Durbinated

I was so proud of Dick Durbin until yesterday He lasted a week without apologizing for saying something that needed to be said, if perhaps in a more delicate way. When I read what he said in the Congressional Record it didn’t read at all the way it was being played in the news and by many people in Washington. Here is exactly what he said,

“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.”

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 was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

What I think when I read this is that Durbin is condemning a broad strategy of torture handed down from the upper-reaches of the military and the administration (i.e. the Secretary of Defense and the President of the United States). By using the broad category or Americans, Soviets and the generic regimes, it is obvious he meant to compare the actions of apples to apples (government to government) not apples to oranges (government to individual soldier).

It is sad that the opponents of honesty in Washington were able to manipulate the Senator’s words, with the full cooperation of the media, into such a hysterical farce.