BAD NEWS FRIDAY

Well it's Friday and you know what that means: The Bush administration is releasing bad or embarrasing news in the hope that nobody is paying attention. What does today bring?

The Pentagon on Friday released new details about mishandling of the Quran at the Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects, confirming that a soldier deliberately kicked the Muslim holy book and that an interrogator stepped on a Quran and was later fired for "a pattern of unacceptable behavior."

In other confirmed incidents, water balloons thrown by prison guards caused an unspecified number of Qurans to get wet; a guard's urine came through an air vent and splashed on a detainee and his Quran; and in a confirmed but ambiguous case, a two-word obscenity was written in English on the inside cover of a Quran.

The findings, released after normal business hours Friday evening, are among the results of an investigation last month by Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, the commander of the detention center in Cuba, that was triggered by a Newsweek magazine report _ later retracted _ that a U.S. soldier had flushed one Guantanamo Bay detainee's Quran down a toilet.

(emphasis mine)

Remember, people in the Pentagon have surely known about this for a while, just as Rummy and Bush knew about the Abu Ghraib tortuers and abuses months before Sy Hersh broke the story (and that's even giving them the benefit of the doubt that Rummy didn't personally authorize the policies that led to all that). They don't care about the wrongness of what they do, but they care about those things being kept secret. Loyalty is morality to these people.