Question #3 - is it necessary? Which means, of course, is it useful/helpful/productive to treat prisoners this way?
Good find. That analysis was almost identical to my own (rather like what I would have argued with LB had I elected to argue <g>) and my conclusion was the same. I thought about 3 a little differently, though, somewhat more abstractly and expansively.
There exists a continuum of behavior relative to the treatment of prisoners from serving them high tea on silver platters each afternoon on one end to torturing them to death on the other. Somewhere along that continuum there's a threshold beyond which decent people don't venture. (Or perhaps several different ones depending on the scenario.) But we've never had a real national discussion of where that line is and different people have different perceptions of its location.
On one side of that line we have the good guys, hopefully us, and on the other side we have the bad guys, like the Nazis. Now the Nazis are way, way on the other side of that line and there is plenty of space on the continuum between the threshold and the Nazis. My question 3 is one of where the behaviors described in the FBI report sit on the continuum. If they're on the acceptable side, then we need some national clarity on that given that Durbin doesn't seem to think so. If they're on the unacceptable side, then we are, indeed, on the same side as the Nazis albeit a long, long, long way from the extreme where they sit.
So Durbin has two communications disconnects. One is with those who find the FBI describe behavior unquestionably acceptable. The other is with the nuance impaired who can't differentiate between a little over the line and Nazi atrocities. |
