Durbin

Wow, it's difficult to find time to write, or even form a coherent thought, with four children running around the house. I do plan to get back to more of the essays on why I think Bush is so damaging, I apologize that it's taking longer than I'd hoped. However, here's something I have to say...

This week, I've been reading more and more people condemning Dick Durbin for his comments on the Senate floor. People are up in arms over his comments likening some of the actions being undertaken at Guantanamo Bay to other evil actions taken by other humans.

But once again, people are taking issue with the text and ignoring the fact that the MESSAGE may be completely legitimate. Read the text again:

"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. Sadly, that is not the case. This as the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners."

He had just read a list of attrocities from the same memo I posted snippets of last week, written by an FBI observer. Let us, for the moment, ignore the concluding lines of Mr. Durbin's commentary and read what went before it:

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. . . . On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor."

My first thought is: This is a heck of a far cry from the gourmet-food-and-day-spa Guantanamo that was described for us last week by Congressman Duncan Hunter.

But think about that paragraph. Think about whether you think that treatment is in any way legitimate or fair. Would you be surprised to hear about such treatment of prisoners within a Soviet gulag? If we hadn't become so desensitized to abuses and so politically polarized by this war, would you really have believed that the United States could actually treat people this way, a country founded on "certain inalienable rights" that our founding documents list as being "endowed by their creator" on "all men"?

Durbin's comments at no point say that Guantanamo is necessarily universally as bad as a Soviet gulag, or something under the Nazis or Pol Pot. He described this particular report as sounding like something one might have heard of from those places. And he's right. It DOES sound like that.

But unless there's some other quote of Durbin's somewhere, of which I am not aware, where he says something like "Guantanamo Bay is just another Soviet gulag", instead of merely comparing certain heinous acts AT Guantanamo Bay to a Soviet gulag... it's time to move along.

[This weekend, reports came out of a torture chamber in Iraq that was clearly far more heinous than Guantanamo Bay. I understand that, and I (and from reading it, I assume Senator Durbin) are not saying that we're worse, or even as bad, as other instances of torture. I continue to maintain that a country founded on the principles ours was founded on, and whose citizens consider themselves a moral icon that everyone else should follow needs to be held to a higher standard. In a strict sense, is what we did worse (or even as bad) as what was done in Iraq, the gulags, or any of the other places up for discussion? Certainly not. But are we, as a nation, all the more reprehenisble in our hypocrisy for speaking out against human rights abuses while practicing them? Yes.

This doesn't have to be a contest. The fact that someone else cheated doesn't make your own cheating OK, and we are first and foremost responsible for our own conduct. Let's clean up our own act, and then we can start worrying about other people's. -- Liam]

Copyright (c) June 20, 2005 by Liam Johnson. http://www.liamjohnson.net