...Minority Whip Durbin's comments to make the forum either because there are those here that agree or those, like me, who are incensed.
Maybe it’s because the Liberals/Progressives/Socialists (or, whatever you are), in this forum are finally realizing how the hyperbolic, bloviations of their Congressional counterparts have finally reached the frequency and pitch only those of their own species (Anti-Americans and Bush-Haters) can identify and recognize…
I’m sure al Qaeda cells across the globe are jumping up and down with glee just as the North Vietnamese did upon hearing John Kerry’s 1971 pack of lies before the Senate Foreign Relations committee.
What did Senate Minority Whip (Yes, another “Democrat Leader”) Richard J. Durbin say? Well, in the middle of a debate over the energy bill, he let loose with this brain-dead slander:
Hmmm...
Okay, let’s start with Pol Pot and work backwards.
During their three-year, eight-month, and 21-day rule of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot, committed some of the most heinous crimes in modern history:
The entire population of Cambodia's urban areas was evacuated from their homes and forced to march into rural areas to work the fields. (Compare that to between 500 and 600 individuals being taken prisoner in the battlefield and sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba for safe keeping and interrogation – through means that can best be described as uncomfortable rather than torturous).
Every man, woman, and child was forced into slave labor for 12-15 hours each day. (Compare that to the Day Camp atmosphere of Guatanamo Bay, Cuba. Are they being forced to do anything even resembling labor?)
An estimated two million people (21% of Cambodia's population) lost their lives. Many of these victims were brutally executed; many more died of starvation, exhaustion, and disease. (Compare that to how many deaths at Guatanamo Bay, Cuba? Zero?)
Now, let’s move on to the Soviet Gulag comparison made popular by Amnesty International’s own Kerry Donor, that Schulz guy.
The term "gulag" is applied to the archipelago-like network of prison camps established throughout remote regions of the Soviet Union, first under V.I. Lenin (1917-1924) and then under the genocidal regime of Joseph Stalin (1927-1953).
The Gulag had two functions, punitive and economic. The Soviet Union simply had too many people to support under a communist system, and too few workers to do the labor. (<< By the way, a whole other discussion on the socialist agenda of the Left could be had here)
The nature of the offenses which could get you assigned to the gulag were entirely subjective. Their solution seems rather Malthusian to me...
The process of arrest and incarceration of people who had, for the most part, served the revolution at the risk of their lives was nothing short of Kafkaesque. Robert Conquest writes that the prisoners of the Soviet Gulag "were, virtually without exception, entirely innocent of the charges brought against them.”
Indeed, when it came to the lesser sentences of a mere ten years or so, this was more or less recognised, in an oblique way, even at the time. The much-quoted story, recorded by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, of a camp official retorting indignantly to a man serving a 25-year sentence, who had said he had done nothing, that this was nonsense as "for nothing you only get ten years" is sometimes disbelieved. It is interesting to find an almost identical incident printed in the Soviet press during the Khrushchev era. The writer Boris Dyakov tells in it of how his interrogator said to him "Prove first that you are 100 per cent crystal pure and you'll get ten years; otherwise -- a lump of lead." ...
Similarly a soldier said to Evgenia Ginzburg, "Of course you're not guilty. Would they have given you ten years if you had been?" (Conquest, Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps [Methuen, 1978], pp. 228-29.)
By all accounts, the Soviets sent 18 million people to the gulag system. (Compare that to the between 500 and 600 suspected terrorists encamped at Guatanamo Bay, Cuba)
"The most notorious of the camp regions was Kolyma, in eastern Siberia -- in actuality, a system of camps four times the size of France. There the death rate may have been as high as 50 percent per year and the number of deaths was probably on the order of 3,000,000." (Again, how many deaths at Gitmo?)
Conditions in the Kolyma camps were atrocious at best. Prisoners not only had to face the wrath of the guards but also the brutality of their fellow inmates. Some prison gangs were given tacit approval by the guards to terrorize, rape, beat and dehumanize other prisoners. (And the conditions at Gitmo compare how?)
Finally, Mr. Durbin, Where should we put the U.S. Confinement Facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba on the following list? Which of these most closely resemble our house of horrors South of Florida?
