The Ressurrected One
06-16-2005, 12:36 PM
...Minority Whip Dick 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:
"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."
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 ( http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/malthus.htm) 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 ( http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7849). 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 hepatitis 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?
Dick 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?
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:
"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."
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 ( http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/malthus.htm) 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 ( http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7849). 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 hepatitis 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?
Dick 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?