Durbin speaks up, wimps out

Sometimes the truth is so damning you have to speak it for its own sake -- not to convince or condemn or even because you think it might right the wrong, but to make it clear you will not consent to a lie by remaining silent.

However, this is not the kind of behavior you normally expect from a politician. Even the good ones -- or rather, the less bad ones -- tend to treat the truth like a scarce commodity, one that has to be strictly rationed in order to avoid running out all together. Evasion, on the other hand, is plentiful, and used as freely as a Hummer burns gasoline.

Which is why I did a double take when I saw what Sen. Durbin of Illinois said on the Senate floor yesterday:

When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here -- I almost hesitate to put them in the 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. [...]

I don't know much about Dick Durbin -- he's a solid, dependable Democrat, but definitely not one of the Senate's show horses. I also don't recall him playing the role of human rights champion before. So God help me, when I read what he said I immediately began to wonder what kind of political advantage he hoped to gain from such extravagant use of the truth.

[...]

Exaggerating for political effect is a technique at least as old as Jonathan Swift. (And it's not always for effect: When G. Gordon Liddy compared the BATF to the Gestapo, you knew he really meant it.) Still, quantitatively and qualitatively, we're not even in the same universe as Stalin's paranoid empire.

But if Durbin had wanted to be completely honest, he could have skipped the rhetorical flourish about the Soviets, the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge, and instead pointed out that if we didn't know better, we might think today's horror stories out of Guantanamo and Abu Graib and Baghram were tales told about prisons in El Salvador, Honduras and Argentina thirty years ago -- or South Vietnam, forty years ago.

And if he really wanted to get reckless with the truth, he could have explained the reasons for that resemblance.

But that's probably more truth than even Dick Durbin can afford.

  Billmon post June 16

The fallout.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said Friday that he regretted any misunderstandings caused by his comments earlier this week comparing American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis.

[...]

"My statement in the Senate was critical of the policies of this administration, which add to the risk our soldiers face," he said in a statement. "I have learned from my statement that historical parallels can be misused and misunderstood. I sincerely regret if what I said caused anyone to misunderstand my true feelings: Our soldiers around the world and their families at home deserve our respect, admiration and total support."

  Houston Chronicle article June 17

No they don't. Not all of them. Those who are participating in the tortures and "incidents tantamount to torture" - and there are more than seven of them - are participating in an evil that bears comparison with other similar evils perpetrated by other brutal governments that we have used over the years to convince ourselves of our "goodness". And nobody's willing to accuse them. Oh no, we can't say anything bad about our soldiers. They're risking their lives for our freedom. And to spread democracy at the end of a gun all around the world.

Maybe they should print up some bumper stickers: "America: Still better than Stalin."

Read Billmon's post.