Auschwitz maybe? Let’s see: live vivisections on patients; non-consensual blood experiments on prisoners; experiments conducted by Josef Mengele where he injected methylne blue into prisoner’s eyes to see if he could make their brown eyes blue; removing the breasts of live female prisoners; studies on twins whereby Mengele would inject various diseases to see their effects on the human body; vein splicing experiments wherein prisoners had their circulatory systems merged to observe the effects; injecting female prisoners with caustic substances such as prolusion and progynon; puncturing or removing living children’s livers to see the result; engaging in mind-control experiments using extremely high doses of barbiturates and morphine; sterilization and castration experiments on living prisoners; injection of cyanide salts to observe the results; injecting typhus into prisoners to experiment with cures; intentional hepa is infection for experimental purposes; harvested organs from starved or starving prisoners; Phenol injections and live dissections; experimenting with the placement of lead acetate on various body parts; Prisoners used as living cadavers for medical students; and, if you survived all that, after about 4 weeks, you were killed by various methods – usually lethal injection. When Auchwitz was liberated there were rooms stacked with bones, body parts, skulls, and mummies.
How ‘bout Belzec? Is Gitmo close? Many of the Nazi Euthanasia experiments were done at Belzec and it was one of the first extermination camps.
Buchenwald? Prisoners were skinned alive and dead for their tattoos; women were taken to the infirmary, or “Block 61”, and either killed by lethal injection or experimented on; more live vivisections; unnecessary operations and amputations; intentional infections with yellow fever, smallpox, paratyphoid A&B, cholera and TB; prisoners injected with Luminal and Pervitin just to see what happened; prisoners injected with evapium sodium and chloral hydrate; burned prisoners had toxins applied to their wounds.
Then there’s Chelmno. One of the main extermination camps in Poland, it had an “efficient” bone crushing machine.
Ah yes, what comparison would be complete without Dachau? Far from exposing prisoners to extreme heat and cold, Dachau administrators would perform hypothermia experiments and then see if they could revive those who died – just so they could repeat the experiment; prisoners were subjected to extreme over and under pressure experiments in decompression chambers; prisoners were intentionally injected with malaria for experimentation; all prisoners who lived longer than 3 months were killed by lethal injection.
And that’s just a few of the camps the Nazis operated across Eastern Europe. I wonder, hmmm…how many medical experiments has the U.S. conducted on the GITMO prisoners, Mr. Durbin?
Durbin needs to apologize for his slanderous remarks, and along with his Quarter-Deck Division of loose cannon must self censure their party. I want anyone who has that kind of power to be accountable for word and deed. They’re a bunch of freakin’ traitors.
Isn't the rhetoric just a little off the charts here? I mean, not only are his comments gross exaggerations and false on their face, do they not marginalize the plight of the victims of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Pol Pot?
Undoubtedly, Durbin's statements are hyperbolic; but his hyperbole is no more harmful than the Right's generalized, scolding mantra that anyone who questions the wisdom of the "war" or the means by which it is fought (on any front or in any theater) is automatically an unpatriotic, un-American, Bush-Hater fueled only by politics.
It's a tired rap -- it goes both ways.
Please, the Left has long ago quit questioning the legitimacy of the war. They've devolved into esoteric conspiracy charges over memos and out-and-out treasonous remarks such as Durbin's.
And I've been waiting for the next Yoni post about the innocense of the right. Luckily, he doesn't keep me waiting very long.
So, I see, the Left is merely balancing the Right's claims they are unpatriotic by being unpatriotic and smearing our military? Nice...that'll reduce the criticism.
You don't like it? Call somebody who gives a damn.
I guess you're correct in a way -- it's now the Right that is beginning to question the legitimacy of the war and the wisdom of this course.
But, of course, you're not generalizing at all. . . . .
what do you guys want to us to do with these terrorists who took up arms against?
^^ I said that Durbin's speech was hyperbole. My point has nothing to do with what Durbin said, absolutely nothing to do with the operation of Guantanamo Bay, and everything to do with the generalization from Durbin's statements that TRO suggested. Durbin engaged in hyperbole, no doubt; but again, so do those who slavishly refer to anyone who is against the War as anti-American or unpatriotic.
Why isn't anyone on the Right apologizing for such crass generalizations?
First, I see a big difference between seditious statements that give aid and comfort to the enemy and what you're claiming the Right is doing.
