The New Year Quote by Michael Isikoff

The most revealing part of Isikoff's sentence is its procedural calm. He isn’t arguing about theology or even morality; he’s narrating bureaucracy catching up to scandal. The line hinges on a blunt concession - "Well, it is true" - a journalist’s way of planting a flag in contested territory while keeping his hands clean. In the post-9/11 information ecosystem, where denial and counter-denial were practically policy tools, that opening functions like a receipt: whatever else people want to debate, this much is documented.

The intent is narrowly evidentiary: to establish that the Pentagon codified rules for handling the Koran in January 2003. But the subtext is broader and sharper. Rules are not invented in a vacuum; they’re an admission that something has already gone wrong often enough to become a pattern. By specifying "after there had been complaints" from detainees and the International Red Cross, Isikoff quietly elevates the allegation from rumor to institutionally witnessed friction. The Red Cross mention does heavy lifting: it signals external legitimacy and the presence of a monitoring body that governments can't easily wave off as partisan.

Context matters: January 2003 sits at the hinge of expanding detention operations and escalating scrutiny of U.S. conduct. The phrasing "governing the handling" is tellingly technocratic, as if reverence can be managed like inventory. That bureaucratic diction becomes the critique: when a superpower has to draft a memo reminding itself not to mistreat a sacred text, the problem isn’t just "handling". It’s the system that made reverence negotiable.