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Sunday, June 19, 2005Cicero has a long and interesting post on Durbin touching on my earlier comments. He makes particular sense when worrying that there may be more than a few not so bad guys locked up among the Al-Qaeda types. Given that we've created a special facility for a special type of prisoner, it would be worthwhile to make sure, not only for justice but also reputation and to maximize bang for the buck, that the folks we're holding fit the bill.However, Guantanamo is not the Gulag, not Oswiec, not Treblinka. And however much one tries to explain it away, Durbin made the comparison: "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."He was not talking about the way they prepared their coffee or changed their bedsheets. He was inviting every enthusiastic opponent of the administration to envision Guantanamo guards with miniature moustaches and spiked helmets. Were Durbin serious, he would have qualified his statements carefully, going out of his way to explain his sadness that this stuff popped up in an unusually sensitive program. He would have noted that Koran abuses were perpetrated upon Korans purchased with our tax dollars and handed out in gloved hands so the inmates could read the prophet who inspired them to kill us from a book not made unclean. Would have taken pains to explain that it was awful because the comparatively few outrages reflected poorly on a nation that could do better. Marcus says Durbin's comparison was a stretch. Were it the stretching of, say, a rubber chicken, the head would have popped clean off and been found three counties over. Durbin is a Senator in a leadership position who knows the value of rhetoric. He just hasn't gotten used to the idea that the rubes find out about the red meat thrown to fellow party hacks. He should have known better. He deserves the same fate as Trent Lott - life on the backbenches until retirement as punishment for a failure to understand that leaders have to engage the brain before opening the mouth. 
posted by gbarto at 10:45 PM |
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