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June 16, 2005
Shooting the Messenger
Here's what has the official right in a tizzy today.
Senator Dick Durbin, D-IL, had the following to say on the floor of the Senate yesterday:
When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here [at Guantanamo Bay]--I almost hesitate to put them in the [Congressional] Record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:
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.
Of course, Durbin is right, which is what really infuriates the neocons and their media enablers. (To his credit, he's not backing down from what he said.) Sure, Gitmo doesn't (yet) equate to a Nazi concentration camp or a Soviet gulag in degree, but it most definitely equates to it in kind. People are captured and thrown into the prison simply because the U.S. government doesn't like them; they're kept there indefinitely, perhaps forever; and they are subjected to inhumane treatment, perhaps in the hope of obtaining "useful" information.
Rush Limbaugh implied today that Durbin ought to be executed for daring to exercise his freedom of speech. Oddly enough, he thought Jane Fonda's far more damaging exercise of freedom of speech in Vietnam was not worthy of punishment. As far as he and most of his listeners and copycats are concerned, everyone in Gitmo is a terrorist--an enemy (because the government says so)--and therefore deserving of far worse treatment than that which Durbin described (since these people are our enemies and out to get us).
Jews, the German people were told, were their enemies and out to get them, and thus anything the Nazi regime did to protect them from the Jews was warranted, no matter how horrific it was. Many of our countrymen aren't far from that same mentality.
Posted by Mike Tennant at June 16, 2005 01:18 PM
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