Religious torture’s backlash

Use of the Qur’an as an instrument of torture is a Guantánamo mistake that may rebound on the United States for generations, warns Michael Peppard in the Catholic magazine Commonweal.

Peppard says:

Religious torture generates determined resistance and long-lasting resentments. What has been a mere footnote for us may be the main story for the Muslim world. The U.S. military knows that desecration of the Qur’an leads to hunger strikes and suicide attempts, that playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” over the call to prayer is demoralizing. But they seem not to have considered the long-term effects of such tactics.

Principal among those long-term effects is creation of a stream if new enemies, as a former Special Operations interrogator warns today in the Washington Post. President-elect Obama has promised to outlaw that torture and close Guantanamo.