Re: Durbin/Gitmo:
Durbin's sin, as described in National Review, a publication I consider reliable:
Speaking on the Senate floor, Durbin quoted from the report of an FBI agent who claims to have seen
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 temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. . . . . On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room.
Durbin then 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.”
nationalreview.com
Compound analysis required.
Question #1 - was the FBI report accurate? I have no way of knowing but I assume that it is/was.
Question #2 - if Durbin read it to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing things Americans had done to prisoners in their control, who would you imagine did things like that? Would you imagine it was Americans?
I, for one, would not.
Not that I know very much about what transpires in prisons in other countries, but I do know that it would be extremely illegal in a US prison. Which is, of course, why these prisoners haven't been transported to the US, or any other country, but are kept in legal limbo.
Question #3 - is it necessary? Which means, of course, is it useful/helpful/productive to treat prisoners this way?
US legal history says no, we don't allow our prisoners to be treated this way because confessions obtained this way are notoriously unreliable.
Question #4 - were Durbin's comments over the top? Hard to say, because he's discussing his personal reaction to the facts described. My own assumption would have been that the events were taking place in some Third World shithole run by petty tyrants -- Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Guatemala, maybe China.
Question #5 - hyperbolic language aside, are the events described human rights abuses? Unless the answer to Question #3 is yes, I would say, yes, these are human rights abuses. Shocking.
If someone treated our own captured military like that, we'd be calling for their blood.
Bonus question - how many posts can we go before someone starts talking about the people who were killed in the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11? And, more importantly, are they using 9/11 as a justification for revenge? Is that what's going on at Gitmo? I don't think so, but it seems to be that this is what they're arguing. Tit for tat.
Commentary: it's clear that Durbin did not call our military Nazis, but the language was still unnecessarily inflammatory. |
