At least Dick Durbin has made Howard Dean's week easier by drawing fire to himself over comments he made on Tuesday on the Senate floor. Before we get all jazzed up over it, let's have a look at exactly what Senator Durbin said:
"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings," Durbin said. [Washington Post, June 16]
And why he said it:
Durbin, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat, made the comparison during a speech on the Senate floor Tuesday after reading an FBI agent's report describing detainees at the Naval base in Guantanamo Bay as being chained to the floor without food or water in extreme temperatures. [San Francisco Chronicle - emphasis added]
Well, the wingers are on fire with outrage, and demanding Durbin say he's sorry. So far, D.D. is refusing to back down, saying it's the Bush administration that should apologize for tarnishing the good name of the United States with its lax rules on torture, for discarding of the Geneva Convention, and for the erection of a legally invisible prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.
As one who has great respect for the military, and the people in it, I viscerally cringe at the idea of comparing U.S. servicemen to Nazis or Soviets. But I don't think Durbin was doing that. The comparison he was making was between those brutal regimes and the one in Washington right now. The Bush administration is the one harkening back to old Soviet tactics in its prosecution of the war on terror (don't believe for a moment that the tactics at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo were invented by the troops themselves...).
Durbin may have used a poor choice of language, and no, George W. Bush isn't Pol Pot, but what's truly shameful is that a United States Senator can even find a way to make such an argument, based on what our own government has done.
The right, for its part, isn't exactly acquitting itself well, responding to every criticsm of Camp X-Ray by justifying the nasty tactics used there. Is that what we've become? Is maintaining our camp worth the cost of losing our standing as a law abiding, moral nation? And are Durbin's comments any worse than the juvenile justifications of prisoner mistreatment proposed by Limbaugh and others, or the utterly silly "menu defense" put forward this week by Rep. Duncan Hunter?
As usual, Craig Crawford is the voice of reasn on this one (he's on "Connected" now, doing battle with Monica Crowley and her fellow "torture the bastards!" WOT warriors). I'll have to check in with his blog later. Crawford makes the point that Gitmo simply isn't worth the public relations nightmare it has created for the U.S., which could fight the war on terror just as well -- perhaps more successfully, if we weren't appearing to throw Geneva out the window whenever its rules inconvenience us. He also goes after the wingers for appearing to justify torture -- er, "mishandling..."
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"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
