Well, everyone’s abuzz over the recent flap about Newsweek’s article concerning desecration of the Koran by US interrogators at Guantanamo.

I’m not going to pontificate about how incredibly, incredibly stupid Michael Isikoff was to run with a story this explosive without getting coroboration from more than one source. The whole story ain’t out yet—if it ever will be—and there’s already plenty of this sort of chaff choking the blogosphere.

No, I’m writing this entry to posit a single premise, to let you know why I took this story with a grain of salt from the get-go.

I checked with three different online booksellers, getting the info on seven different versions of the Koran, in a multitude of formats and dimensions. The average number of pages among these seven versions was a hair over 582.5.

Would someone like to tell me how interrogators managed to flush a book of this magnitude down a toilet?

What, did they delegate a PFC to stand over a john and tear out page after page and flush them individually? Presuming that a state-of-the-art military toilet refills its tank every 30 seconds, that’s still a bit more than 4.85 hours of continuous flushing. Even assuming this was the case, how did the crapper in question not get terminally stopped up after the first sura? Was this the quick-dissolving kind of holy book, specially constructed for use in marine heads and motor homes? Or do government toilets include some sort of turbocharged “Dispos-All”-type unit, designed to pulverize American waste products into an even-more-indistinguishable mess, in order to prevent toilet-centric espionage?

The story—this portion of it, anyway—has an overly melodramatic feel to it, like someone overreached by just a bit in trying to tart it up for public consumption….and outrage. “And then, and then the guy took a Koran and, he uh, he put it on a toilet! No! No, he flushed it down the toilet!”

I can certainly imagine interrogators using tactics and acts considered blasphemous by devout Muslims in order to provoke a response; this certainly isn’t the first time such allegations have surfaced, often from much better sources. (And I’m not quite sure where I stand on that issue, though I tend to lean towards the position that such tactics are acceptable—if they accomplish the objective of getting the prisoner to talk. There is evidence to suggest that they do not.)

But personal suspicions and convictions aside, I simply cannot believe that it is possible to flush a 582.5-page book, sacred or profane, hardbound or paperback, whole or in pieces, down a toilet, unless the Gitmo offers restroom facilities for the use of migrating baleen whales.