I noticed that Durbin didn't add Saddam and his Bath party's atrocities to his list. Funny how this guy suddenly cares so much about all people when he voted NOT to help the Kuwaitis back in '91 after they were attacked and brutalized by Saddam's forces.
Nothing wrong with dissent as long as it is constructive and reasonable. Durbin's clearly isn't either of those.
An FBI agent? That's not the way the right has been spinning Durbins statements. Was his statement hyperbolic? With a doubt. Durbin clearly meant that these actions are not those we usually associate with the United States of America, but with more oppressive regimes throughout history.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 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.
The Right is so desperate to disway public attention from the DSM, this whole non-controversy over Durbin statements smells of another dubious Karl Rove ploy.
According to investigative Reporter and writer, Seymour Hersh, who broke the Abu Gharib prison scandal story and Mai Lai, we have yet to hear about some of the worst horrors that have gone on in Abu Gharib...
LinkHersh: children raped at Abu Ghraib, Pentagon has videos
From Daily Kos' partial transcript of a video (link to REAL stream) of Seymour Hersh speaking at an ACLU event. He says the US government has videotapes of children being raped at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
" Some of the worst things that happened you don't know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib ... The women were passing messages out saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened' and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It's going to come out."
There's also a piece worth reading in this week's Newsweek about new allegations of rape and sexual torture at Abu Ghraib. Feature includes details on the iden ies of the Iraqi prisoners shown in those widely-circulated photographs -- including Satar Jabar (charged with carjacking, not terrorism), whose iconic hooded figure with wires attached is derisively described by many Iraqis as the "Statue of Liberty."
Really? How has the right been spinning it? I don't believe anyone has claimed the statements weren't true. I have no doubt an FBI agent witnessed Gitmo prisoners in that state. But, is it torture or is it unwarranted treatment? Not in my mind.
It went beyond hyperbolic. It was seditious.
Clearly, Durbin has no concept of the realities of war. But, beyond that, he has no concept of the realities of the Khmer Rouge, Stalin's gulags, or Nazi encampments. Frankly, I wouldn't associate one of the cir stances mentioned with any of those horrible regimes...none of them were that nice.
Loud music? Yes, German Nazis forced musically inclined Jews to play for them, but, I don't recall any stories of the concentration, death, or experiment camps being subjected to loud music.
Extreme temperatures? Sure, the Nazis subjected their prisoners to extreme temperatures -- usually in the form of incineration or induced hypothermia for experimental purposes.
Nobody told the idiot to pull out his own hair or roll around in his own feces and urine. But, what do you expect from people that have no problem handling their own excrements so they can toss it at prison guards?
Sorry, no sympathy from me.
Durbin's comments are not a "non-controversy." He has explicitly compared this country and our military to the most de able and murderous regimes of the 20th century. That's beyond the pale.
Ah, yes...Karl Rove. Nbadan's ace in the hole.
Sorry, it took a few minutes to understand what "DSM" was...The "Downing Street Memo." I see, the right is trying to distract from the "DSM." That would explain why ultra-conservative radio host Michael Medved has posted the memo, in its entirety, on his website and usually spends a good portion of his show talking to people like Nbadan over how damning is this memo.
You know what I take away from that memo?
#1 -- and most important to those who believe the WMD justification was just made up out of whole cloth) It incontrovertably proves that Britain and the U.S. believed (rightly or wrongly) that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That is wasn't just an "excuse" to get into a conflict but that they did, at a very high level, discuss matters under the belief that Saddam Hussein had them.
#2) While the folks in Washington believed military conflict was inevitable, they did exactly what the memo suggested, went back to the U.N. and received yet another resolution (#1441, if you recall).
#3) The memo never mentions President Bush's name or that his decision to invade was final and irrevocable. It only says, to me, that given the cir stances as they existed at the time of the memo, war was believed inevitable. That has as much to do with Hussein's defiance as it does anything else.
#4) I can't recall them but, Medved listed several contemporaneous statments made by Administration officials that only support the contents of the memo. Check his website, he may have listed them there...
#5) "fixing" is different in the British vernacular than it is in the American use of the word.
Last edited by The Ressurrected One; 06-17-2005 at 12:36 PM.
"According to investigative Reporter and writer, Seymour Hersh, who broke the Abu Gharib prison scandal story and Mai Lai, we have yet to hear about some of the worst horrors that have gone on in Abu Gharib..."
