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Monday, 20 June, 2005
 
Shooting the Messenger

The attacks on Senator Richard Durbin qualify as a clear and defining a case of shoot-the-messenger as any dictionary compiler could hope to find. It is a dangerous, unpleasant and notably unwanted message he made; However, Durbin had a particular point to make and he made it carefully.

Durbin cited an FBI report describing Guantanamo Bay prisoners chained to the floor in the fetal position without food or water and sometimes in extreme temperatures. "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," he said, "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."Durbin Defends Guantanamo Comments

Others have chosen not to look or listen to this point, to the words he said in order to attack the straw man of their own choosing. The Soviet Gulag was more extensive and in its extensivity piled up more instances of cruelty by several orders of magnitude, that is its context. Nothing we have done compares to that. This point was made very eloquently in a opinion editorial in the Washington Post Saturday. No American 'Gulag'. That context in the Gulags was made up of individuals and individual stories of imprisonment. Durbins point; though, is that presented in clinical blind analysis, examined in macro, what might our policies and actions seem to be part of - and not just at Guantanamo bay but at Abu Ghraib, and the other internment camps.

The question Sen. Warner and all the others need to ask themselves rather than trumpet vacantly in calculated evasion, is that if here we say we are not doing anything untoward, in a war that has no projected end date, no state (or unclear points of repatriation) for those we have imprisoned. If we let all that has occurred form our acceptable baseline and let our facts accumulated along it. That line points down, for once you have made peace with accommodation that is the only direction it will ever point. The question is : what are we becoming?

_____
Addendum: I see that Sen. Durbin has been forced to apologize for his remarks: Sen. Durbin Apologizes for Gitmo Remarks (AP). At least he directed his apology to American service men and women who may have felt the weight of his remarks fell unfairly on them. They do not appear to have been the central problem, and to the extent they have been involved the DoD has not hesitated to burn them itself. While I'm in addendum mode here - let me note that columinst Dan Fromkin of the Post would direct your attention to a piece by Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald where she writes that as part of of a new $500 million contract, Halliburton will build a new $30 million cell block at the Navy base in Gauntamano Bay Cuba.


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