{"id":28968,"date":"2012-03-02T14:32:08","date_gmt":"2012-03-02T18:32:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=28968"},"modified":"2012-03-02T14:32:35","modified_gmt":"2012-03-02T18:32:35","slug":"probing-the-koran-burning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=28968","title":{"rendered":"Probing the Koran burning"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Melvin sends us a link to a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/world\/asia_pacific\/us-probe-of-koran-burning-finds-5-soldiers-responsible-afghan-clerics-demand-public-trial\/2012\/03\/02\/gIQAwJqYmR_story.html?tid=sm_twitter_washingtonpost\">Washington Post<\/a> article about the US military&#8217;s investigation of the Koran burnings in Afghanistan which resulted in the overblown riots there over the last several days;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Investigators appointed by Marine Gen. John R. Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, found that the soldiers removed the Korans from a prison located at Bagram air base after they were found to contain extremist messages.<\/p>\n<p>The books were then placed in an office for safekeeping, according to the inquiry. But they were mistaken for garbage and taken to a landfill on the base.<\/p>\n<p>Afghan employees identified the books as Korans just as their pages caught fire, a major desecration, according to Muslim teachings. The discovery led to a week of unprecedented tension between U.S. and Afghan military officials.<\/p>\n<p>U.S. military officials said that although the five soldiers will be reprimanded, it\u2019s unlikely that their names will be released or that their punishment will approach the seriousness of what some Afghans are demanding, including trial in an Afghan court.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFor the soldiers, it will be serious \u2014 they could lose rank. But you\u2019re not going to see the kind of public trial that some here seem to want,\u201d said one U.S. military official. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Yeah, I don&#8217;t think the military has the standing to punish those guys. I wouldn&#8217;t know a Koran if you hit me on the side of my head with it. The Afghans that were with them didn&#8217;t recognize them as Korans until they began to burn. When you send a private out to burn trash, they just burn trash, not pick through it.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t see anyone getting upset at the little thugs who wrote in and thereby defacing the Korans in the first place. And how do you destroy a defaced Koran? I&#8217;m guessing that you burn it, and everyone I&#8217;ve talked to and heard agrees. That makes them experts, just by the virtue of my attention. What I know about a Koran would look like a BB in a thimble.<\/p>\n<p>Nonetheless, if the Army raises a hand towards those troops, the entire leadership will be watching the troops draw themselves down. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Melvin sends us a link to a Washington Post article about the US military&#8217;s investigation of &hellip; <a title=\"Probing the Koran burning\" class=\"hm-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=28968\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Probing the Koran burning<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-military-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28968"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28968\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}