As usual Dan you are wrong as the two left feet and leanings you have:
the Army announced an investigation many months before the "investigative"
reporters ever heard of the place.
And bye the way does anyone remember the some planes flying into the
WTC. Or were they just poor misguided, other world innocents, as some have described them. I know a survivor of the little incident who said
quote: "I would loved to slap the silly bas ". I will second that
motion as a retired military. Face it Dan, you would sell your soul and this
country to get rid of Bush. Well the country you have already sold you soul
to the left.
Acton playing an engineer. Sheeesh explains much of how you think.
You know, Abu Ghraib would be a scandal if the abuses had been a) systemic and ins utional and, b) were going unpunished.
I think history will record these incidents of abuse occurred at the hands of a few rogue soldiers who, in the initial phase of occupation and settling camps and facilities engaged in some rather bizarre and heinous acts in the belief they'd never be detected, investigated, or punished.
Well, to our credit, people are being tried for the crimes and they are going to prison. What more do you want?
Let's say that you are an independent, or a mainstream Democrat, who has no particular stake in defending the Bush Administration. And let's say that you believe that the actual incidence of murder, torture or other serious physical abuse of prisoners in US custody and the custody of US allies in the war on terror is unacceptably high, higher than should occur just from the natural fact that some prisoners in any prison population will be mistreated by guards or interrogators. (Jon Henke lays out a credible argument that this is, in fact, the case, even if a few of the examples he cites seem rather strained). And let's say that you would actually like something to be done about this.
Shouldn't you be incensed right now at Durbin, Joe Biden, Amnesty International, Newsweek, and Time Magazine? Let's recall briefly:
1) Durbin compared US troops' treatment of prisoners in their custody to the Nazis, the Soviets, or Pol Pot, a comparison predictably trumpeted by Al Jazeera.
2) Biden called for the closing of Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay and the release of its occupants, although he did then render this assertion largely nonsensical by saying we should "keep those we have reason to keep." Biden further complained about the indefinite nature of the detention of terrorists at Gitmo, to the hosannas of Daily Kos.
3) Amnesty International called Gitmo the "gulag of our times".
4) Time Magazine ran a profile of the interrogation of an actual Al Qaeda hijacker wannabe - i.e., someone who wanted to kill me, and would very much like to have killed you too - complaining about a whole raft of "coercive" interrogation procedures, like that were justly mocked for their mildness, under the cir stances, by Lileks in this penetrating Screed.
5) Newsweek, of course, started the whole movement to refocus attention away from mistreatment of prisoners to charges that American troops committed blasphemy by mishandling the Koran.
Several of these folks, Durbin in particular, also blamed everything on the U.S. not following the Geneva Conventions.
Let's take a deep breath here. Look: conservative Republicans are in power right now in Washington, controlling the Executive Branch and holding partisan majorities in both Houses of Congress. And will continue to control the White House and Senate, and probably the House, for 3 1/2 more years, at least. You will get nothing accomplished without persuading them that it is (1) morally imperative, (2) in our national interest, and/or (3) in their political interest to do something about the treatment of prisoners in US custody in the War on Terror.
Republicans know that the majority of the public voted for Bush, knowing all about Abu Ghraib, and knowing all about all the other charges against the Iraq War. Republicans know full well that comparing American soldiers to Nazis is a political gaffe of enormous proportions, the kind of gift from your political opponents that you can't turn down. (See Patrick Ruffini and Hugh Hewitt on why this whole conversation is poison for the Democrats). Conservative Republicans believe, and have very good reasons to think the majority of the American public believes, that the United States should decide for itself what is right and in its national interest, rather than being told what to do by a bunch of international agreements. And there are plenty of us who believe, as I do, that in a war of this nature, where the most dangerous weapons are the jihadis themselves, there's nothing wrong with holding people who are out to get us until we are certain that there is no more danger - however long that takes. And then there's this:
You see, Colonel Jessep was the bad guy in that movie. He did something that was indisputably bad, and the audience rightly cheers when he goes to prison. We don't expect our military, no matter what their other virtues, to act like barbarians.
