to heated discussion - and even deadly demonstrations in Afghanistan - since a Newsweek magazine report, later retracted, that U.S. officials had confirmed a Quran was...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Guantanamo detainee who told an FBI agent in 2002 that U.S. personnel there had flushed a Koran in a toilet retracted his allegation when questioned this month by military investigators, the Pentagon said on Thursday. "We've gone back to the detainee who allegedly made the allegation and he has said it didn't happen. So the underlying allegation, the detainee himself, within the last two weeks, said that didn't happen," chief Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita told a briefing. An FBI document, dated Aug. 1, 2002, contained a summary of statements made by the detainee in two...

FOREST CITY, N.C. -- A Baptist minister in North Carolina is refusing to apologize for a church sign that says the Muslim Quran should be flushed. The Rev. Creighton Lovelace, of Danieltown Baptist Church, says right is right, and he feels he was right when he posted a message outside his church condemning the Quran, reported Greenville-Spartanburg TV station WYFF. "I cannot change my position just because it may offend someone else," Lovelace said. Lovelace said he put the sign up in response to a Newsweek article that falsely accused U.S.soldiers of flushing the Quran down a toilet at the...

<p>Seymour Hersh, whose famously inventive journalism has won him lots of prizes and a new lease on journalistic life as The New Yorker's crusading Beltway gumshoe, has done a laying on of hands with Michael Isikoff, the prime author of the nuclear tidbit that appeared in the May 9 issue of Newsweek about the desecration of the Koran by American interrogators at Guantánamo. Hersh this week asserted that Isikoff "does that magic thing that's so obvious but that nobody does: he reads before he writes." Nobody does? It may not come as news to critical readers of Hersh's work that he finds something arresting about the notion that you should read before you write. But what is really risible about his pronouncement is that, in this matter, apparently, reading before writing is precisely what Isikoff did not do. He seems never to have read any official document stating that any American official anywhere during the present war against Islamic terrorists abused the sacred book of the Muslims.</p>