Nazis and Gulags

Last week, Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin read an account of a couple of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. It part of a long speech but this is the part that everyone has picked up on:

"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.

Durbin also made references to the detainment of Japanese Americans during WWII.

While I do not question the accuracy of the FBI statement, I wonder about its completeness. Why were these men chained this way? Was this just being done for the amusement of the guards? Were they being interrogated? Were they being punished for something? If so, then what - had they started a fight? Tried to kill a guard? Abused a copy of the Koran?

This is important and its omission is telling. The examples that Durbin brought up - Nazis, Soviets, Pol Pot, and even the interment of Americans of Japanese ancestry, these were all political prisoners - people who were locked up for their racial/ethnic backgrounds or people who objected to their government.

None of those descriptions apply to the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Further, if the prisoners were being punished for an act of violence then the American people might lose all sympathy for the prisoners.

Elsewhere in the same speech Durbin said:

For example, they have even argued in court they have the right to indefinitely detain an elderly lady from Switzerland who writes checks to what she thinks is a charity that helps orphans but actually is a front that finances terrorism.

He never says that this elderly lady is at Guantanamo Bay but the implication is clear.

The same is true of Amnesty International's statements about "the gulag of our time." The prisoners at Guananamo Bay were captured in Afghanistan and Iraq. Many were under arms at the time. They are being held in solitary confinement.

Now, you have a prisoner in solitary confinement and he breaks the rules some how (this has included attempts on guards' lives). How do you punish him?

In Franklin County, Ohio, where I live, a prisoner who causes problems is often chained in a hogtie and left for the night. This imobilizes the prisoner and causes a fair amount of pain but it does not injure him. The position the Guantanamo Bay prisoners were in was probably less painful.

Meanwhile, in Durbin's home county, prison abuse is common. This includes actual beating and rapes.

Durbin is not calling for this jail to be shut down. He is not insisting that anyone who enters it will come out a criminal even if he was innocent going in. He does not think that this prison embarrasses us before the world.

Clearly this is nothing but faux indication. Durbin and others are claiming rightious indignation over the treatment of the Guantanamo prisoners even if they are treated better overall than people in American jails.

And none of this compares to the millions who were starved and killed by the Nazis, the Soviets, etc.

Durbin's comments were so over the top that even the Daily Show called him on it. When a congressman criticizing Bush is made fun of by Jon Stewart he has clearly crossed a line.

But the point of all this outrage is to embarrass President Bush. The Democrats hope that they can use reports of minor incidents from Guantanamo Bay the same way that the rather shocking pictures from Abu Ghraib did.

This is nothing but politics.