But don't you think there are a lot of people out there who listen to this particular speech and say, "he has a point"? (In your heart of hearts, don't you feel that way?) Don't you think American troops deserve the benefit of every doubt? Isn't it obviously the fact that the bulk of the American people don't much care to complain about a little rough treatment for actual, bona fide terrorists who would slit the throat of a young child if they could? Isn't it obviously the case that our troops are dealing with people who are not only trained to lie about mistreatment, but are lethally dangerous to their captors if treated like ordinary prisoners? And then we recall, as Bill Whittle discusses at length, that our adversaries in Afghanistan and Iraq and wherever else we capture them have committed war crimes not as isolated incidents but as a fish swims in the water; nearly everything they do, from fighting out of uniform, to faking surrenders, to targeting civilians, violates the most basic rules of warfare that have existed between combatants since many centuries before there was any such thing as "international law." Read Whittle and be reminded that it would be, not merely unwise, but a moral atrocity to reward this type of conduct by treating these guys exactly the same as we treat enemies who abide by those rules.
In short, if you are selling "the Iraq War is evil" and "Americans are acting like Nazis" and "it's just like the gulag" and "boo hoo for actual sworn members of Al Qaeda who have to endure excessive heat and too much air conditioning (this, for guys who previously lived in caves) and have to listen to loud music" and "we ought to let these guys go free" and "we are acting illegally by not following some treaty" - well, you already know that the guys in power don't buy that, and they didn't get elected by buying it, and they don't believe the public buys it, and they're almost certainly right on that score.
So, you have two choices. One, you can just keep peddling inflammatory we-lefties-alone-have-the-moral-high-ground rhetoric and engaging in moral self-gratification, and keep pushing complaints about easily mocked hardhsips for vicious killers. This tactic is guaranteed to cause people in power to circle the wagons and tune you out and the public to lump you in with dope-addled peaceniks with no common sense, however much it may make you feel wonderful about yourself. Or - go back and read Henke again - you can keep a laser-like focus on the worst abuses, the actual deaths and genuine, indefensible instances of torture and mistreatment, and try to win over enough Republicans to force some changes.
There are plenty of us who are willing to be persuaded by arguments like Henke's that leave out the overwrought and frankly anti-American comparisons to Communists and Nazis but that also zero in on genuine abuses rather than sob stories about how these guys were treated a little mean. But when you call American soldiers Nazis and call Guantanamo the gulag - as it sits just miles from actual gulags - you cheapen the meaning of "Nazi" and "gulag". And when you call the interrogation methods that have been approved by the Pentagon "torture," you cheapen the meaning of torture. And you end up devaluing your own words to the point where they flow over the listener like so much rainwater.
Predictably, we see where the Democrats' hearts lead them. They want to relive 1987, when they pilloried President Reagan over Iran-Contra as their path to win back the White House. Of course, that didn't work, but it felt good. As a number of commentators have pointed out, that debate would have gone much better for the Dems if they'd focused on what was genuinely bad - trading arms for hostages - but no, they wanted to settle scores with Reagan over his determination to battle Communism in Central America, a fight where Reagan had a lot more public support. Here we go again, with the Democrats trying to paint American efforts as evil and wrong in a big way, rather than flawed in a specific and correctible way, and framing an argument about whether we are being too hard on the evildoers. The more you hear "Nazi" and "gulag" and "Geneva" and complaints about sleep deprivation and rap music, the less will get done about guys getting raped or beaten to death in custody – to the extent that is actually happening.
That can't be what the Left wants - can it? It’s certainly not what I want.
Last edited by The Ressurrected One; 06-17-2005 at 03:17 PM.
Typical Republican diatribe, kill the messenger to kill the message...
NY Daily NewsDaily News (NY)
June 21, 2005
"GOP wrong to kill the messenger"
by Richard Cohen
Those of us who have read accounts of the gulag or of the interrogation methods of the Nazis are familiar with the infinite varieties of torture. Maybe for that reason I did not feel it was anything of a stretch for Sen. Durbin to refer to those regimes when reciting what an FBI agent had seen at Guantanamo ...
Whatever that is, it is not America.
This was Durbin's point.
*****
The contempt the Bush administration has shown for world opinion and international law is costing us plenty. We are not the Soviet Union, and we are not Nazi Germany, and Durbin did not intend to say we are. His detractors know that. But their intention is not to answer criticism but to silence a critic.
*****
nbadan...you need to get off the computer and back to making your IEDs and sharpening your sword to cut the heads off your captives
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